"The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five cities. We use the exogenous variation in residential locations generated by MTO to estimate neighborhood effects on youth crime and delinquency. The offer to relocate to lower-poverty areas reduces arrests among female youth for violent and property crimes, relative to a control group. For males the offer to relocate reduces arrests for violent crime, at least in the short run, but increases problem behaviors and property crime arrests. The gender difference in treatment effects seems to reflect differences in how male and female youths from disadvantaged backgrounds adapt and respond to similar new neighborhood environments"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.

Business improvement districts (BIDs) collect assessments and invest in local service provisions and activities, such as place promotion, street cleaning, and public safety. Such activities can help reduce crime and youth violence by increasing informal social control, reducing signs of disorder and blight, improving order maintenance, and enriching job opportunities. This report examines BIDs1 impact on crime and youth violence in Los Angeles.

Over the last 25 years a vast body of literature has been published on neighbourhood effects: the idea that living in more deprived neighbourhoods has a negative effect on residents’ life chances over and above the effect of their individual characteristics. The volume of work not only reflects academic and policy interest in this topic, but also the fact that we are still no closer to answering the question of how important neighbourhood effects actually are. There is little doubt that these effects exist, but we do not know enough about the causal mechanisms which produce them, their relative importance in shaping individual’s life chances, the circumstances or conditions under which they are most important, or the most effective policy responses. Collectively, the chapters in this book offer new perspectives on these questions, and refocus the academic debate on neighbourhood effects. The book enriches the neighbourhood effects literature with insights from a wide range of disciplines and countries.

Unsparing and important. . . . An informative, clearheaded and sobering book.—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post (1999 Critic's Choice) Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence, but in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. This unwritten set of rules—based largely on an individual's ability to command respect—is a powerful and pervasive form of etiquette, governing the way in which people learn to negotiate public spaces. Elijah Anderson's incisive book delineates the code and examines it as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope.

Juvenile Delinquency in a Diverse Society, Fourth Edition presents a fresh, critical examination of juvenile delinquency in the context of real communities and social policies - addressing many social factors that shape juvenile delinquency and its control, including race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Authors Kristin A. Bates and Richelle S. Swan use true stories and contemporary examples to link theories of delinquency to current public policies and to existing community programs, encouraging readers to consider how theories of delinquency can be used to create new policies and programs in their own communities.

How does growing up in a residential area with many juvenile delinquents affect the risk of future juvenile delinquency? Does it increase the risk? In general, it is hard to measure the effects of growing up in a residential area with many juvenile delinquents. It may well be the case that families in which the children face a high risk of juvenile delinquency have a higher tendency to settle in such locally chosen areas. Yet, this 'selection issue' did not exist in the specific case of children of refugees who were granted asylum in Denmark over the period of 1986 to 1998. The reason is that they did not choose where to settle in Denmark, but were placed in housing by the Danish Refugee Council. The analysis in this book examines the children of refugees and the probability rate of being convicted of crime committed over the 15-21 age interval if they were, as children, assigned to housing in a Danish municipality in which a high share of youth had been convicted of crime. (Series: The Rockwool Foundation Research Unit - Study Paper - No. 63)