Sunday, May 11, 2025
5/11/2025
Place Matters - Adaptable Solutions to Violence at the Community Level - PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT Gun and domestic violence have both drastically increased in US cities following the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, including in gun violence involving children and unintentional firearm deaths in youth. Furthermore, the pandemic drastically increased the already wide gap between exposure to violence for Black and other minoritized youth. The broad objective of the proposed research is to examine the short- and long-term impact of vacant and abandoned property remediation on violence before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the years that follow, with a specific focus on how vacant and abandoned property remediation may have buffered violence and psychological stress during the pandemic. Although there is a growing evidence-base to prevent violence, including youth and family violence, there is now an unprecedented opportunity to examine the impact that place- based, population-level interventions have had on trends in violence during and following large perturbations to urban systems, including, very prominently, the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed work adds significantly to our ongoing place-based cluster randomized trial aimed at primary prevention of violence among youth and families (R01HD095609). Expanding our efforts by continuing treatment and following our trial clusters for a longer period of time (nearly three years)—especially given the impact of COVID-19—will provide valuable new information for a growing number of cities, beyond simply New Orleans, who are launching place-based approaches to violence prevention. This unique opportunity to learn more about how to adapt and improve such approaches by studying what happened during the height of the pandemic and in the years that follow will uniquely advance our understanding of such programs during future large-scale events such epidemics, extreme weather due to climate change, or other large perturbations that quickly affect the daily lives of entire cities and will continue to do so with increasing frequency.
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