Elsevier

Habitat International

Volume 55, July 2016, Pages 148-158
Habitat International

Do all commercial land uses deteriorate neighborhood safety?: Examining the relationship between commercial land-use mix and residential burglary

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2016.03.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The effects of commercial land-use mix on residential burglary vary depending on the type of commercial facility.

  • Integrating grocery stores, restaurants, and offices in a neighborhood may have a positive role in improving safety.

  • The ratio of the shopping center area to the residential area has a positive impact on the increase in residential burglary.

  • Residential burglary is positively related to the proximity to downtown and the ratio of apartment area in a neighborhood.

  • Residential burglary is negatively associated with household income level.

Abstract

Criminologists often claim that neighborhoods with a higher proportion of commercial land uses are likely to be more vulnerable to crime because commercial facilities attract outsiders to the neighborhood, thereby increasing its exposure to potential offenders. Advocates of mixed-use neighborhoods, on the other hand, suggest that combining commercial and residential uses can reduce crime by increasing opportunities for surveillance, encouraging social interaction, and promoting a sense of community and social control among neighborhood members. This theoretical contradiction of the effect of land-use mix on crime makes it difficult to reach a conclusive agreement and thus warrants further investigation. This study attempts to fill this gap by examining the association of residential burglary with five commercial land-use types (i.e., offices, retail stores, shopping centers, restaurants, and grocery stores) most commonly found in residential neighborhoods in Seattle. The findings show that grocery stores, restaurants, and offices have a positive role in improving neighborhood safety, whereas neighborhoods with more shopping center areas have experienced higher levels of residential burglary. These results indicate that the effects of commercial land-use mix on residential burglary vary depending on the type of commercial facility, suggesting that not all commercial uses increase crime. This study claims that the possible positive effects of increased surveillance can outweigh the opportunity effect (i.e., attracting offenders to possible targets) when commercial uses encouraging legitimate activities are integrated within the neighborhood. The implications for commercial establishments in relation to neighborhood safety are discussed.

Introduction

Research in environmental criminology has provided extensive empirical evidence showing that commercial facilities are significantly associated with crime (Block and Block, 1995, Brantingham and Brantingham, 1995, Kinney et al., 2008, Kitchen, 2005, Loukaitou-Sideris et al., 2000, Schneider and Kitchen, 2007). Criminologists often claim that neighborhoods with a higher proportion of commercial land uses are likely to be more vulnerable to crime because commercial facilities attract outsiders to the neighborhood, thereby increasing its exposure to potential offenders (Hayslett-McCall, 2002). In the fields of urban planning, transportation, and public health, however, strong policy support for “mixed-use” neighborhoods has been initiated to improve urban sustainability, reduce traffic, and prevent chronic disease by promoting physical activities (Cozens, 2015, Duncan et al., 2010, Park et al., 2013, Soltani and Hoseini, 2014). Advocates of mixed-use neighborhoods claim that combining residential uses with commercial uses can make neighborhoods safer (Calthrope and Fulton, 2001, Duany et al., 2001, Jacobs, 1961) because urban activities promoted by the diversity of land use can enhance natural surveillance, discouraging criminal activity (Cozens, 2008, Jacobs, 1961, Subbaiyan and Tadepalli, 2012).

Such theoretical contradictions make it difficult to reach a conclusive agreement regarding the effect of land-use mix on crime. This study attempts to investigate the relationship between commercial land-use mix and residential crime, focusing on the five commercial land-use types (i.e., offices, retail stores, shopping centers, restaurants, and grocery stores) most commonly found in residential neighborhoods in Seattle. Because previous research investigating the relationships between crime and commercial establishments narrowly examined potentially harmful facilities, such as casinos, bars/taverns, and alcohol outlets, the need for investigating the effects of other various land uses on crime has been raised (Groff & Lockwood, 2014). It is hypothesized in this study that different facilities may have varying effects on crime and that not all commercial businesses may negatively affect neighborhood safety. By analyzing incidents of residential burglary, which has been reported as one of the most common types of offense influenced by the built environment (DeFrances and Titus, 1993, Yang, 2006), this study seeks to propose implications for land-use strategies to improve neighborhood safety. To identify an accurate spatial distribution of crime, the measure of crime density based on a standardized spatial unit of analysis is used in the analysis. In addition, a spatial regression model is employed to reduce the potential problems that may result from the spatial autocorrelation of crime data.

