What Is The Relationship Between Racial Housing Wealth Disparities and Violence In Cities?

Abstract

Much empirical literature analyzing crime and violence omits an important theoretical “fundamental cause”: an underlying mechanism that might drive both the analysis’s proposed explanatory factors and outcome phenomena of violence. If violence and its “causes” are both driven by a third factor not addressed in research, there will be no hope of creating policy that fundamentally reduces violence. This paper proposes and quantifies racism in public policy as a fundamental cause both of violence and the many factors that have been proposed to “explain” violence. It then develops an empirical strategy to assess whether racism in policy, conceptualized as race-disparities in housing wealth, is associated with violence in cities. This paper’s dataset and strategy do not produce an observable relationship. But limitations inherent to the analysis point to promising next steps to assessing this question.