Do crime hot spots affect housing prices?

Abstract

Our knowledge about what happens to housing values when properties are close to places with high concentrations of crime, often called ‘hot spots’, is limited. Previous research suggests that crime depresses property prices overall, but crime hot spots affect house prices more than crime occurrence does and may affect prices of single-family houses more than prices of flats. Here we employ hedonic price modelling to estimate the impact of crime hot spots on housing sales, controlling for property, neighbourhood and city characteristics in the Stockholm metropolitan region, Sweden. Using a Geographic Information System (GIS), we combine property sales by coordinates into a single database with locations of crime hot spots. The overall effect on house prices of crime (measured as crime rates) is relatively small, but if its impact is measured by distance to a crime hot spot, the effect is non-negligible. By moving a house 1 km further away from a crime hot spot, its value increases by more than SEK 30,000 (about EUR 2,797). Vandalism is the type of crime that most affects prices for both multi- and single-family housing, but that effect decreases with distance from a crime hot spot.