Relationship Between Rent and Major Crime by Census Tract in Baltimore City (2015-2019)

This project examines the relationship between contract rent and major crimes, such as homicide, shooting, robbery, and aggravated assault in Baltimore City. The Pearson Product-moment Correlation Coefficient Test was used to determine whether a relationship exists. It suggests that average contract rent positively correlated with the number of crimes committed in that tract (p-value < 2.2e-16), and to a lesser extent, with the number of crimes committed per unit area of that tract (p-value = 0.01398).

Rent estimates are from the American Community Survey 5-year dataset for Baltimore City tracts from 2015-2019. Crime point data are from the City of Baltimore’s ‘Open Baltimore’ data catalogue. The analysis and figures were done in R with packages like tidycensus, tidyverse, tigris, sf and ggplot2. Complete R code and walkthrough can be found here, along with additional discussion.