Another Broken Myth: Foreclosures And Crime Rates

Remember when real estate foreclosures were decimating
neighborhoods in Cleveland, eroding neighborhoods in Boston,
creating ghost towns in Chicago?

No? Then maybe you remember the foreclosure-driven crime wave
that hit Washington D.C.; Atlanta, Georgia; and Charlotte, North Carolina;
prompting New York State ACORN President Pat Boone to explain, "It is
common sense that foreclosure and crime go together."

Still drawing a blank? Then surely you recall how 2008 Democratic
presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both
proposed a $30 billion fund to combat crime and blight in high-
foreclosure areas. Republican candidate John McCain considered
rising foreclosure rates so hazardous to civil order that he proposed
having the Treasury Department buy up all the bad home loans in
America.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Massachusetts Connecticut) spelled out the
connection between foreclosure and crime with admirable
specificity last year:

It isn't just the foreclosed property that causes the problem. There's
the next door neighbor, the community that also suffers. For every
one foreclosure in a square block, one-eighth square mile, there is a
decline in value almost immediately of 1 percent of every other home
in that square block. There's an increase of crime of 2 percent almost
immediately in that area.

You don't recall any of this because none of it happened. If the
foreclosure-driven crime trends that journalists and politicians have
been predicting since 2006 had actually come to pass, our streets
would by now be impassible wastelands where Toecutter and
Bubba Zanetti prey upon the citizens with impunity.

Yet crime statistics continue to head downward throughout the country --
even or especially in those areas marked out as foreclosure clusters.
Camden, New Jersey, supposedly America's most crime-ridden city,
has seen a 14 percent crime reduction in 2009.

Prince William County, Virginia, which has the highest rate of foreclosures
in Old Dominion, nevertheless saw its violent crime rate fall by 36.8 percent
between 2008 and 2009. Foreclosure-plagued Oakland, California has
seen a 3 percent annual drop.

Still, the perception that foreclosures are linked to the deterioration of
law-abiding areas is not necessarily susceptible to statistics. Many
intelligent people say they have a sense that crime is getting worse as
more residences end up unoccupied. Again, my own experience
contradicts this: I live in a not-so-nice part of Los Angeles County and
spend plenty of time in less-nice areas (in California nothing ever goes
below nice), yet I am absolutely certain I hear less gunfire and fewer
police helicopters this year than I did in 2006.