The Cost of Doing Business: How Does Gentrification Impact Crime In the Nation’s Capital?

By Travis Rayome, Political History

Photo: a katz, Shutterstock.com

Gentrification is a socioeconomic phenomenon spurred on by a growing investment bubble within urban centers. These areas are usually already suffering from a lack of public investment and have declined from a previous state of economic growth. Tax incentives, subsidies, and cheap land invite private developers to purchase real estate and begin operations in these neighborhoods due to the attractive business prospects. The main driver of economic growth under gentrification is private investment, which provides a flow of income into the area and increases property values. This growth attracts more actors in the real estate market to take advantage of the inflating investment bubble, including out-of-state owners and large firms. As this process occurs, businesses and new residents move in to take advantage of the local culture, proximity to desirable locations, economic opportunities, and urban infrastructure. 

Gentrification is a pervasive topic within discussions of local economic development in US cities. As major cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C. employ market-driven revitalization efforts in previously neglected areas, they see increases in income and property values. Arguments arise about the adverse effects of this process, but local governments defend them by emphasizing its correlation to economic growth. For example, Muriel Bowser, mayor of Washington, D.C., promoted the controversial project to revitalize the Robert F. Kennedy Stadium Campus by highlighting the business it would bring to the area. 

It is also often observed that public safety increases alongside gentrification–seen in the negative correlation between economic growth and crime (Barr and Zhang 2024). This added safety can attract even more higher-income residents and investors, which further drives growth and lowers crime. It is this perception that drives some local policymakers to attract private investment in order to make their cities safer. Within Washington D.C., which has been undergoing revitalization efforts for the past several decades, violent crime hit a 30-year low in 2024 and property crime saw a significant decrease from 2023. At the same time, some longtime D.C. residents purport their neighborhoods have improved (Lei et al. 2022). D.C.’s government prioritizes policies that contribute to gentrification, consistently allocating large portions of the annual budget to revitalization programs that encourage investment and increase economic activity in the District. Studies have even named Washington, D.C. as one of the most gentrified cities in the country (National Community Reinvestment Coalition 2020). But the idea that gentrification caused a decrease in crime is a misdiagnosis. D.C.’s crime went down in 2024, but there has been a significant overall surge from pre-pandemic numbers in the past few years. This has fueled a prevalent public perception of D.C. as being overrun with crime (Clement and Davies 2024), a sentiment repeated by even the House Budget Committee. Research into successful long-term crime deterrence efforts recommends adequately investing public funds in social services (Amaning and Bashir 2022; Partners for Justice 2022), something the District has historically struggled to do (Jenkins 2024). This means that crime being down in 2024 is not indicative of sustained improvement, and the issue remains a pressing concern for policy makers and residents. 

Within D.C., conflicting approaches to and perceptions of crime complicate policy. D.C.’s government places heavy emphasis on expanding the powers, number, and budget of law enforcement as the most direct means of improving public safety. Mayor Bowser and the D.C. council explained their goal of deterring crime when discussing the large expansions of Metropolitan Police Department power through the 2024 Secure D.C. bill, citing significant public anxieties about crime and the need for punitive justice in keeping the city safe (Gelman 2024).

Long-term crime prevention in D.C. could potentially be hampered rather than ensured given the current trajectory of the local policy trends, though. The District’s 2025 budget prioritizes law enforcement and gentrification in revitalizing while cutting spending on measures crucial to improving conditions (Metzgar and Williams 2024; Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless 2024). These measures were created to address D.C.’s inequality and unaffordability, but saw no substantial improvement in funding for 2025 while spending directed at encouraging private investment increased along with the police budget. Inequality and unaffordability caused by gentrification are problems which historically define the conditions that facilitate criminal activity and issues Mayor Muriel Bowser publicly recognizes as greatly impacting D.C. communities. Preventing poverty and homelessness prevents crime, yet the District’s government struggled to maintain living assistance programs, affordable housing initiatives, and other social services during an affordability crisis. Similarly, increased police funding is not shown to meaningfully lower crime without the proper community investment to go along with it (Austen 2024). Mayor Bowser defended her initial budget proposal, which contained even greater and more expansive cuts than the final approved version, as addressing the District’s budget deficit in public statements, but organizations such as the DC Fiscal Policy Institute and dissenting council members have since pointed out that the D.C. government is not pursuing all of the available avenues that would close the deficit without depriving communities of resources and potentially making the District’s existing struggles worse.

