Neighborhood Intervention, Crime and School Achievement: Evidence from Football FIelds Construction in Fortaleza, Brazil

Marcelino Guerra

Lemann Graduate Forum 2023

The Areninhas Project

  • Fortaleza is the fifth largest Brazilian city and is the state capital of Ceará, located in the Northeast region of the country

  • The city has 120.6 sq mi of territorial area and population around 2.7 million - similar to Houston and Chicago

    • From 2010 to 2020, Fortaleza’s population grew by 10%

  • Census 2010 divides the city into 3,043 census tracts - a.k.a neighborhoods - and 3,020 are populated

    • An average tract has 812 people in 0.105 sq km

  • In July 2014, The City of Fortaleza began an ongoing urban renewal project called “Areninhas”

  • The intervention consists of synthetic football turf, a playground and an outdoor gym. The surroundings are improved with further infrastructure development

  • The project targets vulnerable communities and aims to provide an amenity that promotes physical activity and stimulates a sense of community

  • In 8 years, 103 football arenas were built in Fortaleza and more than 160 in the rest of the State

Source: O Povo newspaper and Fortaleza’s Website

  • There are two types of equipment - Areninhas type 1 and 2. They differ by the size of the turf field and presence of locker rooms and bench

  • Each equipment have three employees. Two guards (one in the morning, one in the evening) control access to the fields, and one janitor cleans and organizes the place.

  • According to the City Hall, maintenance costs (salaries, energy and water) range from R$ 120,000 to 125,000/year.

Source: O Povo newspaper.

  • Currently, 102 neighborhoods have an equipment - around 94,000 people covered

    • City Hall and State Government invest R$ 24.87 millions/year in four social projects: Esporte em 3 tempos, Futpaz, Esporte superação, and Atleta Cidadão

    • Projects directly impacts around 32,000 children

  • Amateur football championships are held on weekends, dance/fitness classes occur regularly, and pick-up football games happen at daily basis

Notes: Valeska coordinates the project Futpaz that impacts 3.500 children (ages 7-12). Source: O Povo newspaper.

Motivation

  1. There are large disparities in health and safety between communities within a city, and local governments continue to seek meaningful policies to improve residents’ quality of life

    • e.g. increase state presence - Blattman et al. (JEEA, 2021), improve street lighting - Chalfin et al. (J. Quant. Criminol., 2021), cleaning and greening vacant lots, demolishing vacant buildings, home restoration, increase in urban green space, among others - Macdonald et al. (J. Exper. Criminol., 2021) Branas et al. (PNAS, 2018), Kondo et al. (Annu. Rev. Public Health, 2018), Spader et al. (RSUE, 2016), Cui and Walsh (JUE, 2015)
    • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and mentorship - Heller et al. (2016, QJE), Blattman, Jamison, and Sheridan (2017, AER)

  2. Lack of safety in neighborhoods have other detrimental effects, e.g., violence exposure afffects student performance - Sharkey (PNAS, 2010), Monteiro and Rocha (Restat, 2017), Casey et al. (AEA P&P, 2018), and Koppensteiner and Menezes (JOLE, 2021)

  3. Successful neighborhood interventions are likely to generate positive spillovers, and the social benefits of the public policy might be underestimated

    This study wants to evaluate an ongoing urban renewal project that blends person and place-based interventions in a large Brazilian city and establish a causal chain between environmental design, violence, and student performance

Preview of Findings

  • Murder rates decreased by 2/3 in treated census tracts meaning 62 fewer murders per year

    • No evidence of displacement: crime is neither moving around the corner nor clock

  • The decrease is larger during afternoon hours and weekdays (when most social projects happen), which supports the “more eyes on the streets”/increase of capable guardians argument - McMillen et al. (JUE, 2019), Sanfelice (JEBO, 2019) - and voluntary incapacitation

    • Treated tracts do not have 100% street lighting coverage and lights on (from 6:00 pm to 9:59 pm) might be mediating the night hours decrease

  • Males aged 18-29 with a past criminal record are more impacted. This result suggests that there are fewer gang fights in treated neighborhoods

  • There are diffusion of benefits to schools up to 500 meters from an equipment. On average, students’ math scores increase by 2.5%.

    • The primary mechanism driving this result might be the safer neighborhoods/path from home to school, but cannot rule out direct effects from equipment’s usage

Social benefits recover all program costs (fixed, maintenance, and social projects) within 2 years

Contributions

  • The causal effect of a citywide large-scale 8-years span urban renewal policy on violence and student achievement

    • Directly affects more than 94,000 people (32,000 people from ages 7-29) and actively changes the neighborhoods’ daily routine

    • Exploiting the time of murders, I am able to discuss some mechanisms through which the intervention i) is curbing violence ii) is improving student performance

    • Assessment of the policy’s indirect impacts. Due to the research design/intervention’s characteristics, few studies can correctly identify temporal and spatial displacement/diffusion of benefits

  • The intervention takes place in a large and growing city in a Developing country

    • Many evaluations of urban interventions are done in US legacy cities or cities in high-income countries
    • It is a well–defined policy that can be replicated in Latin America and Europe

