It's one of the first questions that any potential homeowner will ask: "How safe is the neighborhood?" Although both violent crime and property crime rates have decreased greatly since the 1990s, crime rates can vary substantially across city and state lines.
Using the 2015 FBI Uniform Crime Report, the following is a list of the cities and metro areas with the highest rates of property crime in the United States.
Reported rates of burglaries, vehicle thefts and larcenies in each city were used to find the overall property crime rate per 100,000 people in 2015. Only cities that reported data for all three crimes were included. Arson, while considered a property crime, is not included in the calculations due to a lack of wide participation by law enforcement, limiting the data available. To prevent the data from skewing toward small cities with few incidents, a population threshold of at least 100,000 people was required for locales to make the ranking.
Note: The data published here is meant solely to illustrate the relative rates of crime, and not to make assertions about the effectiveness of law enforcement. There are many factors that affect the rate and nature of crime — such as the degree of urbanization, composition of age groups, economic climate and modes of transportation within an area — which are not considered here. For more information on how to interpret FBI crime data, click here.