The socioeconomic factors most heavily correlated with crime are inequality and poverty (Fleming 2011); This is why investment in communities and social services is so important in preventing crime. This investment can include specialized policies like targeted anti-violence programs and welfare, but are most commonly found in the form of public institutions like education, transit, subsidies, and sanitation. These investments target needs; they help relieve poverty, improve infrastructure, and provide vital resources to residents. This also means they address conditions that foster crime: lack of education, poor health outcomes, unemployment, homelessness, food insecurity, etc. Two of the most harmful effects of gentrification are its capacity to strain social services and accelerate crime-fostering conditions among people already living within gentrifying areas. This is because gentrification is associated with rapid cost-of-living increases and unstable markets, not just in housing, but in other essential commodities such as insurance (Schneider 2024). 

Gentrification can facilitate unstable housing markets as existing property values rise and newly-built developments become more expensive to cater to richer incoming residents. Three of the most gentrified neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. – Navy Yard, Eckington, and Shaw – saw rents increase by 55% in the previous decade (Erickson 2022), and the average home price across the district only continues to rise into the millions. Investor purchases of housing stock in gentrifying areas also dramatically increases the chances of an eviction spike, as was observed in Atlanta from 2000-2016 (Braun et al. 2021). These factors destabilize lower-income communities who cannot afford inflated prices and intensify crime-related conditions such as inequality, homelessness, and poverty. 

The investment bubble created during gentrification can encourage exploitation and destabilize markets. As markets grow, private equity firms begin purchasing housing supply in the area and use their large size to drive up local housing prices, rapidly increasing asset values. This makes private equity a key driver of gentrification, and leads to practices like price gouging, cost cutting, collusion, and market consolidation becoming prevalent in gentrified cities. In November 2023, Washington, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb filed a lawsuit against 14 of D.C.’s largest residential landlords and RealPage, a property management company owned by Chicago-based private equity firm Thoma Bravo. Schwalb alleges that RealPage encourages anticompetitive practices, as these firms illegally colluded to use the RealPage app to predatorily raise rental prices on over 50,000 apartments and monopolize the city’s housing market as a cartel (Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia 2023). According to the lawsuit, RealPage’s software is used to fix prices in over 30% of all multifamily apartments in D.C. and even more in the surrounding area, costing D.C. residents extra millions and raising prices across the area. The case is still pending as of January 2025, but the attorney general’s analysis highlights the dangers of gentrification: the attraction of private investment without public interest in mind can end up harming communities.

The increased cost of housing is not the only harmful financial impact on locals in gentrified cities, though. Prices across the board all shoot up as investors capitalize on the growing markets for all goods and services within the area. A notable example is in food prices. In gentrifying neighborhoods, local affordable grocers and restaurants either are priced out of the market, have their properties sold off to investors, or are forced to raise prices to remain competitive, not dissimilarly to local landlords. This can lead to what are referred to as “food mirages,” where food is seemingly readily available in an area, but the high prices and exclusivity of the vendors prevent many locals from having equal access to it and can hamper nutritional variety (Nevin 2018). Food insecurity is linked to crime (Caughron 2016), and gentrification can hide that insecurity in plain sight while making the problem worse. The phenomenon of food mirages shows how gentrification can indirectly make resources less accessible and put added financial strain on already struggling communities, and demonstrates that the line drawn from pro-gentrification policy to crime-fostering socioeconomic conditions has many different facets.

Gentrification is commonly correlated with major population displacements in affected neighborhoods as locals who cannot keep up with the increase in cost-of-living or who are evicted from their homes leave the area, which can give the impression that poverty has decreased. Police presence also increases in gentrified areas to bolster security. These two facts might explain why D.C. is choosing to invite private investment into the district and increasing police presence to lower crime instead of investing in poverty alleviation efforts; lower-income residents living in neglected and unsafe neighborhoods are being pushed out and replaced with wealthier arrivals as property values increase (Li et al. 2022). However, the assumption that displacement and increased security will improve conditions unilaterally is questionable. Displaced Washingtonians are mostly black and the richer new arrivals are mostly white, leading to increasingly racially segregated and unequal communities. Disrupting community cohesion in this way and increasing surveillance can make outreach efforts more difficult and lead to an alienating atmosphere for lower-income and black locals, both issues that could adversely affect crime rates.