  • Heterogeneity analysis shows that the intervention has a larger effect on the most vulnerable population: young males with a past criminal record

  • The study supports a combination of place and person-based interventions to prevent public goods from turning into public bads - Albouy et al. (JPUB, 2020)

Data and Context

  • Fortaleza-CE commonly ranks as one of the most violent cities in the world, with homicide rates close to Cali-COL, St Louis-USA, New Orleans-USA, and Baltimore-USA

  • Between 2004 and 2015, homicide rates more than double. Many factors contributed to the violence escalation: from a police strike at the end of 2011 to the rise of crime syndicates

  • In 2019 the city managed to cut murder rates by more than 50%, compared to the previous year. However, in February 2020, the Military Police went on a general strike again, and the State went back to the top of the murder rates ranking

  • Detailed information about 12,081 murders within Fortaleza’s boundaries between January 1st, 2012 and November 30th, 2019

    • The 8,291 homicides that happened on the streets are considered in the analysis

    • 5,560 murders occurred between 8:00 am and 10:00 pm

  • Murders are aggregated to months and at the census tract level. The outcome is homicide rates per 1,000 people

Note: complete addresses were converted to coordinates (lat and lon) using Google’s API

  • Since 1992, the State Government of Ceara has been consistently evaluating the performance of students in the public system. Every year, middle and high school students take the SPAECE exam by late November

  • The SPAECE contains standardized Math and Portuguese test scores - it is an average at the school level

  • School Census data have yearly information about schools’ characteristics (internet coverage, presence of labs/library, number of employees, etc.)

Research Design

  • I conjecture tracts treated until July 2019 and after January 2020 are similar in observables and unobservables, and this control group’s choice produces an apples-to-apples comparison

  • Potential control areas within 650 meters of a treated neighborhood are excluded (2), as well as fields built between September and December 2019 (11)

  • Different comparison groups are also built by matching similar never treated neighborhoods using neighborhoods and boroughs’ demographics available in Census 2010

  • In total, there are 31 treated and 55 control neighborhoods

  • Total population in treated areas is 28,365 and in control tracts is 51,017

  • This sample covers 3.2% of the city’s population and around 6% of land area

  • I draw rings with [300m, 600m] radius from 86 quasi-experimental neighborhoods to identify treated and control schools

  • Any overlap between treated and control is kept as treated

  • If a school is covered by more than one treated area, the school will be attached to the arena with the earliest opening date

  • If a school is covered by more than one control area, duplicates are dropped based on the minimum distance to the equipment

Results Crime

  • ETWFE point estimate suggests that the urban renewal policy caused a decrease in murder rates decreased around 2/3 in treated neighborhoods

  • S & A (2021) confidence intervals rules out reductions smaller than 26%

The figure shows ETWFE and S&A (2021) dynamic treatment effects. Months are binned into years, and endpoints are binned at -4 years (or less) and 2 years (or more). Coefficients are normalized to event time -1.

  • Day-of-week columns show a larger effect during weekdays, and time-of-day analysis points to a bigger effect during the afternoon (from 12 pm to 5:59 pm) - when most social projects happen

  • Pupils that study during the afternoon and commute from home to school around 1:00 pm and from school to home between 5:00-5:30 pm would benefit the most

  • The effect is driven by males aged 18-29 with past criminal record, which suggests fewer gang fights in treated areas

  • Although there is anecdotal evidence of young males leaving the drug trafficking in these areas, incapacitation effect is hard to identify

Results School Outcomes

  • The first three columns display the causal effects of the urban policy on Portuguese scores of students in \(5^{th}\) grade. Results point to an increase of 0.56%, but are not statistically significant

  • Using the preferred ring size, Math scores increase by 2.5% on average

  • As the radius increases, point estimates get smaller - i.e., schools very close to sports arenas (below 300 meters threshold) benefit the most

  • At such small range, inference suffers from few treated clusters, and confidence intervals are made using wild bootstrap

A Back-of-envelope Calculation

  • Back-of-envelop calculation shows that the 31 treated areas are having 18.86 fewer homicides every year. Extrapolating the effects to all 102 areas covered by 103 football fields, there are 62.68 fewer murders/year due to this policy. I follow Pereira, Almeida and Oliveira (2020), who attach R$ 1.119 million for a blue-collar Brazilian men

  • Amenity value is based on private turf field rentals at an hourly rate of R$ 100, considering 56 hours/week available for practice

  • Building costs vary from R$ .24 to R$ 1.7 million depending on the type of the equipment, and maintenance costs are composed by salaries, water and energy. There are four social projects connected to areninhas with an estimated cost of R$ 24.87 million/year

Takeaways

  • Crime prevention through environmental design might be a cost-effective strategy to reduce violent crimes and an alternative to policing

  • Successful interventions may cause diffusion of benefits to other areas such as school achievement

    • In particular, local governments could target unsafe areas close to schools to maximize positive spillovers

  • Place-based policies that involve the community or significantly change the neighborhood’s routine might have a greater impact on residents’ quality of life and prevent public goods from turning into public bads