Affordable Housing Institute : US

 

“[Railroads will] only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.”

The Duke of Wellington, 1835

 

 

There is much to admire in the Iron Duke, but when it came to the Iron Horse, no matter how dismissive, he was imperiously, dismissively, magisterially wrong.  Railways created mobility and opportunity, and the common people took advantage of it to improve their lot in life.

 

Imagine who is riding them!

 

To be sure, railways also brought the lumpenproletariat out to the Brighton Pavilion, or to Windsor Castle, or any of the other pastoral retreats that the aristocratic and rich had thought their own private pastures, even as they were legally public land.  With that mobility came crime, disease, and political agitation, culminating in Europe‘s explosive year 1848 – and, of course, economic expansion, broad democracy (not just for the moneyed or landed), liberalism, and a rising standard of living. 

 

Thus Lord Wellington stood astride the railway of history growling, “None shall pass.”  Something similar, although cloaked in regretful empathy, is coyly implied by of a lengthy and provocative if questionable article in The Atlantic, which coyly implies – but never actually states – that an increase in crime is directly attributable to mobile housing subsidy in the form of Section 8 (recently renamed Housing Choice Vouchers), and that things would just be so much better if all ‘‘those people’ could return to the halcyon days of public housing.  Because author Hanna Rosin – who appears new to housing and cites only sociologists, not any actual housing experts, in her 8,500 word article – seems embarrassed by her thesis, she tiptoes up to it with an elliptical day-in-the-life opening:

 

To get to the Old Allen police station in North Memphis, you have to drive all the way to the end of a quiet suburban road until it turns country.

 

Got the theme?  Bucolic suburb shattered by escaped urban hordes. Shades of The Wild One.

 

We’re here for the housing subsidies

 

Hidden by six acres of woods, the station seems to be the kind of place that might concern itself mainly with lost dogs, or maybe the misuse of hunting licenses. But it isn’t. Not anymore. As Lieutenant Doug Barnes waited for me to arrive one night for a tour of his beat, he had a smoke and listened for shots. He counted eight, none meant for buck. “Nothing unusual for a Tuesday,” he told me.

 

The place remained, until about 10 years ago, a pretty safe neighborhood where you could play outside with a ball or a dog. But as he considered more-recent times, his nostalgia gave way to something darker. “I have never been so disheartened,” he said.

 

By 2000, all of that had changed. Once-quiet apartment complexes full of young families “suddenly started turning hot on us.” Instead of the occasional break-in, Barnes was getting calls of robberies, gunshots in the hallways, drug dealers roughing up their neighbors. A gang war ripped through the neighborhood.

 

Maybe not quite so romantic as this gang war

 

“We thought, What the hell is going on here?” A gang war! In North Memphis! “All of a sudden it was a damn war zone,” he said.

 

Let’s get the rest of Mr. Rosin’s thesis out in the open:

 

Falling crime rates have been one of the great American success stories of the past 15 years. New York and Los Angeles, once the twin capitals of violent crime, have calmed down significantly, as have most other big cities. Criminologists still debate why: the crack war petered out, new policing tactics worked, the economy improved for a long spell.

 

Two reasons not listed include the aging of America (few teenage males, the raw recruits of violence and crime, arriving in the population), and the rising income levels in America‘s cities.  Richer people need crime less, and can pay more to prevent it. 

 

We cost money but we’re worth it

 

While the cities have become richer, and larger – phenomena I’ve commented on in numerous posts – no society (except Lake Wobegon‘s) can have all its people above average.  As urban land prices rise, poor people are displaced from the city core.  Because they have to stay in the metro area for employment, they slide to the declining areas, which at the moment are the inner-ring suburbs.

 

Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.

 

So hard, in fact, that author Rosin never actually says it, which is infuriating since it leaves us all what ‘it’ is. 

 

You have to guess what ‘it’ is

 

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.”

 

Is Ms. Rosin saying that the subsidy is a corrupting influence: that people become criminals upon receipt of a voucher?  That they should have stayed out of sight in public housing?  That moving them to suburbs triggers a spree (a word always used with crime)?  She wants it both ways – not saying what she means but wanting us to know what she means. 

 

Section 8 – or, as it has been renamed, the Housing Choice Voucher – is a kind of economic railway ticket.  It enables people to exercise their choice – to move to other neighborhoods. 

 

God knows where they might go to

 

Still, Housing Choice is a limited choice – the voucher is capped at a rent level that is below-median.  So newly mobile recipients tend to vacate the worst neighborhoods, into the best ones they can afford, which by economic correlation are usually those that are in slow economic decline.

