So my realtor, Ellen Pitts (who is highly recommended, helped us a ton remotely moving into Raleigh), has a YouTube channel where she talks about real estate trends. Her most recent video she discussed a bit about crime in Raleigh relative to other cities because of the most recent shooting.

My criminologist hot take is that generally most cities in the US are relatively low crime. So Ellen shows Dallas has quite a few more per-capita shootings than Raleigh, but Dallas is quite safe “overall”. Probably somewhat contra to what most people think, the cities that in my opinion really have the most crime problems tend to be smaller rust belt cities. I love Troy, NY (where I was a crime analyst for a few years), but Troy is quite a bit rougher around the edges than Raleigh or Dallas.

So this post is more about, you have already chosen to move to Raleigh – if I am comparing house 1 and house 2 (or looking at general neighborhoods), do I need to worry about crime in this specific location?

So for a few specific resources/strategies for the home hunter. Not just in Raleigh, but many cities now have an open data portal. You can often look at crime. Here is an example with the Raleigh open data:

So if you have a specific address in mind, you can go and see the recent crime around that location (cities often fuzz the address a bit, so the actual points are just nearby on that block of the street). Blue dots in that screenshot are recent crimes in 2022 against people (you can click on each dot and get a more specific breakdown). Be prepared when you do this – crime is everywhere. But that said the vast majority of minor crime incidents should not deter you from buying a house or renting at a particular location.

Note I recommend looking at actual crime data (points on a map) for this. Several vendors release crime stats aggregated to neighborhoods or zipcodes, but these are of very low quality. (Often they “make up” data when it doesn’t exist, and when data does exist they don’t have a real great way to rank areas of low or high crime.)

For the more high level, should I worry about this neighborhood, I made an interactive hotspot map.

For the methodology, I focused on crimes that I would personally be concerned with as a homeowner. If I pull larceny crimes, I am sure the Target in North Hills would be a hotspot (but I would totally buy a condo in North Hills). So this pulls the recent crime data from Raleigh open data starting in 2020, but scoops up aggravated assaults, interpersonal robberies, weapon violations, and residential burglaries. Folks may be concerned about drug incidents and breaking into cars as well, but my experience those also do not tend to be in residential areas. The python code to replicate the map is here.

Then I created DBScan clusters that had at least 34 crimes – so these areas average at least one of these crimes per month over the time period I sampled. Zooming in, even though I tried to filter for more potentially residential related crimes, you can see the majority of these hot spots of crime are commercial areas in Raleigh. So for example you can zoom in and check out the string of hot spots on Capital Blvd (and if you click a hot spot you can get breakdowns of specific crime stats I looked at):

Very few of these hot spots are in residential neighborhoods – most are in more commercial areas. So when considering looking at homes in Raleigh, there are very few spots I would worry about crime at all in the city when making a housing choice. If moving into a neighborhood with a higher proportion of renters I think is potentially more important long term signal than crime here in Raleigh.