Peer-Reviewed Research

     A renewed interest in understanding the relationship of the built environment with neighborhood crime patterns has encouraged researchers to utilize novel methods (e.g., risk terrain modeling) to better examine the influence of environmental risk factors on types of crime. The current study engages with this research by operationalizing neighborhoods using Hipp and Boessen’s (2013) egohood strategy and using Drawve and colleagues (2016; Thomas & Drawve, 2018) ANROC measure to assess the relationship of a neighborhood's physical environment with its spatial vulnerability of experiencing a homicide. Findings demonstrate that the physical environment was a significant predictor of neighborhood homicide, however, social structural neighborhood characteristics were more important. This suggests crime prevention strategies like crime prevention though environmental design (CPTED) or blight remediation may provide prudent and straightforward methods to inhibit lethal violence in a community in the short run, but that addressing a neighborhood’s social structural characteristics may be more effective at reducing homicides in the long term. 

     Research has in​creasingly moved toward a consensus that violent crime declines as neighborhoods gentrify, yet some studies find the direction of this relationship varies by type of violent crime. This finding becomes even more important when connected with recent research that finds the structural influences of gang and non-gang homicide are disparate. The current study engages with research in each of these areas by examining the relationship of gentrification with levels of total, gang and non-gang homicide in LAPD’s Hollenbeck Community Policing Area. We find gentrification was not associated with variation in total or gang homicide, but was positively associated with non-gang homicide. 

​     Gentrification has been argued to contribute to urban inequalities, including those of health disparities. Extant research has yet to conduct a systematic study of gentrification’s relation with neighborhood health outcomes nationally. This gap is addressed in the current study through the utilization of census-tract data from the Center for Disease Control’s 500 Cities project, the 2000 Census and the 2010–2014 American Community Survey to examine how gentrification relates to local self-rated physical health in select cities across the United States. We examine gentrification’s association with neighborhood rates of poor self-rated physical health. We contextualize this relationship by evaluating gentrification’s relation with city-level self-rated health inequalities. We find gentrification was significantly and positively related with self-rated physical neighborhood health outcomes. However, the presence and magnitude of gentrification within a city was not associated with health outcomes for cities overall. Based on these findings, we argue that gentrification’s health benefits for cities are limited at best, though gentrification does not appear to be associated with deepening city-level health inequalities, either. 

     Over the last decade, there has been a growing trend of European nations with fertility rates below replacement levels, top-heavy population age structures, and, in turn, widespread natural population decrease. Meanwhile, the turmoil taking place in Syria has led leaders of nations around the world to host fleeing refugees. Many in the media claim these two components are connected—that is, those nations losing population seek refugees to resolve their crises. This article empirically tests whether the natural population change in thirty-three European nations is a significant predictor of the number of refugees the nation resettles.