Murder Rates Are Rising in Surprising Cities, and Here’s Why

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Ideally, home buyers strive to stay far away from violent crime. But surprisingly enough, crime rates, including murder, are on the rise in some of the nation’s fastest-growing—and, when it comes to housing, most desired—cities.

Nationally, the number of murders is projected to jump 13.1% in 2016, compared with 2015—with nearly half of those homicides happening in Chicago, according to a recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice. The center is a nonpartisan law and policy institute at the New York University School of Law.

But the Windy City has long been known for its high rates of violence. What comes as more of a surprise is that the murder rate—which shows how many people are killed per 100,000 residents— is also expected to rise in fast-rising tech hubs like San Jose, CA, and Austin, TX.

Homeowners in those cities shouldn’t panic and rush to put their homes on the market and move to safer, more suburban pastures.

“The murder rate is especially concentrated in areas that are the poorest and have struggled with unemployment,” says Ames Grawert, one of the authors of the report.

That’s probably why home prices in the affected cities seem to be largely unaffected by the violence. Nationally, crime is hovering near historic lows and is expected to rise just 1.3% in 2016.

The authors of the report attempted to collect crime data from police departments in the 30 largest U.S. cities, although they weren’t able to obtain full data for nine of those cities, including Portland, OR, Las Vegas, and Phoenix. They came up with their 2016 predictions by calculating the projected number of new crimes they expected to happen this year based on how many occurred last year and how many there have been so far in 2016.

Where is the murder rate rising the highest?

The murder rate is expected to spike by 115.4% this year in Austin, a rapidly growing liberal oasis in the middle of a red state.

But numbers can be deceiving. The increase is worrying—but the city’s projected number of murders in 2016 was 5.2 per 100,000 residents, or 52 killings overall. That’s one of the lowest rates of cities on the list.

The jump in anticipated violence may be due to the city’s population surge of nearly 15% from April 2010 through July 2015, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“Cities that are growing very much may have a harder time handling higher crime rates,” Grawert notes.

Those transplants moving in have helped boost home prices in the metro area by 4.7% annually, according to realtor.com® data that compared August median prices to a year earlier. However, that’s less than the 6.2% national average during the same period.

Austin’s low per capita crime rate is actually one of the selling points for buyers moving into the quirky city despite its recent rise, says local Realtor Reinae Kessler of Austin Home Girls Realty.

“People want to live in a neighborhood where they can walk their dog at night,” she says. And Austin’s not a place where “the public’s at risk.”

Money can’t buy fewer homicides

In Silicon Valley’s extra-expensive San Jose, only one of the priciest markets in the entire country, murder rates are anticipated to shoot up 70.6%.

Clearly, tech money can’t buy everything—such as fewer homicides.

The median home price in the Bay Area hot spot is a bank-account-busting $769,000. But the annual appreciation was 5.7%—still below the national average.

“It looks frightening. … [But] this is still a city that’s fairly safe,” says Grawert. “If you look at how many homicides actually occurred there, it’s still a relatively low number.”

The city’s number of per capita murders is projected to be fairly low at 4.8 per 100,000 residents. That’s an expected 51 murders in 2016.

The sleepy Texas city of San Antonio is projected to see the third-highest jump in homicides, at 52.9%. Its per capita murder rate is expected to be more than double that of the top two cities on the list, at 9.6 per 100,000 residents with 144 deaths.

Meanwhile, home prices were up 7% in the metro annually, according to realtor.com.

Murder rates also are expected to rise 47.4% annually in Chicago, at 26.6 projected homicides per 100,000 residents; 34.5% in Nashville, TN, at 12.7; 30.4% in San Diego, at 3.4; and 28.6% in Oklahoma City, at 14.7.

Cities such as New York, where many tourists are still scared to take the subway or wander the streets alone at night, are expected to have substantially more killings: 359. But with more than 8.5 million folks calling the Big Apple home, that translated into a lower rate of only 4.2 anticipated homicides per 100,000 residents.

The cities with the most murders per capita

The cities with the highest projected murder rates—Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago—have all struggled with poverty and unemployment for at least the past decade, Grawert says. The cities are anticipated to have 49.8, 41.5, and 26.6 murders respectively per 100,000 residents in 2016, according to the Brennan Center report.

Chicago’s larger population is the reason why it comes in third on the list but makes up such a disproportionate number of homicides.

“Chicago overall is not a highly violent city,” says Arthur Lurigio, a criminology and psychology professor at Loyola University Chicago. “The communities that are most violent are ones that have suffered from blight for more than 50 years.”

Those isolated pockets of violence haven’t crimped citywide residential real estate prices. Median list prices rose more than the national average, at 7.9% year over year in August.

But the worst-off neighborhoods are still struggling. They were also the hardest hit by the recession and foreclosure crisis. And the problem’s only gotten worse as those who can afford to do so have been leaving Chicago’s roughest neighborhoods for the last 10 to 15 years, taking their more middle-class values and the stability they provided their communities with them, he says.

“Those who are left are the poorest of the poor, the most hopeless,” Lurigio says. “Violence is a way for these young men to bolster their self-esteem and their reputation in a gang.”

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