Criminological Research on Public Housing: Toward a Better Understanding of People, Places, and Spaces

Abstract

Although public housing in the United States is often portrayed as crime ridden, little information from official statistics is available to support this impression. Furthermore, only a handful of criminologists have done empirical research on crime in public housing, and this research has tended to focus on large public housing authorities (PHAs) in big cities. Furnishing the reader with an array of facts about public housing (e.g., roughly 90% of PHAs have fewer than 500 units), this article makes the case that criminologists are woefully uninformed about the nature of the public housing universe and its crime problems.