Gun violence incidents profoundly impact American neighborhoods in ways that extend beyond the immediate harm. Drawing on millions of mobile-device location records paired with 30,000 gun violence incidents, UC Santa Barbara sociologist Masoud Movahed has quantified how shootings reduce the number of people who visit affected neighborhoods, identifying a causal relationship between gun violence incidents, local economic activity and racialized patterns of segregation.
Movahed’s new paper in Spatial Demography, co-authored with Karl Vachuska (University of Wisconsin-Madison), underscores neighborhood “visibility” as an important and often overlooked dimension of urban inequality.
The study offers one of the first comprehensive looks at how gun violence influences neighborhood mobility patterns across U.S. neighborhoods, adding a distinct angle to extensive neighborhood stratification and gun violence research. By introducing “neighborhood popularity” — a measure of how often people from outside a neighborhood visit it — Vachuska and Movahed highlight an underexplored mechanism through which inequality and segregation persist.
“Neighborhood disadvantage is usually measured with things like income levels, wealth, poverty rate or racial composition,” Movahed said. “We wanted to add another layer: How visible are neighborhoods to the rest of the city? How many new people come in, how many stay away, and how does gun violence change that?”
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