Nuisance ordinances decrease the rate at which assaults that happen inside the home are reported

By Aria Golestani of UC Irvine.

Abstract 

"Nuisance property ordinances label a property as a nuisance, and violations are filed against landlords when the police respond to a home a set number of times within a certain period (e.g., three times in six months). After having a property declared a nuisance, property owners who do not abate the nuisance can face fines and criminal charges. Many landlords renting to tenants who incur NuPO violations respond by evicting the tenant, refusing to renew their lease, or instructing tenants not to call 911. In this paper, I examine the impact of applying these policies to domestic violence. Using individual- and agency- level data, I exploit time variation in the enactment of nuisance ordinances across 40 major MSAs to identify the impacts of these ordinances on the rate at which assault victimization is reported to police. I find that nuisance ordinances decrease the rate at which assaults that happen inside the home are reported, and those living in rental units are particularly affected by these ordinances. I also find evidence that these nuisances are followed by a significant increase in the number of reported intimate partner homicides. Results indicate these policies do not affect reporting rates for crimes that are not associated with a property and do not affect non-intimate partner homicide rates. Findings are robust to the inclusion of controls for individual, policy, and economic variables. Additionally, these findings are consistent with estimates produced using alternative estimation strategies proposed by the recent literature on the internal validity of the two-way fixed effect models with staggered rollout and dynamic or heterogenous treatment effects."