“Hotbeds of Crime?” Crime and Public Housing in Urban Sydney

Abstract

Public housing estates in Britain, the United States, and Australia are frequently plagued by crime problems. In Australia at least, policy debate about how to address these problems has been dominated by the view that public housing design influences crime by controlling the supply of opportunities for offending (the design hypothesis). An alternate and less frequently considered possibility is that public housing estates experience persistent crime problems simply because crime-prone individuals are (by reason of their economic and social disadvantage) more likely to be allocated to public housing (the allocation hypothesis). This article reports the results of research designed to test the two hypotheses. The results support the allocation hypothesis.