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Comment by hiou | Hacker News Reader

Data certainly shows that oversupply of housing is almost always correlated with crime. Whether or not that is the cause is certainly up for debate but I am very curious about what the argument is that oversupply does not result in staging grounds for illegal activity. Especially based on what we have seen in the rust belt.

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The argument is very simple when you consider that the causality may run in the opposite direction. If economic opportunity in an area declines, people become poorer and/or leave. This results in a housing oversupply in addition to an increase in crime.

To me, this is a far more plausible explanation than housing oversupply itself being the cause of crime.

I don't think you're giving the parent enough credit. People didn't leave North St. Louis because of economic decline. There was never any such thing. People left North St. Louis for the suburbs on their own accord -- for lots of reasons. They wanted the new housing that the suburbs had to offer. They wanted to be further from blacks. The car made for an easier commute.

This created an oversupply of housing in the region. St. Louis doesn't have too many houses because people went to other cities. It has too many houses because people abandoned the housing in the urban core and built new suburbs. That obviously did cause a loss of economic opportunity for the people left behind. But it didn't happen the other way around.

That's still an oversupply caused by a fall in demand, not a rise in supply, so it isn't correct to say, as the parent seemed to imply (in a Glenn Beck, wink wink sort of way) that too much construction in places like North St Louis caused the problem. People moving out of a jurisdiction lowers the tax base and hurts the economy; building more housing does not.

People moving out of a jurisdiction lowers the tax base and hurts the economy; building more housing does not.

We're just taking turns flipping over the same coin. The people can't move unless you build new houses. Lack of demand for inner-city housing drives an oversupply of total housing units in the region.

Correlation is not causation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...

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