On top of the problems posed within displaced populations, the population around a gentrified area may also see a rise in crime. A 2023 study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization found that in Philadelphia, PA in the 2010s, 8200 shootings (29% of Philadelphia shootings in that decade) were identified as resulting either directly or indirectly from gentrification within the city (Porreca 2023). The study explains that displacement of locals during gentrification relegates and concentrates criminal activity to nearby areas, sometimes even within the same neighborhood. This phenomenon is not specific to Philadelphia, either. The central area of Washington, D.C. saw the most crime in 2024 contains the neighborhoods that have experienced the highest turnover of black-to-white residents associated with gentrification (Lei et al. 2022; Rusk 2017) and massive increases in the cost of living, including the previously mentioned Navy Yard, Eckington, and Shaw (Erickson 2022). These neighborhoods were disadvantaged and unsafe before gentrification, but the ongoing increase in prices, concentration of criminal activity, disinvestment in communities, and displacement of locals combined with increased police presence since the 2000s is unlikely to sustainably improve the situation.

Above: maps detailing demographic change in D.C. (bottom and top left) along with prevalence of crime in 2024 (top right). Neighborhoods in central D.C. have seen the most extreme demographic shift and the highest number of crimes in the city. 

So, if gentrification cannot meaningfully deter crime and can even make it worse in some aspects, how should cities like D.C. approach public safety? As mentioned before, investment in the city’s communities is a crucial first step. Cities should focus on preventing poverty, homelessness, food insecurity, and generally unstable conditions for locals, and properly support specialized measures to address specific factors. National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform officials attribute D.C.’s 30-year violent crime low in 2024 to the city’s robust violence prevention initiatives such as Cure the Streets and People of Promise, extensive outreach programs targeting individuals in unsafe situations (Kuo 2025). D.C.’s government, though, is struggling to decide between punitive and preventive approaches to crime.

The 2024 Secure D.C. bill increases penalties for existing sentences and implements pretrial detentions for people accused of violent crime. These types of policies are shown to have adverse effects on crime-fostering conditions in the long term even if they effectively scare criminals. The Council Office of Racial Equity argued in a letter to the D.C. Council that penalty increases would further harm the majority-black population, a group already disproportionately criminalized. Pretrial detention has disastrous effects; a New York Criminal Justice Agency report found that they are highly correlated with job loss, homelessness, and community instability. The Secure D.C. bill also increases police presence and reduces checks on their power (The Sentencing Project 2024), enabling further destabilization of primarily black lower-income communities and simply punishing criminals without addressing the economic environment that enables crime. As stated before, as well, increasing police budget and power does not contribute to reducing crime by itself. This makes Secure D.C. ineffective in preventing crime, as it enables harsher punishment while potentially worsening conditions for the District’s most vulnerable residents.

If cities wish to sustainably reduce crime and improve life for their residents, then the adverse effects of gentrification must be acknowledged and fought. Within D.C., allocating resources to communities to prevent crime-fostering conditions remains a priority for some council members and numerous advocacy organizations, but these parties clashed with the Mayor’s office and other council members who wished to cut investment in social services and focus on attracting private investment. Mayor Bowser’s proposed 2025 budget cut spending greatly on programs key to preventing crime, but under public pressure, the D.C. council revised the plan to undo many of the cuts and divert more funds to programs meant to resolve the District’s housing crisis, vast economic inequality, and strained social safety nets (DC Fiscal Policy Institute 2024). The council did not fully meet demands, though, and many of D.C.’s social services remain critically underfunded. This shows some promise for the future, demonstrating that  the city’s government is willing to work with communities, but many top officials’ willingness to disinvest also indicates that achieving long-term public safety will likely remain an uphill battle for the foreseeable future. If Washington, D.C. provides any picture of the relationship between gentrification and crime, it is one that is complex and requires careful planning and meaningful investment from city governments, so that underserved communities can revitalize equitably and sustainably.

References:

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