ABSTRACT
Standard explanations for neighborhood differences in crime focus on residents. They pay little attention to the people and businesses that own the places where the residents live, shop, work, and play. These overlooked people and businesses are place managers. Ignoring them is a mistake as place managers are important sources of order. We look at the relationship between place management and guardianship. We show how these two concepts overlap and how they differ. In doing so we describe how place management can create guardianship and invoke other crime reduction mechanisms. In short, an important reason some neighborhoods have far more crime than others is that a greater proportion of their place managers (relative to other neighborhoods) are weak or suborn crime. We then show how neighborhood-level characteristics can influence the decisions that place managers make, and how this leads to concentrations of high-crime places. We conclude with a discussion of research questions and policy implications.
