Home buying and collective efficacy

With the recent large appreciation in home values, around 20% in the prior year, there have been an increase in private investors purchasing homes to rent out. Recent stories on this by Tyler Dukes and colleagues have collated open parcel data to identify the scope of these companies across all of North Carolina.

For bit of background, I tried to purchase a home in Plano, TX early 2018. Homes in our price range at that time were going in a single day and typically a few thousand over asking price.

Fast forward to early 2021, I am full remote data scientist instead of a professor, and kiddo is in online school. Even with the pay bump, housing competition was even worse in Plano at this point, so we knew we were likely going to have to move school districts to be able to purchase a home. So we decided to strike out, and ended up looking around Raleigh. Ended up quite quickly deciding to purchase a new build home in the suburb of Clayton (totally recommend our realtor, Ellen Pitts, her crew did quite a bit of work for us remotely).

I was lucky to get in then it appears – many of the new developments in the area are being heavily scooped up by these equity firms (and rent would be ~$600 more for my home than the mortgage). So I downloaded the public data Dukes put together, and loaded it into Excel to make a quick map of the properties.

For a NC state view, we have big clusters in Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh:

We can zoom in, and here is an overview of triangle area:

So you can see that inside the loop in Raleigh is pretty sparse, but many of the newer developments on the east side have many more of the private firm purchased houses. Charlotte is much more infilled with these private firms purchasing properties.

Zooming in even further to my town of Clayton, there is quite a bit of variance in the proportion of private vs residential purchases across various developments. My development is less than 50% of these purchases, several developments though appear almost 100% private purchased though. (This is not my home/neighborhood FYI.)

So what does this have to do with collective efficacy? Traditionally areas with higher home ownership have been associated with lower rates of crime. For not criminologists reading my blog, one of the most prominent criminological theories is that state actions only move the needle slightly on increasing/decreasing crime, people enforcing social norms is a bigger factor that explains high crime vs low crime areas. Places with people churning out more frequently – which occurs in areas with more renters – tend to have fewer people effectively keeping the peace. Because social scientists love to make up words, we call this concept collective efficacy.

Downloading and looking at this data, while I was mostly just interested in zooming into my neighborhood and seeing the infill of renters, sparked a criminological hypothesis: I expect neighborhoods with higher rates of private equity purchased housing in the long run to have higher rates of criminal behavior.

This hypothesis will be difficult to test in the wild. It is partially confounded with capital – those who buy their homes accumulate more wealth over time (again mortgage is quite a bit cheaper than rent, so even ignoring home value appreciation this is true). But the variance in the number of homes purchased by private equity firms in different areas makes me wonder if there is enough variation to do a reasonable research design to test my hypothesis, especially in the Charlotte area in say two or three years post a development being finished.