This study provides estimates of the impact of increased access to home mortgage credit on local crime rates and uses national home mortgage loan origination volume as a shift-share instrument for local home mortgage loan origination volume. The focus of the study is San Diego County from 2007-Q1 to 2013-Q1. The regression estimates indicate that increased access to home mortgage loans during this time period had a statistically significant negative impact on local crime rates: the baseline specification suggests that a ten percentage point increase in the growth in home mortgage loan originations decreases the growth in total crime incidents by approximately 2.75 percentage points. This finding is robust to different model specifications.

This Article argues that the social impact of vandalism must be factored into the expected criminal punishment for this offense. Existing law does so unevenly. Acts of vandalism may have a positive social impact, either as street art or as a form of protected speech, or a negative social impact as costs that preclude the provision of public goods or goods traded upon the basis of access, and not ownership. In general, vandalism cannot be prevented by means of observable security measures; rather, vandalism must be deterred by means of higher expected criminal punishment. A large expected punishment, however, implicates what this article terms the “broken community theory of punishment.” Although broken community effects militate in favor of relatively minimal punishment for vandalism, a negative consequence of this punitive approach is less investment in the infrastructure or physical appearance of urban communities. A number of urban communities may, in fact, benefit significantly from vandalism laws that allow for greater capital investment by more harshly punishing the deliberate damage or destruction of public goods or goods traded upon the basis of access, as vandalism in the first-degree.