Affordable Housing Institute : US

 [Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]

 

Yesterday we started digging into an 8,500 word Atlantic article that never quite has the courage of its convictions.  Echoing the Duke of Wellington’s lament about the railways –

 

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

The Duke of Wellington, 1835

 

Imagine having to sit among them

 

– it wants to damn housing choice mobility as contributing to the delinquency of a neighborhood, but instead author Hanna Rosin skirts any such declaration, choosing instead to make her case by innuendo.

 

Delinquency, know what I mean, nudge nudge?

 

She also various and apparently-confirmatory quote snippet, in this case a comment by Dr. Laura Harris, HOPE VI evaluator in Memphis.  “[HOPE VI] became seen as a way to get rid of eyesores and attract rich people downtown.”

 

Ms. Harris is alluding to the income mixing within HOPE VI, which isn’t so much ‘attracting rich people downtown’ – Memphis has plenty of unsold riverfront condos for that – as trying to create, within the reborn neighborhood, a diversity of income that makes the new community integrated socioeconomically with its surrounding neighborhoods.  This parallels research being done by Laura Tach at Harvard, who’s also been studying the effect of public housing redevelopment (in her case, at a renovate-rebuild HOPE VI in the Northeast), which shows overwhelmingly that, memories of Easter-egg hunts notwithstanding, poverty-concentrated neighborhoods are terrible places:

 

Laura Tach

 

As she puts it early in the paper, we know that bad neighborhoods incubate troubled adults:

 

Neighborhood-level disadvantage is associated with a host of negative outcomes for individuals, including:

 

School drop-out and teenage childbearing (Crane 1991; Harding 2003, 2007)

Lower educational attainment (Ginther, Haveman, and Wolfe 2000; Cutler and Glaeser 1997)

Lower test scores (Brooks-Gunn et al. 1993; Turley 2003)

Criminal activity (Anderson 1990; Case and Katz 1991), and

Poorer mental health (Wheaton and Clarke 2003). 

 

What makes you think this is a bad neighborhood?

 

Not only the residents but also their neighbors suffer:

 

At the community level, high poverty neighborhoods also have:

 

Higher crime rates and more observable public disorder (Sampson and Groves 1989; Sampson and Raudenbush 1999)

Higher unemployment rates (Wilson 1996), and

Weaker institutional and political connections to the rest of the city (Bursik and Gramsick 1993). 

 

If concentrating poverty creates bad neighborhoods and bad citizens, then urban planning should emphasize deconcentrating poverty:

 

This evidence, coupled with mounting evidence that concentrated poverty became more pervasive between 1970 and 1990 (Wilson 1987; Jargowsky 1997), provided convincing evidence to policymakers and academics that poverty should be “deconcentrated.” 

 

The most direct example of this in housing is HOPE VI, which is in general the demolition and rebuilding of highly dense, very deeply concentrated legacy public housing.

 

Pre-HOPE VI public housing: Maverick Heights, Boston

 

There’s no question that uprooting residents in a HOPE VI redevelopment is complicated and traumatic, but there’s a wide range of possible interpretations of why residents feel disoriented [Well, wouldn’t you? – Ed; My point exactly – Auth.] and confused during and shortly after a HOPE VI transformation:

 

Phyllis Betts [sociologist and founding director of the Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action (CBANA) in the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Memphis – Ed.] told me that when she was interviewing residents leaving the housing projects, “they were under the impression they could move into the new developments on site.”  

 

Transformed into Maverick Landing, Boston

 

That impression, despite Ms. Rosin’s framing, was true.  They could.

 

Residents were asked to help name the new developments and consult on the architectural plans. Yet to move back in, residents had to meet strict criteria: if they were not seniors, they had to be working, or in school, or on disability.

 

A typical HOPE VI: Ashley Station in Columbus, OH

 

In other words, they had to be lease-compliant tenants, like everybody else.

 

Their children could not be delinquent in school.  Most public-housing residents were scared off by the criteria, or couldn’t meet them, or else they’d already moved and didn’t want to move again.

