Crime In New York City: linking to income and public housing
By: Jingjing Ge
Tags: NYPD, Crime, New York City, Nycha, Public Housing

Crime and Public Housing

Then, the question leads to the effects of housing development and neighborhood characteristics on crime. Low-income public housing, in this case, is centered in this discussion. Public housing in New York City is operated by NYCHA (New York City Housing Authority), which is responsible for the health and safety of over half a million New Yorkers in 2017. NYCHA accounts fro 8.1% of the city’s total housing units with 328 developments/projects of low-moderate income housing (mean household income is $23,672). According to Manhattan Institute, “under Mayor de Blasio, crime in NYCHA developments — absolutely and as a share of the city total — has remained largely unchanged.” People in NYCHA properties are murdered, raped and assaulted at twice or more the rate of the rest of the city.

When its data on housing project crime was last updated Oct. 18, the NYPD counted 59 homicides in NYCHA property, up 41% from the same period of 2019 The murder rate is far worse in NYCHA projects than elsewhere. As of Oct. 18, the projects have seen 15.5 homicides per 100,000 people, compared to 4 per 100,000 elsewhere in the city. Police counted 257 shooting incidents in NYCHA projects this year as of Oct. 18, also a 92% increase over 2019. Sixty-seven shootings were reported per 100,000 NYCHA residents, compared to 12 per 100,000 in the rest of the city.

The map above shows the locations of all NYCHA developments in New York City in relation to the number of crime cases by neighborhood tabulation areas. We could easily find out that most NYCHA developments are clustered in areas with higher number of crimes (800 to over 1,500 cases). To have a more accurate number of the crimes happened near NYCHA developments, I made a buffer of 1,000 feet near the housing projects and then selected and counted the number of crimes cases. The map below presents the result that 38,981 out of 104,586 crimes cases occur near NYCHA housing, which is almost 40% of the total crimes in past three months. It acknowledges the fact that public housing faces the less safe conditions compared to other neighborhoods in terms of the number of crimes. Rather than a coincidence, it would be largely believed that low-income public housing has relatively poor living conditions such as poor lighting and CCTV locations which don’t prove conducive to a safe, healthy environment.

Among all the NYCHA developments, certain neighborhoods have higher number of crimes compared to others. I mapped the crimes near NYCHA housing projects by counting the number of the cases in the buffer region of 1,000 feet around each housing, and classified in to 5 ranges. The black bubbles on the map below represent the developments with crime cases of more than 403. Top five neighborhoods with highest number of cases are Clinton, Washington, Patterson, Saint Nicholas and Johnson, mainly located in Uptown Manhattan and Bronx.

What’s Next?

To conclude, crimes are more or less connected to the characteristics of neighborhoods in terms of income level. Low-Moderate public housing indeed giving people an affordable, decent place to live, but people could not neglect the actual unsafe and unhealthy living conditions that still existed in most housing developments. With higher number of crimes happened near these neighborhoods, we should relate the factors inducing crimes to the neighborhood conditions in order to mitigate the probability of more violent crimes. Aside from the different median household income, we could also look into the races, ages, gentrification in neighborhoods and public housing to address more racial, and socio-economic issues surrounding it. Crimes could be broken down to more specific types for a more detailed analysis of the likelihood of certain crimes happened in the areas and behind reasons that cause the crimes.