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. IMO, one of the reasons crime declined so universally, is because people started moving back to cities in greater numbers.
I think its the opposite.
The crime went down, and that attracted the new residents.
Greater rates of incarceration, proactive policing, more law abiding citizens being armed, all helped reduce the crime rate. "3 strikes" laws and special new draconian laws on crack cocaine were pretty universal.
To be clear, no one is really sure what cause crime to begin dropping since 1990. All that's really known is the trend was shown nationwide roughly everywhere, and at roughly the same rate.
To be clear, no one is really sure what cause crime to begin dropping since 1990. All that's really known is the trend was shown nationwide roughly everywhere, and at roughly the same rate.
Why don't you read the article and draw your own conclusions?
I skimmed it. I'm a busy woman! Really, having spent a career in public health, I never heard that before. Maybe the crime rate went down due to measles immunization? Just as likely.
I skimmed it. I'm a busy woman! Really, having spent a career in public health, I never heard that before. Maybe the crime rate went down due to measles immunization? Just as likely.
I got quite a bit of attention. No, it wasn't conclusive, but it wasn't laughed at either.
The first link references the Mother Jones article eschaton linked. Seriously? Mother Jones is not a research journal, and correlation does not equal causation.
New York City stats show that the murder rate increase in the 60's, hitting over 1000 in 1969 and staying above that to 1994, when it started plummeting.
Yes, the absolute peak was in 1990, but the rate throughout the 70's and 80's was more than 3 times the current rate.
declining crime rates beginning in the 90's, helped make the cities more hospitable and a more reasonable choice for today's hipsters.
NYC was also one of the frontrunners in the gentrification phase. Per resident, Chicago's peaked around 1993. St. Louis' at about the same time as well. This is pretty consistent with most cities. Which begs the question: if crime was so bad over such an extended stretch, then why did the young educated demo start to return to the cities just as it peaked (mid-Gen X)? This trend started pre-Millennial, but the media was slow to pick up on it. IMO, people coming back who were much less likely to shoot one another than to invest in their neighborhoods played a role. When I told my parents where I was going to move in the 90s, they though I was an idiot. And I probably was. There were 6 homicides in a half mile radius of my place, including one in front of my place. 7 years later there was only 1. The demographics of the neighborhood changed dramatically. No more street walkers at 4 am. Less concentrated poverty. More commercial open in the evening = eyes on the street.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BajanYankee
Is choice necessarily indicative of preference? There are Millennials who are leaving cities today without someone holding a gun to their head and saying "do it." When one points out that most Millennials today still live in the suburbs, the response is typically "Well, that doesn't mean that's where they want to be." How do we know that the preference for urban living among previous generations wasn't equally constrained by any number of circumstances?
I guess the only way we would know about changes in attitude towards urban living would be by polling the same age group (21-35) over time, possibly accounting for marital status. My guess would be that most young people back then wanted to live in a city rather than milking cows on the family farm.
Choice is indicative of preference only to the extent that structural impediments aren't in place that prohibit one from exercising their preference. The fact is that cities saw declines (in absolute numbers) of educated Boomers. The opposite is occurring with Millennials. We could argue all day long about the relative obstacles either faced. With Boomers it was probably fear of rising crime and the "newness of elevated crime. With Millennials it probably job sprawl that came about when Boomers continued to leave the cities. That and the economy for 4-5 years.
More Mills live in the suburbs today because more of everyone lives in the suburbs today. We won't see an instantaneous inversion of where people live. Surburbanization lasted multiple decades. It is still occurring. What I do think is important to note is the massive gains in numbers of young educated workers. Not all 25-34s, just the educated ones who presumably have more choices. A huge chunk are living in the suburbs and exurbs, but we are seeing significant numbers move back in:
FWIW, I don't see any support for the huge STL numbers. I've looked at those through the census and the biggest jump within the core is the biggest component (the city's central corridor and south city at about a 100% to 110% increase), but that's just a piece of what they are looking. Their math doesn't compute. It has made a tremendous difference though. I think it's important to note that cities are a pretty small portion of metros by geography in particular, so getting all of a demographic, or even 20-30% of it, to relocate isn't really necessary to make large changes. One thing that I do think is interesting is that in a recent APA study, Boomer's preferred walkable neighborhoods slightly more than Gen Xers (by 1%). This is interesting to me not because they preferred them more, but because the margin was so small. Boomers are coming to grips with their own mortality and the fact that many will need to give away their car keys soon. Xers are in the middle of raising kids where they supposedly have priorities other than walkable urban spaces. The lack of separation suggests the beginning of the attitude shift.
NYC was also one of the frontrunners in the gentrification phase. Per resident, Chicago's peaked around 1993. St. Louis' at about the same time as well. This is pretty consistent with most cities. Which begs the question: if crime was so bad over such an extended stretch, then why did the young educated demo start to return to the cities just as it peaked (mid-Gen X)? This trend started pre-Millennial, but the media was slow to pick up on it. IMO, people coming back who were much less likely to shoot one another than to invest in their neighborhoods played a role. When I told my parents where I was going to move in the 90s, they though I was an idiot. And I probably was. There were 6 homicides in a half mile radius of my place, including one in front of my place. 7 years later there was only 1. The demographics of the neighborhood changed dramatically. No more street walkers at 4 am. Less concentrated poverty. More commercial open in the evening = eyes on the street.
The problem with the idea that gentrification spurred the drop in crime is then you would expect that crime only decreased (or predominantly decreased) in gentrifying neighborhoods. This just isn't true. Indeed, the Mother Jones article I linked to cites that over the same period that NYC saw a 75% drop in crime, Newark saw a 74% drop in crime. This despite anything resembling gentrification in Newark being a very, very new thing.
Going back to the topic of this thread - one of the biggest failures of urbanists is failure to recognize the importance of schools to families. FallsAngel and others have been telling you this for years. (Seems to be an area of convenient blindness for urbanists)
Austin, Texas is one of the fastest growing areas of the country. School districts are "independent" of other political subdivisions of the state in Texas. One is not able to simply attend a school that is in a district other than where one resides.
Yet the Austin Independent School District has recently announced a policy of allowing transfers in of students from the larger Austin metro area (i.e., metro area of the city which encompasses areas much larger/outside the school district). At the same time, AISD announced which schools are not open to transfer. The schools that are not open to transfer are all in areas that urbanists snidely denigrate as "suburbs". The ones that are open are the schools in the "urban areas".
Point is that although some hipsters, DINKs, SINKs, and others might find downtown living appealing - it just isn't appealing for families (or most of the rest of the population either). Hence the enrollment in the downtown area schools is dropping even though the area's population is dramatically rising. Downtown is "family unfriendly" and families know it. Can the urbanists figure it out?
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