Eviction, Collective Efficacy, and Firearm Violence in Chicago

Importance: Firearm violence is concentrated in structurally marginalized communities. Collective efficacy—a community's belief in their ability to achieve a shared goal—has been associated with lower rates of firearm violence. It remains unclear whether structural determinants, such as eviction, may be associated with lower collective efficacy and firearm violence.

Objective: To understand if eviction is independently associated with firearm violence and if eviction moderates established associations between collective efficacy and firearm violence.

Design, Setting, and Participants: This cross-sectional study used participant data from the Healthy Chicago Surveys (HCS) from 2021 to 2023, and neighborhood-level data from the City of Chicago. Participants included respondents to the HCS, and data were analyzed from July to December 2024.

Exposures: Primary exposures included personal experience of eviction (self-reported) and neighborhood-level exposure to eviction (census-tract eviction rate). Neighborhood collective efficacy and related neighborhood measures were also examined in moderation analyses, modeling an interaction term between eviction and neighborhood measures.

Main Outcome and Measures: The primary outcome was exposure to firearm violence, measured by shooting events within 1000 feet of a participant's home. Mixed-effects linear regression models were used to examine firearm violence as a function of eviction measures and theoretically-relevant covariates.

Results: The sample included 13 916 participants. Most participants were White (5194 [37.7%]), Black (3915 [28.4%]), or Hispanic (3150 [22.9%]); women (8625 [62.5%]) were oversampled relative to men (4923 [35.7%]). Additionally, 3362 individuals (25.2%) lived below the federal poverty line and 7032 (50.8%) had at least a bachelor's degree. Most participants were age 45 to 64 years (4416 [31.8%]) or 30 to 44 years (4169 [30.0%]). The median (IQR) number of shootings within 1000 feet of a participant's home was 3 (1-9). Each percentage increase in census tract eviction rate (mean [range], 0.88% [0%-5.33%]) was associated with 2.66 (95% CI, 2.01-3.31) additional shootings within 1000 ft of the participant's home. Individual experience of eviction was associated with 1.04 (95% CI, 0.46-1.61) additional shootings within 1000 ft. Eviction was a significant moderator of associations of low collective efficacy with firearm violence (0.89; 95% CI, 0.20 to 1.58; P = .01).

Conclusions and Relevance: In this cross-sectional study, eviction was associated with increased firearm violence exposure. Eviction augmented associations between low collective efficacy and firearm violence, highlighting the contextual role of structural disadvantage in galvanizing this association. Eviction may be a tangible intervention target for violence prevention in US cities.