Urban Violence and Residential Mobility

Abstract

Data from a recently completed national longitudinal survey suggest, contrary to popular expectations, that individual perceptions of local violence have at best only a very moderate influence on significant changes in residential location, that concern with crime problems does not seem to result in a major exodus to the suburbs, and that what little effect urban crime has on mobility is stronger for the poor and black than for high and middle income whites. The findings are interpreted to indicate that those groups who are most affected by crime and violence, the poor and the black, are precisely those groups least able to escape the problem through residential relocation.