Vachuska Karl, Movahed Masoud
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, United States.
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States.
Spat Demogr. 2025;13(1):7. doi: 10.1007/s40980-025-00139-1. Epub 2025 Jul 16.
Gun violence takes an enormous toll on neighborhoods and their residents in important ways. While research has identified that violence makes neighborhoods less appealing and livable, few studies have fully quantified the effect of violence on neighborhoods' vitality and dynamism. In this study, we introduce the notion of 'neighborhood activity,' which we measure by the unique number of everyday visitors those neighborhoods receive from residents of neighborhoods. Drawing on a large geographically-coded dataset of 30,000 gun violence incidents across US neighborhoods in conjunction with daily mobility pattern data based on 45 million mobile devices, we apply a quasi-experimental method to estimate the impact of gun violence on the number of visitors neighborhoods receive. We find that gun violence reduces neighborhoods' visibility significantly, but its consequences are disproportionately distributed among non-White neighborhoods that are far less popular to begin with. Our estimation results indicate that gun violence cost neighborhoods approximately 9 million visitors in the year 2019 alone.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40980-025-00139-1.
枪支暴力对社区及其居民造成了巨大的损失。虽然研究已经确定暴力会使社区吸引力下降且不宜居住，但很少有研究充分量化暴力对社区活力和动态性的影响。在本研究中，我们引入了“社区活动”的概念，通过这些社区从其他社区居民那里获得的日常访客的独特数量来衡量。利用一个包含美国各社区30000起枪支暴力事件的大型地理编码数据集，并结合基于4500万移动设备的日常出行模式数据，我们采用一种准实验方法来估计枪支暴力对社区访客数量的影响。我们发现，枪支暴力显著降低了社区的可见度，但其后果在一开始就远不那么受欢迎的非白人社区中分布不均。我们的估计结果表明，仅在2019年，枪支暴力就使各社区损失了约900万访客。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s40980-025-00139-1获取的补充材料。
