Costly Neighbors? Housing, Crime, and Support for Redistribution

Public housing is often blamed for generating crime, though evidence is mixed and drawn mostly from Global North contexts. We ask whether public housing actually increases crime, and how such beliefs shape support for redistribution. Studying Brazil's \textit{Minha Casa, Minha Vida}—one of the world's largest public housing programs—we combine multiple causal designs with an original survey. We find no evidence that public housing raises beneficiary, neighborhood, or city-wide crime: beneficiaries report high residential satisfaction; treated neighborhoods show no increase across crime indicators; and cities with exogenous increases in housing see homicide rates decline, even among vulnerable groups. A survey experiment shows that support for public housing depends less on whether it is linked to crime than on who is perceived to bear its costs. Support holds when costs are framed as confined to beneficiaries, but collapses when crime is framed as spilling beyond them.