Nothing Costs Like Crime

For as long as I can remember, even before “affordability” became a prominent theme in American public discourse, politicians and pundits have tracked the prices of homes, gasoline, milk, eggs, and other supermarket staples. Affordability, or the lack of it, has long been the explicit goal or chief complaint of policymakers debating housing, public finance, and economic regulation. In these debates, each side wants to show that its proposals will make constituents’ lives better—that is, more affordable. The focus typically falls on issues like housing supply, tax rates, and social-welfare spending.

Zohran Mamdani’s rise to the New York City mayoralty is a prime example. His campaign relentlessly emphasized affordability. From freezing rents and providing fare-free buses to building more public housing and launching nonprofit, government-run grocery stores, most Mamdani messages centered on lowering costs.

At the same time, Mamdani staked out troubling positions on public-safety issues—abolishing the NYPD’s gang database, refusing to hire more officers, and imposing a moratorium on clearing homeless encampments. Many predict that, if implemented, these initiatives will erode public safety and order. To the extent that proves correct, Mamdani’s public-safety agenda would also undercut his stated commitment to affordability.

Often missing from the affordability debate is an appreciation of how public safety and order shape economic well-being. Policymakers seldom draw the connection, yet affordability and safety are tightly intertwined. When leaders fail on public safety, their constituents’ economic prospects decline with it.

Controlling crime and disorder is often treated as a good unto itself, and rightly so. Crime affects a host of other areas: real-estate values, economic mobility, private investment, and, of course, the direct social costs of victimization. Failure to control it undermines the bottom lines of those living in the neighborhoods most affected. This point matters even more because many misguided criminal-justice reforms are justified in part on fiscal grounds. Incarceration is expensive, reformers say, so we should do less of it for taxpayers’ sake. But loosening the social controls exerted by police departments and prisons carries its own price: rising crime imposes massive economic costs.

Many Americans tend to view a crime’s costs as falling primarily on the victim. Few consider its broader effects on society. That’s a crucial error.

Think of a crime as a stone tossed into a lake. It breaks the surface at a single point, but the ripples extend far beyond. Some crimes are mere pebbles in this analogy; others land like cinder blocks, sending larger waves that radiate much farther. Once one understands this, it becomes clearer why Tom has an interest in preventing Dick from murdering Harry, even if Harry is a complete stranger to Tom. The negative effects associated with Harry’s murder extend to Tom, whether or not he realizes it. The societal impact of a single act of violent victimization may seem small; but in the aggregate, and over time, even those who are never personally victimized will find themselves paying a toll.

Though it’s not easy to capture all of crime’s ripple effects, a robust social-science literature offers well-informed estimates of the social costs of at least some offenses—and the figures are alarming. In a 2010 study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, an international scholarly journal, scholars from the University of Miami and University of Colorado–Denver provided updated, crime-specific estimates of the social costs associated with offenses ranging from murder to theft. The authors note that “more than 23 million criminal offenses were committed in 2007, resulting in approximately $15 billion in economic losses to the victims and $179 billion in government expenditures [all in 2008 dollars] on police protection, judicial and legal activities, and corrections.” In today’s dollars, that totals roughly $290 billion—more than the U.S. Department of Education spent in 2024. To contextualize those numbers further, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated the total annual price tag of major weather and climate disasters (those exceeding $1 billion) between 2020 and 2024 at just under $150 billion.

In deriving their estimates, the authors of the 2010 study broke the social costs of crime into four categories:

Victim costs (property losses, medical bills, and lost earnings)

Criminal-justice system costs (policing, adjudication, and corrections)

Crime career costs (the lost productivity associated with the offender’s choice to offend rather than engage in legal work)

Intangible costs (indirect damages to victims like “pain and suffering, decreased quality of life, and psychological distress”)

They then provided estimates for 13 offense categories. For example, the direct or tangible costs of a single murder exceeded $1.2 million. The total cost of a murder to society—once intangible and crime career harms are included—came in just under $9 million. Murder, for obvious reasons, is an outlier. But other crimes are far from cheap and happen more often: the social cost of a rape exceeds $240,000; an aggravated assault, just over $107,000; and a robbery, just over $42,000.

And crime and disorder can impose other serious harms, especially in the most dangerous areas of American cities. An empirical literature on the relationship between crime and educational performance, for example, suggests that a lack of safety can meaningfully undermine academic success. In Urban Studies, a group of scholars found that repeated exposure to criminal violence on their blocks negatively affected New York City students’ standardized-test performance. Similar findings emerged in Chicago, where scholars linked students’ poorer performance on academic assessments to their exposure to a homicide within a week of the assessment.

A study published in 2018 showed how the “Beltway Sniper” attacks in 2002 “significantly reduced school-level proficiency rates in schools within five miles of an attack.” Yet another analysis of the link between gun violence and standardized test performance in Syracuse, New York, between 2009 and 2015 found that “[s]tate standardized test scores for ELA [English language arts] and math were found to be 50% lower in the elementary schools located within higher concentration gunshot areas, than in elementary schools in lower gunshot areas” and that “[h]igher levels of gun violence within school catchment areas were significantly associated with higher rates of ELA and math failure.” A 2019 study in The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences documented: “Middle school students exposed to neighborhood violent crime before the ELA exam who attend schools perceived to be less safe or to have a weak sense of community score 0.06 and 0.03 standard deviations lower, respectively.”

