This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America.
Late last month, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson proposed a measure that will protect renters from eviction and tenant exploitation — a move that the city’s housing advocates have supported for years — and which may also have implications for violence prevention.
The mayor’s proposal comes months after a landmark study published in December 2025 that linked eviction rates to gun violence in Chicago for the first time. According to the study, between 2021 and 2023, a 1 percent increase in eviction rates in a census tract was associated with 2.66 more shootings within 1000 feet of a person’s home. The researchers analyzed more than 13,900 demographically representative responses from Healthy Chicago Surveys data: 38 percent of the respondents were white, another 28 percent were Black, 23 percent were Hispanic, and about 6 percent were Asian. The largest individual-level association with shootings — higher than a resident’s race, income status, or even education level — was the personal experience of eviction, which was associated with about one more shooting.
The study, conducted by a group of researchers at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago, underpins what violence prevention leaders have observed for years: Social conditions like economic stability affect gun violence.
“Gun violence is the last manifestation of every other social ill, of poverty, of lack of opportunity, lack of health care, lack of jobs, segregation, redlining,” said Arne Duncan, the former secretary of education in the Obama administration. “When all those social ills come together, then the result, almost inevitably, is gun violence.”
Before Duncan was secretary of education, he spent two decades in public education in Chicago, first as a tutor and then as the chief officer of Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2009. Time and again, he told The Trace, he observed a troubling pattern: a good student with a poor attendance record, often due to unreliable transportation or unstable housing, eventually becoming a perpetrator or victim of gun violence. The cycle reminded him of the many friends he lost to shootings growing up.
Chicago remains one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States, alongside other Midwestern cities like Detroit and Milwaukee. Shaped by the Great Migration, the mass migration of millions of Black people from the rural South to cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970, census tracts in these areas continue to experience high levels of poverty and shootings among Black and brown residents, and high eviction rates. In the census tract in the University of Chicago study, evictions were most prevalent on the West and South Sides, areas that account for more than half of the city’s firearm injuries.
“Focusing on eviction was interesting because it allowed us to look at how we are creating urban policy,” said Thomas Statchen, the study’s lead author and a fourth-year medical student at the University of Chicago, “and how that creates the conditions, such as the loss of those social networks or the instability that we see in those social networks, related to firearm violence.”
In census tracts with high eviction rates, the study found the strongest association between social capital – a community’s belief in working together to reach a common goal – and firearm violence.
“This emphasizes the way that we should be thinking about reducing structural factors like eviction that are driving the turnover in these neighborhoods,” Stachen said, “and the opportunities for policy changes that can help reduce violence in these communities.”
The study is not the first to connect poverty to gun violence in Chicago. A report published last year found that Black Chicagoans faced a poverty rate of almost 30 percent, three times higher than their white neighbors. Another report published last week by the Violence Policy Report, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, found that Black residents in Illinois are 26 times more likely than their white counterparts to die by firearm homicide, meaning they account for nearly 69 percent of gun homicide victims, but just 14 percent of the state population.
Several other studies have tied education level to a person’s susceptibility to being a victim of violence, and in recent years, analyses have found a direct connection between communities with high levels of food insecurity and higher rates of firearm injuries.
Yet even as researchers make inroads into determining how factors like reliable employment and access to health insurance affect a person’s health, political pushback makes continued research more difficult. A Trace analysis found that the Trump administration has cut at least $100 million in funding directed at gun violence research, undoing much of the Biden administration’s efforts aimed at expanding firearm violence scholarship.
Statchen, the study’s lead author, emphasized that its findings are associative, and that further research examining potential Chicago policy changes is necessary to make causal claims.
“It’s important to continue to think about this, even beyond Chicago, and look at whether these same relationships occur in other places,” Stachen said. “This will be really important in helping to understand these associations and how they are making a difference in firearm violence in these communities.”
These days, Duncan is leading Chicago CRED, a violence prevention organization that has assisted at least 400 participants in obtaining a high school diploma. But while Chicago is experiencing an overall drop in gun deaths, communities on the South and West Sides are still facing rising shooting rates.
“For far too many kids growing up here in the South and West Sides of Chicago, they talk about ‘if I grow up,’ not ‘when I grow up,’” said Duncan. “It’s hard to talk about deferring gratification and planning for college, and thinking long term, when they’re literally just trying to survive every single day.”
