Crime Rates & Housing Prices in Wisconsin
A quantitative analysis of how local crime rates influence residential property values across Wisconsin counties from 2018 to 2022, using reusable data pipelines and descriptive econometric models.
Overview
This project examines the relationship between crime rates and housing prices across cities in Wisconsin. Using city-level datasets spanning 2018–2022, I built reusable data pipelines with Python (Pandas) to merge, clean, and wrangle multiple sources of crime, housing, demographic, and economic data into a unified analytical dataset.
The analysis employs descriptive models controlling for time and state fixed effects to isolate the correlation between crime rates and housing prices, while accounting for confounding factors such as population changes, inflation (via CPI adjustments), and local economic conditions.
Data Pipeline
- Crime Data: FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) offense data at the agency level, including violent and property crime categories across Wisconsin law enforcement agencies.
- Housing Price Data: County-level housing price indices from multiple years, adjusted for inflation using CPI data to ensure comparability over time.
- Population & Demographics: Census-based population estimates (2010–2022) to normalize crime rates per capita and control for demographic shifts.
Analysis & Visualization
- Fixed Effects Models: Panel regression models with time and state fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity and common shocks.
- Heat Maps: Geographic visualizations showing crime rate distributions across Wisconsin counties, revealing spatial patterns in offense concentrations.
- Trend Charts: Time-series visualizations tracking housing price movements alongside crime rate changes, highlighting periods of divergence or convergence.
Key Findings
The analysis identified measurable correlations between local crime rates and housing price levels across Wisconsin counties. After controlling for population, inflation, and time effects, the results suggest that areas with higher crime concentrations tend to experience downward pressure on housing values — though the magnitude varies significantly by county characteristics and crime type.
Visualizations & Results