Educational performance is a key predictor of, and perhaps even a prerequisite for, economic mobility—another outcome shaped by criminal violence. One oft-cited study found that “a one standard deviation decline in violent crime as experienced during late adolescence increases the expected income rank in adulthood by at least 2 points.” The study also found that “a one standard deviation decline in the murder rate increases the expected income rank by roughly 1.5 points.” This makes intuitive sense: If your adolescence is dominated by worries about personal safety, how much can you focus on meeting the requirements for economic success?

Though many American cities have seen crime declines recently, crime levels in those cities’ most troubled neighborhoods remain far above what can be considered tolerable. In a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Brown University’s Brandon del Pozo and coauthors found that, in some American neighborhoods, the risk of violent death for young men exceeded that faced by frontline U.S. combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even in high-crime neighborhoods that fall below that benchmark, homicide rates are many times higher than the national average.

In neighborhoods with the biggest crime problems, staying safe requires real work and brain power. No wonder, then, that the available evidence seems to suggest that neighborhood violence is also associated with poorer mental health, including clinically significant anxiety and depression. That was the prevailing finding of a 2021 literature review appearing in Social Science & Medicine.

Crime can also have concrete effects on the asset that often accounts for most of the average American family’s wealth: their home. The homeownership rate in the U.S. was just under 66 percent in 2022. According to Pew Research, “Half of U.S. homeowners derived more than 45 percent of their wealth from home equity alone.” That share is even higher for black and Hispanic homeowners, for whom home values constitute between 63 percent and 66 percent of total wealth. I note this disparity because black and Hispanic Americans disproportionately bear the brunt of the nation’s violent-crime problem. In testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 2023, I laid out the relevant facts on that disparity.

Consider an illustrative excerpt: “In New York City, . . . a minimum of 95 percent of all shooting victims and 85 percent of all homicide victims have been black or Hispanic every year going back to 2008, despite those groups making up just 52 percent of the city’s population. . . . Relative to their share of the population, these groups are also consistently statistically overrepresented among victims of rape, robbery, and felonious assault.” Meanwhile, “in Chicago, where 57.9 percent of the population is black or Hispanic, those groups constituted 95 percent of homicide victims in 2019, 96 percent in 2020, 96 percent in 2021, and 95 percent in 2022. . . . Relative to their share of the city’s population, those groups are also consistently statistically overrepresented among victims of robbery, aggravated assault, criminal sexual assault, aggravated battery, and violent crime, generally.”

This should matter more to progressive policymakers, who largely attribute the racial wealth gap to disparities in homeownership. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition, for example, notes: “For most families, their home is the primary way they store and build wealth. The Black–White homeownership gap is therefore the primary driver of the Black–White racial wealth divide. . . . In fact, between 2013 and 2022, more than 90 percent of the wealth gains for Black Americans came from homeownership.” One would expect, then, that self-styled progressives would calibrate their public-safety policies to protect the home values of the very people whose interests they claim to represent.

Numerous studies have empirically linked crime and home values. A 2019 analysis based in Sweden found: “By moving a house 1 km further away from a crime hot spot, its value increases by more than SEK 30,000 (about EUR 2,797).” A 2012 study based on data from the United Kingdom found that “each additional case of anti-social behavior lowers house prices in the same street by approximately 1 percent and each additional case of violent crime by 2 percent.” In 2013, the Inter-American Development Bank analyzed how residential property values in Brazil were affected by perceptions about public safety, estimating that “increasing the sense of security in the home by one standard deviation would increase average home values by R$1,513 (US$757), or about US$13.6 billion, if applied to all 18.0 million households in the study area.” Note that some of these effects were driven by perceptions of safety—extensive evidence, informed by Broken Windows theory, shows that perception is influenced not only by crime but also by visible signs of disorder.

And it works the other way, too: declining crime boosts home values. A 2012 paper from the Center for American Progress studying eight U.S. cities found that “a 10 percent reduction in homicides would substantially expand revenues from property taxes in all eight cities.”

The effect isn’t confined to residential property values. In the Journal of Regional Science, a collaboration between the NYU Furman Center, UCLA’s Ziman Center, and the Federal Reserve found suggestive evidence that crime depresses commercial property values and that the negative impact was strongest “in neighborhoods with lower incomes and higher shares of minority residents.”

Many community advocates are understandably quick to call for more investment in underserved neighborhoods struggling with high crime. Yet we rarely hear them urging local leaders to crack down on that crime. Recent years have offered plenty of examples of how failure to control disorder makes investment less attractive—including the widely reported closures of pharmacies and big-box stores that were fighting high levels of retail theft. A 2022 Journal of Urban Economics study found that higher crime rates reduced consumers’ willingness to visit establishments in affected neighborhoods, particularly at night. Evidence suggests that crime not only keeps away customers from outside the community but also erodes the resident customer base. In an influential 1999 analysis published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, Julie Cullen and Steven Levitt found substantial crime-related population declines driven by out-migration.

Affordability isn’t self-creating—it’s a by-product of good policy. Delivering it requires more than subsidies for things that have grown more expensive. Nor is “affordable” synonymous with “good.” Letting crime and disorder spiral out of control might drive down home values, for example, but few would count that as a triumph of affordability. The goal should be to make good things more affordable, and that means creating conditions in which residents can acquire the skills and assets needed to sustain a higher quality of life. Safety and public order are prerequisites for that progress. Policymakers who promise “affordability” should remember a lesson most of us learned as kids: safety first.

This article is part of “An Affordability Agenda,” a symposium that appears in City Journal’s Winter 2026 issue.

Photo: The economic costs of criminal offenses nationwide total roughly $290 billion annually. (Jack Berman/Getty Images)