Race-Based Real Estate Practices and Spuriousness in Community Criminology: Was the Chicago School Part of a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For over a century, a small network of scholars, extending from the University of Chicago, shaped community criminology research. Drawing on human ecology, they argued that poor structural factors—poverty, ethnic heterogeneity, population mobility—cause crime. As this network studied crime in neighborhoods, another network changed neighborhoods. This other network also assumed structural factors were important, but its members developed policies and practices to alter them. This other network, also influenced by human ecology, was composed of real estate researchers. Historical records show that the two networks are connected. These connections raise the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The implications of the prophecy are that the correlations between structural factors and crime may be spurious. We show that real estate practices shaped structural factors. But the structural factors may not drive crime. Instead, real estate practices may have shaped crime opportunities through place management thus driving crime. This has serious implications for community criminology research. This theoretical paper lays out the historical evidence for this conjecture.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".