 

If one of us is going up, the other must be heading down

 

Studies show that recipients of Section 8 vouchers have tended to choose moderately poor neighborhoods that were already on the decline, not low-poverty neighborhoods.

 

That’s because it’s all the voucher will pay.  We could fix this problem by allowing voucher rents to be set at a higher standard, and that would increase mobility.  I’d favor such a move but I suspect Ms. Rosin wouldn’t.

 

Buried among Ms. Rosin’s words are a series of hypotheses that, being half-formed and unvoiced, are irrefutable.  Let us go then, you and I, to make them visible so they can be refuted. 

 

1.         The old public housing (where new voucher recipients lived) was physically and morally bankrupt

 

To argue implicitly that giving residents mobility is a bad idea, Ms. Rosin must imply that what they had before – legacy public housing, sixty years old, demolished as unacceptable – wasn’t so bad after all.  Knowing that this is a difficult proposition to swallow – one, by the way, that as far as I know is held by no knowledgeable housing person – she must start by conjuring up the bogeyman of the oldest and worst properties (Chicago’s Cabrini-Green), just so se can say, “but Memphis wasn’t that bad.”

 

Watch, in fact, how Ms. Rosin turns a set of damning facts into an exculpatory aura:

 

Not every project was like Cabrini-Green. Dixie Homes was a complex of two- and three-story brick buildings on grassy plots.

 

The other large property Memphis Housing Authority demolished: Lamar Terrace

You get green grass if you board up all the apartments, so nobody comes there

 

Grassy plots or no, it was built in 1938, and never substantially rehabbed since then. 

 

The last time Memphis built public housing: commissioners from 1953

 

Undoubtedly the apartments were too small, the plumbing was vintage Depression, the electrical circuitry wouldn’t come anywhere near code or current demands. 

 

It was, by all accounts, claustrophobic, sometimes badly maintained, and occasionally violent.

 

‘Sometimes’ badly maintained?  And how much violence is ‘occasional’?

 

But to its residents, it was, above all, a community. Every former resident I spoke to mentioned one thing: the annual Easter-egg hunt.

 

Yes, it must have been just like that

 

Yes, what are a few homicides and rampant drug dealing when we can have an Easter-egg hunt?

 

Demonizing the high-rises has blinded some city officials to what was good and necessary about the projects, and what they ultimately have to find a way to replace: the sense of belonging, the informal economy, the easy access to social services.

 

What lies behind a phrase like ‘the informal economy’ – you mean drug dealing?  Prostitution?  Protection rackets?  And to what social services did the residents have ‘easy access’?  Public housing is not noted for its largesse in providing them.

 

And for better or worse, the fact that the police had the address.

 

And therefore what?  That those trafficking in the sylvan ‘informal economy’ could be more easily rounded up? 

 

Obviously the benighted City of Memphis was blind to these sociological benefits, as it secured a HOPE VI grant to tear the entire property down and rebuild it:

 

[From the Memphis Commercial-Appeal]: Joey Hagan (left) and David Schuermann, co-founders of Architecture, Incorporated, stand among the rubble of the former Dixie Homes housing project on Poplar. The eight-person firm is helping redevelop Dixie Homes and Lamar Terrace, two of the city’s bleakest public housing projects.

 

Ms. Rosin, who never saw it, imagines Dixie Homes as a happy community.  Everyone in Memphis close to it saw it as needing to go somewhere to die, via demolition.  For that matter, so did HUD, whose HOPE VI awards, in my experience, go only to the most troubled properties, and are frequently complete demo-rebuild. 

 

Since everyone close to the action disagrees with the thesis Ms. Rosin is constructing, goes her reasoning, they must also have been bamboozled:

 

HOPE VI stands as a bitter footnote to this story.

 

That’s what HOPE VI tastes like?

 

Bitter to whom?  Not to Memphians

 

What began as an “I Have a Dream” social crusade has turned into an urban-redevelopment project. Cities fell so hard for the idea of a new, spiffed-up, gentrified downtown that this vision came to crowd out other goals.

 

It did?  Says who?

 

“People ask me if HOPE VI was successful, and I have to say, ‘You mean the buildings or the people?’” said Laura Harris, a HOPE VI evaluator in Memphis. “It became seen as a way to get rid of eyesores and attract rich people downtown.”

 

Although Ms. Harris is qualified to have an opinion on this point, I doubt that this throwaway sentence accurately describes her views.  (She can write me and correct me if I’m wrong!)  Nor does it square with the view of my long-time friend who’s a Memphis affordable housing developer and owner, or my on (admittedly limited) experience in Memphis.  

 

I didn’t develop any property in Memphis

 

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]