Section snippets

Land-use mix and crime

The link between land use and crime has been extensively researched in the field of environmental criminology. The research has focused on their relationship from three broad perspectives – the routine activity theory, crime pattern theory, and territoriality theory. The routine activity theory (Cohen & Felson, 1979) asserts that daily activities (e.g., dining, working, and shopping) in which people engage assign potential offenders and targets in close proximity differently, and thus the level

Study area

This study was conducted based on the crime data of Seattle in 2010. The population of Seattle was approximately .6 million according to the 2010 Census. It has the largest population among the cities in King County and the broader Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Metro Area, and it is the 23rd most populous city in the U.S. (Seattle Department of Planning and Development). The land area of Seattle is 53,113 acres, and it remains mostly single-family residential use (49%) followed by parks and open

Bivariate analysis

As a preliminary analysis, the bivariate correlations between crime and land-use mix variables were estimated (Table 4). The ratios of grocery store area, restaurants, and office areas to the residential area in the neighborhood showed negative correlations with the residential burglary density, but the coefficients were not statistically significant at the .1 level. The ratios of retail store and shopping center areas to the residential area in the neighborhood were positively related to the

Discussion

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the validity of the two opposing theoretical assumptions regarding the effects of commercial land-use mix on neighborhood safety. This study attempted to address the methodological limitations of prior research in examining the effect of neighborhood land-use mix on crime. First, the use of micro-level objective crime data combined with an area-standardized unit of analysis made it possible to reduce the potential bias of spatial crime

Conclusion

In the field of environmental criminology, mixing commercial and residential land use has been considered to escalate the risk of crime. The crime pattern theory, for instance, assumes that some proportion of people are criminally motivated (Groff & Lockwood, 2014), and because neighborhoods with commercial facilities tend to draw more people than those without such establishments, it has been believed that these places have an increased likelihood of becoming an activity space of a potential

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by 2016 Hongik University Research Fund.

References (78)

  • R.L. Block et al.

    Space, place, and crime: hot spot areas and hot places of liquor-related crime

  • L.N. Boggess et al.

    Violent crime, residential instability and mobility: does the relationship differ in minority neighborhoods?

    Journal of Quantitative Criminology

    (2010)
  • K. Bowers et al.

    Exploring links between crime and disadvantage in north-west England: an analysis using geographical information systems

    International Journal of Geographical Information Science

    (1999)
  • P. Brantingham et al.

    Criminality of place

    European Journal of Criminal Policy and Research

    (1995)
  • C.R. Browning et al.

    Commercial density, residential concentration, and crime: land use patterns and violence in neighborhood context

    Journal of Research in Crime & Delinquency

    (2010)
  • R.J. Bursik et al.

    Neighborhoods and crime

    (1993)
  • M.E. Cahill et al.

    The determinants of crime n Tucson, Arizona

    Urban Geography

    (2003)
  • P. Calthrope et al.

    The regional city

    (2001)
  • D. Chang

    Social crime or spatial crime? Exploring the effects of social, economical, and spatial factors on burglary rates

    Environment and Behavior

    (2011)
  • B. Christens et al.

    Predicting violent crime using urban and suburban densities

    Behavior and Social Issues

    (2005)
  • R.V. Clarke

    Burglary of retail establishments

  • L. Cohen et al.

    Social change and crime rate trends: a routine activity approach

    American Sociological Review

    (1979)
  • C.J. Coulton et al.

    How big is my neighborhood? Individual and contextual effects on perceptions of neighborhood scale

    American Journal of Community Psychology

    (2013)
  • P.M. Cozens

    New Urbanism, crime and the suburbs: a review of the evidence

    Urban Policy and Research

    (2008)
  • P. Cozens

    Crime and community safety: challenging the design consensus

  • P. Cozens et al.

    Crime and the design of residential property – exploring the theoretical background

    Property Management

    (2001)
  • P.M. Cozens et al.

    Crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED): a review and modern bibliography

    Property Management

    (2005)
  • T. Davies et al.

    Examining the relationship between road structure and burglary risk via quantitative analysis

    Journal of Quantitative Criminology

    (2015)
  • A. Duany et al.

    Suburban nation: The rise of sprawl and the decline of the American dream

    (2001)
  • M.J. Duncan et al.

    Relationships of land use mix with walking for transportation: do land uses and geographical scale matter?

    Journal of Urban Health

    (2010)
  • P. Ekblom

    Deconstructing CPTED and reconstructing it for practice, knowledge management and research

    European Journal of Criminal Policy and Research

    (2011)
  • E.P. Fowler

    Street management and city design

    Social Forces

    (1989)
  • S.W. Greenberg et al.

    Safety in urban neighborhoods: a comparison of physical characteristics and informal territorial control in high and low crime neighborhoods

    Population and Environment

    (1982)
  • E.L. Grinols et al.

    Casinos, crime, and community costs

    The Review of Economics and Statistics

    (2006)
  • E.R. Groff et al.

    Criminogenic facilities and crime across street segments in Philadelphia: uncovering evidence about the spatial extent of facility influence

    Journal of Research in Crime & Delinquency

    (2014)
  • E.R. Groff et al.

    Permeability across a metropolitan area: conceptualizing and operationalizing a macrolevel crime pattern theory

    Environment and Planning A

    (2014)
  • S.L. Handy et al.

    Local shopping as a strategy for reducing automobile travel

    Transportation

    (2001)
  • K. Harries

    Property crimes and violence in United States: an analysis of the influence of population density

    International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences

    (2006)
  • K.L. Hayslett-McCall

    Neighborhoods, land-use, and robbery rates: A test of routine activity theory

    (2002)
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text