The Health of Place: Community Health, Land Use, Crime, and Spatial Justice

This study examines whether community mental and physical health conditions are associated with parcel-level crime after land use and differences across census tracts are taken into account. Drawing on general strain theory and routine activities theory, the present study treats community health as a broader contextual condition and land use as an indicator of criminal opportunity. The analysis includes 28,193 tax parcels nested within 25 census tracts in Sarasota, Florida. Police-recorded crime incidents from 2022 through 2025 were geocoded to parcels and linked to nine tract-level health measures from CDC PLACES, 38 parcel-level land-use categories, and demographic controls. A Poisson model with standard errors clustered by census tract is followed by a mixed-effects Poisson model with a tract-level random intercept. Depression and fair or poor general health are significantly positively associated with parcel-level crime in both models, whereas frequent physical and mental distress are significantly negatively associated with crime in both models. Because the health measures are strongly intercorrelated and vary across only 25 tracts, individual coefficients may be unstable and are interpreted cautiously. Land use is also strongly related to crime, with higher counts at several commercial, institutional, medical, lodging, and multifamily residential parcels. Community health and land use therefore provide complementary information: the former captures broader contextual conditions, while the latter identifies places where opportunities for crime converge. Viewed through a spatial-justice lens, this convergence raises questions about whether the conditions that support health and personal security are distributed equitably across communities.