COMMUNITY STRUCTURAL-CHANGE AND FEAR OF CRIME

This paper examines how unexpected neighborhood changes influence fear of crime. It focuses on the roles of population composition, signs of incivility, and unsupervised peer teen groups. Survey, physical asses sment, and census data for 1, 622 residents in 66 Baltimore city neigh borhoods form the basis of contextual models of daytime and nighttime fear levels. Fear was high in neighborhoods experiencing unexpected in creases in minority and youth populations. Unexpected ecological chang e does not by itself set in motion a broad array of consequences under mining neighborhood viability. Rather, ecological change influences ra cial composition; other structural dynamics, independent of these ecol ogical changes, subsequently determine the specific consequences of ne ighborhood racial composition.