Violent crime has fallen to historic lows in Chicago, although gun violence continues to plague neighborhoods with concentrated poverty.

A 2023 study of five major cities showed that more than 55% of shootings occurred in just 9% of total census tracts, and that small increases in things like poverty, unemployment or limited access to health care are associated with large increases in firearm violence.

Yet not every neighborhood that struggles with these challenges also has high rates of violence. What is different about these communities? A key factor may be eviction rates. A new study from the University of Chicago looks at the link between evictions and gun violence across Chicago and found that every 1% increase in eviction rate in a census tract was associated with 2.66 more shootings.

The study also showed that evictions disrupt a neighborhood’s “collective efficacy,” or residents’ shared belief in their ability to work together for the common good. This sense of cohesion or neighborliness can protect disadvantaged neighborhoods from gun violence in spite of greater socioeconomic disadvantages.

“Evictions really break up communities, both for the people who are forced to move and for people who are losing their neighbors,” said Thomas Statchen, a medical student at the UChicago Pritzker School of Medicine and lead author of the study, published recently in JAMA Network Open. “Here we can see that eviction rates not only impact these social characteristics but are associated with increased gun violence as well.”

Resiliency and conventional wisdom

The study used data from the Healthy Chicago Survey, an annual survey conducted by the Chicago Department of Public Health to collect data on a range of topics, including access to health services, civic engagement, financial security, food security, mental health, neighborhood conditions and safety. In recent years, the survey started to include questions to help measure collective efficacy in a community, such as how many neighbors people know well enough to ask for help, or their belief that they’re able to make positive changes in their neighborhoods.

The conventional wisdom about why certain neighborhoods are more prone to gun violence is that they lack collective efficacy. Yet, the study showed that in neighborhoods that score low on collective efficacy but don’t have the same kind of poverty and other structural disadvantages, residents don’t suffer from the same rates of gun violence.

Assoc. Prof. Elizabeth Tung, senior author of the study, says the conventional wisdom overlooks the resiliency of disadvantaged neighborhoods that manage to avoid high rates of gun violence.

“The root cause is still poverty, and it’s by force of nature that some communities are able to form such strong, resilient bonds to withstand structural disadvantages and economic challenges like eviction that lead to firearm violence,” she said.

Changing policies to avoid evictions

Between 2007 and 2016, more than 7.6 million people per year faced the threat of eviction, and more than 3.6 million were eventually forcibly removed from their housing. Black women are disproportionately impacted by eviction filings, and people who are evicted are more likely to experience financial hardship, stress and depression. Higher eviction rates in a neighborhood are linked to low voter turnout during elections, fewer calls for city services and even higher maternal mortality.

Statchen and Tung say it’s important to study the impact of eviction rates on gun violence because, ultimately, evictions are driven by policy choices by the state. While solving large scale poverty may seem too big of a challenge, city governments can do things to limit the number of people who are forcibly removed from their homes, like capping rent increases or improving public housing options.

“The policies that we use to govern poverty say something about what we value in society,” Tung said. “People often say there will always be poverty, but even if that’s true, we can change policies to increase the levers of opportunity and make poverty escapable rather than inescapable. Eviction is just so devastating and life changing, especially for children. So, it’s a great place to start in terms of thinking through how we handle poverty.”

The study, “Eviction, Collective Efficacy, and Firearm Violence in Chicago,” was supported by the U.S. Department of Justice, the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Aging. Additional authors include Anna Volerman and Louise Hawkley from UChicago.

—Adapted from an article originally published on the UChicago Biological Sciences Division website.