Residents’ perceived safety is key to improving livelihoods and reducing disparities between neighborhoods in Sweden. Neighborhood interventions may be more cost-effective than individual-level interventions in addressing major societal issues such as unequal levels of safety between neighborhoods. However, most studies investigating the impact of neighborhood characteristics on perceived safety suffer from either poor data quality, too few respondents per statistical unit, large units of analysis, or a lack of longitudinally collected data. This study aims to fill this gap by combining property-specific longitudinal sociodemographic data with customer satisfaction survey data (N = 147,965) collected between 2013–2014 and 2016–2021 in Gothenburg. Using two multilevel models, we examined the relationship between perceived safety and both property-level and area-level structural characteristics, testing three hypotheses. Consistent with prior research, we find that sociodemographic and urban environmental characteristics influenced perceptions of safety. The multilevel analyses reveal that proximity to the square is associated with lower levels of perceived safety, particularly among residents living within 0–100 m of the square in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Moreover, the results show that living in taller buildings of 10–16 floors is associated with lower levels of safety.
The authors would like to thank Helena Bohman at Malmö University and Guilherme Kenjy Chihaya Da Silva at Nord University for the conceptualization and review of this article, and Lars Bankvall at the Framtiden Group who helped us with the data collection. We would like to thank Formas for supporting this work. This project is funded by Formas through the Smart Built Environment programme with grant reference number 2022–00125.