The Consequences of Bank Disinvestment on Violent Crime
Substantial evidence shows that minorities and their neighborhoods receive fewer home mortgage loans and less loan dollars than whites, even after adjusting for important economic controls. In their presentation, María B. Vélez, PhD and Christopher J. Lyons, PhD explore the consequences of this form of racial inequality on violent crime rates across Albuquerque neighborhoods.
They utilized a combination of census, police and home mortgage disclosure data to explore the impact of the average application amount per census tract of home mortgage loans and home improvement loans in 1990 on neighborhood violent crime rates in 1996. They found that home improvement loans (but not mortgage loans) are negatively associated with violent crime, and this relationship is especially true for Latino communities.
Our work helps to further document and uncover the sources of neighborhood-level inequality. More generally our work situates neighborhood trajectories of decline or prosperity in the context of decisions by political and economic actors rather than on the individual level attributes of residents.
