A couple weeks ago, the
Atlantic published a Hannah Rosin
article, attributing the increase in violent crime in mid-sized cities like Memphis and St. Louis to the destruction of public housing projects and the dispersal of their former residents, using Section 8 housing vouchers.
Though some of my
favorite bloggers linked favorably to the article when it came out, it left me feeling uneasy. The article flirts a little too closely to justifying the kind nonsense you see on
the Corner and
here on the libertarian America’s Future Foundation blog:
…poverty isn’t the problem, at least not the central problem. The real problem is culture. The culture that says the biggest sin someone from the ‘hood can commit is forgetting his friends….This is the culture that the people involved in the Section 8 program are bringing out of the projects and into the ‘burbs. And until they decide to ditch that culture, there’s no realistic way to help them.
Read the whole post and you’ll find the author has also managed to use Rosin’s article to show why Javon Walker, a receiver for the Oakland Raiders, bears responsibility for the fact that a stranger robbed and beat him. Or something like that.
My major problem with Rosin’s argument is its confusion between good theories and good intentions. She professes a certain bafflement— both on her own behalf and that of the housing and crime experts she profiles— as to why Chicago’s Gautreaux program was so successful in placing families in Section 8 housing and lifting them out of poverty, while other programs that copied the model seem to have failed.
But from my vantage point, Rosin, as the J-School professors say, has buried her lede here. The Guatreaux program worked because the participating families were strongly counseled and carefully screened at every step of their relocation process, as Rosin reports much too deeply in her article. The program, in other words, was well run and based on actual needs. How were the other relocation projects administered? Well, Rosin doesn't say.
You can read between the lines though. In 1991, Rosin tells us, the federal government appropriated over $6 billion for the demolition and redevelopment of public housing projects across the country. What do you think tends to happen when massive amounts of money are thrown around for "urban renewal" projects? I haven’t done the reporting, but read this next section of the article with a proper sense of cynicism, keeping the number $6 billion firmly in mind:
The program was launched in the same spirit as Bill Clinton’s national service initiative—communities working together to “rebuild lives.” One Chicago housing official mused about “architects and lawyers and bus drivers and people on welfare living together.” Wrecking balls began hitting the Chicago high-rises in the mid-1990s. Within a few years, tens of thousands of public-housing residents all over the country were leaving their apartments. In place of the projects, new developments arose, with fanciful names like “Jazz on the Boulevard” or “Centennial Place.” In Memphis, the Hurt Village project was razed to make way for “Uptown Square,” which the local developer Henry Turley declared would be proof that you could turn the inner city into a “nice place for poor people” to live. Robert Lipscomb, the dynamic director of the Memphis Housing Authority, announced, “Memphis is on the move.”
What happened, almost certainly, is that developers started to see green and rushed people out of their homes without providing proper support, for which there is typically little financial incentive. Does “Jazz on the Boulevard” sound like the title of a project conceived by former residents of the Henry Horner homes or Cabrini-Green? Not the ones I’ve met (though I do keep missing the CHA’s annual production “Cabaret”).
Imagine you lived in a public housing high-rise in the mid ’90s. Yes, your home was built on the premises of faulty and even malevolent urban planning, replacing more diverse housing stock and commercial streets that would have given you and your neighbors a better chance to lift yourselves up over the generations. But, over time, your building had developed some of the fixtures of a vital city neighborhood, like long-standing friendships between neighbors and reliable social welfare institutions. Though some of these friendships and institutions might also, at times, drag you down, at least you have somebody to rely on when the inevitable crises of poverty strike.
Now imagine you’re told you have three months— or six months, or even a year— to clear out, and that the government will give you a section 8 voucher to help you pay rent on a new apartment of your choosing.
Sounds nice, but you don’t have a car or much money, so unless you find readily available help, you’re not likely to find a house too far from where you already live, far enough to actually provide your child genuinely expanded horizons. How would you even get out to the suburbs if you wanted to? Two buses and a train? That would take two hours, and you work during the school day, so who would look after the kids while you’re gone? I know from experience that one trip isn't usually enough to find a good apartment. Five, or even ten, would be a more realistic number.
Sure, all these challenges could be confronted, with good information and a benevolent, well-run counseling system. But in the absence of that, wouldn’t you end up moving nearby? Doesn’t it make sense that you’d end up getting an apartment near people you already know, and that many of the problems that existed in the high-rise would follow you to your new neighborhood? Would it be your fault that some pie-in-the-sky program, executed by politicians and developers, whose interests are most likely not your own, had managed to move you around again, just like they moved your grandparents to build the high-rises from which you were just vacated?
Here’s the thing: when civic leaders use false paternalism to justify rushing people out of their homes, usually so politically connected developers can get a chunk of a huge project and city councilmen can expand their tax bases, social disorder tends to result. The theory— that public housing projects are a particularly malignant form of urban housing and should be phased out— isn’t wrong. It’s the execution that should be questioned. That should have been Rosin's lede.
The silver lining, as Rosin begrudgingly admits, is that even a worst-case disperal scenario is still probably preferable to the old concentrated-public-housing status quo. If crime persists in a single, ghettoized district, as it did in so many public housing developments over the last few decades, it eventually becomes ignored. This leads to counter-intutive policy. In Chicago, for example, low crime white neighborhoods have long had a higher per capita police presence than poor, public housing-concentrated neighborhoods with high crime rates, because leaders in the poorer neighborhoods are comparably easier to isolate or buy off.
When the problem of is dispersed, however, causing medium levels of crime across large parts of a city, it becomes a city-wide problem. A city-wide problem is not a good thing, obviously, but it does have one major advantage over a ghettoized, institutionally accepted problem: it's a problem that politicians and police chiefs have to give a fuck about. And, just maybe, try to solve.
