Chicago Is Way, Way More Violent Than New York. Why?
By Mae Rice in News on Jul 19, 2016 6:10PM
New York had 435 shootings in 2016 as of last week. For Chicago, as of Tuesday, that figure was 1,813. Chicago had almost New York's year-to-date number of shootings—355—in June alone. The discrepancy is sort of freakish, especially when you factor in population. Chicago has about 67 shootings per 100,000 people, and New York has... five. Five.
Why the staggering difference? The short answer: No one knows, really. But here's a longer answer with some plausible reasons.
Poverty is more concentrated in Chicago
Chicago is a super-segregated city. It's incredibly, visibly segregated by race, and it's also segregated by wealth—which, a new story on New York Magazine's The Science of Us blog argues, is the crux of the problem. A whopping 35 precent of black Chicagoans live in areas where more than 40 percent of people lived in poverty, a 2015 Rutgers study found, and Brooklyn College sociologist Alex Vitale tells NYMag that this is the root of Chicago's higher crime rates:
As Vitale explains, when poverty is concentrated, it creates a culture on the street where violence becomes endemic. If you’re a teen or a 20-something in those environments, Vitale says, you have to show the capability of violence so that you’re not “constantly victimized” — not because you want to be a predator, but as a form of self-defense. “In New York, the neighborhood-level effect is isolated to a few places,” Vitale says, with pockets of concentrated poverty like public housing serving as a huge source of gun violence. “But in Chicago, a third of the city is caught up in this dynamic.”
How does this culture get created? Yale sociologist Andrew Papachristos argues, in the same NYMag story, that violence in high-poverty neighborhoods passes from person to person like a virus (a theory also put forward in the 2011 documentary The Interrupters, about CeaseFire Illinois). Dense poverty helps the virus of violence spread.
New York is crazy rich
On the other side of the same coin: As a city, New York is wildly wealthy. It's way more expensive than Chicago, as roughly one million people who made the Chicago-to-New-York move told us—and pretty much every neighborhood has gentrified or plans to gentrify shortly. As we discussed in a recent feature on Pilsen, gentrification can displace long-time residents and erase local culture. In many cases, though, the influx of money also reduces violent crime, the Tribune argued in a 2015 feature:
New York's gentrification has spread to historically African-American neighborhoods, including Harlem, another neighborhood in Upper Manhattan that also had massive drops in violence over the last 20 years. Most of Chicago's historically African-American neighborhoods, however, have seen limited economic improvement, and unabated violence.
Basically, the richer an area, the safer it is. Rich people will pay extra to be safe, and city governments also go to greater lengths to keep rich people happy. Just look at the years of loving attention Rahm gave to George Lucas's purely theoretical museum.
So... what Chicago needs... is a universal basic income? Dumb luck? Papachristos previously told NYMag that you "can't arrest your way out" of a gun violence epidemic. He, for one, recommends preventative interventions in the most violent neighborhoods instead.