ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on several of the key hypotheses behind the longitudinal, ecological version of the incivilities thesis. The incivilities thesis has most clearly addressed changes in street crime such as assaults and robberies. The chapter focuses on two groups of outcomes: changes in crime and changes in neighborhood fabric. It develops more fully how and why fundamental neighborhood features can shape later decline. Structural decline was operationalized with six change indicators that most would agree represented worsening conditions: weighted house value percentiles, percentage owner occupied, percentage one-unit structures, percentage with at least some college, poverty, and vacant housing. Of interest from a systemic perspective are the lagged impacts of other neighborhood features on changing crime and decline. Ample ideas from urban sociology generally and the systemic social disorganization model more specifically help broaden our thinking about causes of changing neighborhood quality and changing neighborhood crime rates.
