So many opportunities to revisit the scene of a crime present themselves in this handy map of 2013 Houston murder locations assembled from HPD data by the Houston Chronicle. The city’s death-dealers appear to have kept out of the lower west quadrant of the Inner Loop (for the most part), and stayed clear of a swath west of the Loop between I-10 and Westheimer. [Edit: The Greater Fifth Ward looks pretty good too.] Viewing the map on a larger page (try here) allows you to zero in more easily on homicide hotspots such as the stretch of Bissonnet on either side of the Southwest Fwy.
We’re not exactly sure what lucky advertiser will show up at the bottom of the death map from BatchGeo when you view it, but them’s the breaks.
- Interactive: Murders in 2013 [Houston Chronicle]
- HPD concentrates on hot spots to reduce homicides [Houston Chronicle]
Map: Houston Chronicle
Impressed to see Westside free and clear. As ZAW commented in the Chron article, the biggest problems are localized to the apartment complexes. I would like to see a dataset for all types of violent crime, to see how much “spillover” there is from the sites of the worst happenings.
I wish the city would condemn and bulldoze every apartment complex along Westheimer between 610 and the Beltway. Such a move would eliminate most of the murders in my ‘hood.
Haha! 5th ward and West University. About the only time you will see these two areas with the same crime statistics
This is a good map for the tourists.
Woohoo! Shady Acres is murder free.
Also worthy of note: the absence of murders in the Fifth Ward (aka the former Bloody Nickel.)
I doubt the murder stats include any info from the Memorial Villages, Bellaire and West U. There likely weren’t any, but it is one potential reason for the absense of any dots in certain areas.
If you overlay the “Ethnic distribution map” from earlier last year on Swamplot, you will come to the No Shit Sherlock realization.
Who should the lucky advertiser be at the bottom of Houston’s murder map?
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ApartmentFinder.com of course!
Ha! My old Sharpstown looks pretty good, especially compared to what online hyperbole usually suggests. Instead, looks like the Westwood area is not doing well.
Seems Montrose/midtown and Brooke-Smith & 3rd ward have the most of the inner loop areas.
Yeah, these are only City of Houston statistics, so the Memorial Villages and Bellaire/West U/Southside areas aren’t accounted for. It’s also worth noting that the location of a homicide is recorded for statistical purposes as where the body was found.
And all the inner loopers on here wonder why I live outside the beltway. Enjoy your murders inside the loop!
Hmmm not one in 5th Ward! The stereotypes if my neighborhood are wrong… we only commit petty crimes lol!
Do they consider hit and run, vehicle vs. pedestrian/bicyclist murder? How about the deaths on the freeways? I know most of the time they consider these “accidents” but really the end result is the same. I’d like to see that map.
@Rodrigo @TheNiche
Murder statistics are really the best gauge of crime statistics because there is a body, and the location of the body is almost always the location of the crime. Other crimes (property, rape) are often underreported or less easily geotagged (e.g. stolen cars) and there for less reliable as to extent and location. Would be interesting to see the maps with the smaller cities included, although from 1999-2011 Bellaire only had one murder (2003): West U and the Villages appear to have had none. http://bit.ly/1aspoEE
LOL, bulldoze those apartments and the crime will magically disappear? Sure, let’s do that and they can camp on your lawns.
I was seriously considering purchasing one of these last year. Loved the house, loved the neighborhood, was aware of the high-profile news-making murder that had taken place there earlier in the year and was not freaked out by it at all. (It was either a business deal gone wrong or a personal vendetta, either way it was a targeted hit and not a random killing.)
What killed the deal was when we viewed the house, it was about 50 degrees inside because they were trying to keep the mold smell down. It had serious problems with water collecting under the house, which is normally fixable with a pier-and-beam, but some previous owner had permanently and completely closed in (cemented/bricked) all of the breathing holes in the foundation. We ended up lucking into a house about a block away, on a higher block with a pier-and-beam that you can crawl around under.
@Wiggycat – spoken like a true “let’s just corral the criminals in run down apartments and make some money off them” slum lord apologist. Bravo, you’re the first one here today!
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In all seriousness, no smart Houstonian wants to ban affordable apartments. We actually welcome them, IF THEY’RE RUN PROPERLY! By “run properly”‘ I mean they meet code, things are repaired when they break, and the management carefully screens tenants and uses CPTED to keep those tenants safe. Alas, at a lot of the apartments in Westwood, this isn’t the case.
It would be interesting to see this with an overlay of where the city spends their time being aggressive with apartment owners. Out where people get shot and buildings are falling down, the city inspectors and ‘crime abatement’ is near nill. Come to Montrose or other hot areas (were I’d argue such aggressive action isn’t as necessary due to built in market forces solving those issues) and you have city swarming.
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Eh, just funny to me…
Inside the loop West of 45 East of 610 and south of I10 this whole area is murder free nice
Most of Houston’s murders appear to have taken place in the “donut”: that region between 610 and Beltway 8. As upper middle class residential development has bifurcated between the inner loop and the far-flung suburbs (Sugarland, Katy, Cypress, Woodlands, etc.), the donut is becoming a no-mans land, with only a few exceptions (Tanglewood/Spring Branch, and to a lesser extent Garden Oaks/Oak Forest) to prove the rule.
Interesting to see the murder desert (since it is the new cliche) in the westchase area. THere are some shady spots and at least a few murders (probably more, only the ones i read about) when i lived out there, now there are none? Westchase district must be doing something right.
Kudos to Rex for coining “murder desert”. Enjoyed that way too much.