On January 15, WBEZ featured a recent JAMA Network Open study, Eviction, Collective Efficacy, and Firearm Violence in Chicago, by Thomas Statchen, CDRP faculty affiliate Elizabeth Tung, et al, which used participant data from the Healthy Chicago Surveys from 2021 to 2023, and neighborhood-level data from the City of Chicago to show that a 1% increase in the census tract eviction rate was associated with 2.66 additional shootings within 1000 feet of the individual’s home.
Noting that neighborhoods on the south and west sides of the city experience the greatest proportion of gun violence, the researchers searched for characteristics that could be associated with this concentration of violence. The study of 13,916 Chicago residents demonstrated that exposure to eviction at the individual- and census tract-levels was associated with higher exposure to firearm violence. Tung et al also traced measures of collective efficacy to assess whether a community’s capacity to organize for the common good of their neighborhoods had an impact on violence rates — and found that community organizing had no impact on the rates of violence. The results suggest that addressing housing stability could have a positive impact on gun violence in Chicago neighborhoods.
“Something I hear from folks is that there’s always going to be poverty, you’re never going to fix poverty,” Tung said. “But we have policies that govern how poverty is handled in a society, and eviction is a very clear policy foothold that we can actually make an impact on.”