Public Housing

In the popular imagination, public housing is associated with violent crime, drug trafficking, and disorder. This unsavory image is inspired principally by journalistic accounts rather than empirical research by social scientists. Although public housing has existed in the United States since the 1930s, relatively little criminological research exists on crime in public housing, especially with respect to how crime levels in these enclaves compare with levels in the surrounding neighborhoods and county or municipal jurisdiction (Fagan et al. 1998; Holzman 1996). Even where criminologists have documented problems with drugs and crime in public housing, the question has remained whether the public housing developments were generating the troublesome behavior or playing unwilling host to predators from the surrounding “bad neighborhood” (Dunworth and Saiger 1994).

The paucity of information on actual crime rates is due to the fact that the quantitative measurement of crime in public housing is exceedingly difficult (Dunworth and [Page 1307]Saiger 1994; Fagan and Davies 2000). Measurement of crime levels is hampered by the fact that the vast majority of police departments do not keep official statistics for land parcels as small as public housing developments or even on neighborhoods. Rather, they report only on large geographic areas such as precincts and districts, as well as on the jurisdiction as a whole. Precise information on the rates of specific crimes in public housing developments is therefore seldom available.