In New York and Philadelphia, in particular, respondents cited several recent high-profile incidents of violence that occurred downtown as exacerbating factors (which, in New York, also may have been influenced by exponential increases in media coverage of crime in tourist hubs and subway stations). In both cities, such incidents can become conflated in the media as an inherent aspect of the “urban doom loop” threatening city recovery.
 

2. Respondents also reported unsafe conditions on public transit as preventing workers and visitors from commuting downtown. Almost as often as stakeholders cited crime and a sense of disorder in downtowns as barriers to returning to the office, they described safety issues on public transit as hindering downtown commutes.

3. Small business owners and major retailers alike described increased property crime downtown as a major barrier to keeping their business open. From small mom-and-pops to major retailers, business owners reported higher costs for private security, reduced foot traffic, and increased theft as significant barriers to remaining open.
 

In many cases, stakeholders reported that this created a negative feedback loop in which businesses closed due to safety concerns for their workers, reducing foot traffic further and contributing to a greater sense of fear downtown.
 

4. Residents and business owners in each city’s Chinatown neighborhood reported greater safety concerns than other downtown stakeholders—driven primarily by anti-Asian racism. Stakeholders who lived or operated a business in the Chinatown neighborhood of all four cities reported qualitatively different safety concerns than other downtown stakeholders. In addition to reporting fears of theft and burglary, they also cited concerns of anti-Asian racism and hate that increased during the pandemic—causing many business owners to question whether to remain within their districts and making safety a top concern for Asian residents in all four cities.
 

5. Respondents varied in their perceptions of the geographic distribution of crime within their cities. Respondents generally took a dichotomous approach to understanding where within their cities crime occurs—often taking a “downtown versus neighborhoods” view of public safety. Many in Chicago and Philadelphia, in particular, reported a perception that crime and conflicts “from the neighborhoods” were expanding into downtown and exacerbating safety issues there. This perception fueled fear among office workers who had previously seen downtown as relatively safe compared to other neighborhoods.
 

In contrast, other stakeholders perceived that the attention paid to crime downtown came at the expense of addressing long-standing neighborhood safety concerns.

 

The mismatch between perception and realities of crime: New spatial analysis

After completing our interviews, we compared those perceptions with both national and neighborhood crime trends. Hyperlocal crime data reveals a significant mismatch between residents’ perceived understanding of where crime occurs in their city versus its actual spatial distribution. Several themes emerged from our research, which have significant implications for policy and practice.

National and citywide trends only tell one piece of a larger story about violent crime—but can have an outsized impact. Respondents’ overall perceptions of rising crime were not wholly unfounded, but they tended to reflect national and citywide crime rhetoric and sensationalized media coverage rather than an understanding of where and how crime actually occurs within their cities.

For instance, the national murder rate increased by nearly 30% between 2019 and 2020, driven predominantly by gun murders (Table 1). Cities and towns of all sizes saw their murder rates increase as well, rising over 35% in cities with populations over 250,000; 40% percent in cities with populations of 100,000 to 250,000; and around 25% in cities with populations under 25,000. At the end of 2022, analysis from the Council on Criminal Justice found that the national murder rate was 34% higher than it was in 2019, but half of its historic peak in 1991.

But after looking more granularly at this pandemic-era increase in murders within cities, it becomes clear that its toll was not distributed evenly. Instead, increases in homicides were largely concentrated in disadvantaged neighborhoods that already had high rates of gun violence, along with significant histories of public and private sector disinvestment.

This spatial concentration of pandemic-era homicides in disinvested neighborhoods took place in all 16 cities in which it has been studied, including three of our four study cities: Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle.

Local data on property and violent crimes shows that in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, downtowns are some of the safest places to be. Interview respondents were not only afraid of violence downtown. They also spoke to a significant perceived increase in property crimes such as retail theft, motor vehicle thefts, and robberies. Nationally, evidence would seem to bear this out, as robberies increased by 5.5%, nonresidential burglaries by 11%, larcenies by 8%, and motor vehicle thefts by 21% nationwide between 2021 and 2022.

However, when we looked at hyperlocal data, we identified three primary findings related to property and violent crime downtown that defied these larger trends:
 

However, as shown in Figure 2b, downtown Chicago accounted for just 6% of the citywide increase in property crime and less than 1% of the citywide increase in violent crime. Manhattan’s core drove 3% of the citywide increase in property crime and 2% of the increase in violent crime. Downtown Seattle accounted for less than 1% of the city’s increase in violent crime and 1% of the increase in property crime. And Center City Philadelphia accounted for less than 1% of the increase in both categories.

The share of all crimes happening downtown remained stable between 2019 and 2022
—and in a few cases declined.

Another way to understand how crime may impact downtown recovery is to identify whether the share of citywide crimes occurring downtown increased during the pandemic. As Figure 3 demonstrates, our analysis found that across cities, the share of crimes that occur downtown has remained relatively stable since the onset of the pandemic, and actually declined in Seattle (for both property and violent crime), New York (property crime only), and Philadelphia (property crime only). That being said, there is wide variation across cohort cities in the share of crimes that occur downtown, with Seattle (despite declines) seeing the greatest share of both violent and property crimes occurring in its downtown.