 

Forgive my lack of sympathy, being scared off sounds like an all-too-convenient excuse.  As for being unable to meet them, if the pre-renovation Dixie Homes was such a wonderful place, how did it tolerate non-compliant residents?  Or might it be simply that the public housing property was a convenient low-cost warehouse for the poor, a place to keep ‘‘those people’ out of sight as well as out of mind?

 

The new HOPE VI developments aimed to balance Section 8 and market-rate residents, but this generally hasn’t happened. In Memphis, the rate of former public-housing residents moving back in is 5 %.

 

Even by HOPE VI standards, that is an extremely low rate.  What happened to the others?

 

Where’d they go?

 

2.         Dispersing people doesn’t make things worse, it makes them visible

 

I can well believe that criminals who are able to move to better neighborhoods could (at least initially) increase their rate of robbery and burglary – there’s more valuable stuff to steal, and the local constabulary aren’t necessarily ready to deal with the new predators:

 

According to FBI data, America’s most dangerous spots are now places where Martin Scorsese would never think of staging a shoot-out—Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Reading, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee.

 

Mobility isn’t just a function of housing assistance, but also of things like cars, and cell phones:

 

“It used to be the criminal element was more confined,” said Larry Godwin, the police chief. “Now it’s all spread out. They might hit one area today and another tomorrow. We have to take a sophisticated look on a daily, hourly basis, or we might never get leverage on it.” For a police department facing a volatile situation, the bar graphs imposed some semblance of order.

 

The inner city, where crime used to be concentrated, was now clean. But everywhere else looked much worse: arrests had skyrocketed along two corridors north and west of the central city and along one in the southeast. Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city.

 

What seems indisputable is that, in Memphis at any rate, there is a clear correlation between Housing Choice Voucher recipients and new crime spots:

 

Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn’t been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis.

 

Phyllis Betts, University of Memphis

 

If police departments are usually stingy with their information, housing departments are even more so. Getting addresses of Section 8 holders is difficult, because the departments want to protect the residents’ privacy. Betts, however, helps the city track where the former residents of public housing have moved. Over time, she and Janikowski realized that they were doing their fieldwork in the same neighborhoods.

 

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section 8 rentals.  On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section 8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

 

3.         Deconcentrating public housing with vouchers gives people mobility – and they use it

 

For those of you not old enough to remember it, the desegregation fights of the 1960’s centered around two institutions: schools, and housing.  Of these, housing was the more fundamental, because school districts are geographic and school attendance is defined by where you live.  Keep ‘those people’ out of your neighborhood and you can keep them out of your school – unless the Federal government enforces intra-city busing, as it did in Boston and Memphis and dozens of other major cities around the United States.

 

The flashpoints for school and neighborhood desegregation were cities like Boston and Chicago, and thirty years ago Chicago – under a Federal court order – embarked on what even today is still the landmark experiment in deconcentrating poverty:

 

Starting in 1977, in what became known as the Gautreaux program, hundreds of families relocated to suburban neighborhoods—most of them about 25 miles from the ghetto, with very low poverty rates and good public schools.

 

The court had found that the pattern of assigning families to public housing amounted to racial discrimination (a finding reinforced, I should note, by a raft of explicit whites-only or blacks-only policies common in the 1930’s through late 1950’s all over the country). 

 

Memphis, mid-1950s: no blacks allowed in this one

 

To enable racial integration, therefore, the families were feed from the leash of a place-based housing assistance, and given the newly-minted vouchers to go find housing.  But everyone involved knew they would face challenges in finding homes, one of which would be racism-cloaked-as-credit-checking.  So they wanted the first families to be those that, race aside, would clearly be desirable tenants:

 

The authorities had screened the families carefully, inspecting their apartments and checking for good credit histories. They didn’t offer the vouchers to families with more than five children, or to those that were indifferent to leaving the projects. They were looking for families “seeking a healthy environment, good schools and an opportunity to live in a safe and decent home.”

 

Most people think Gautreaux worked:

 

A well-known Gautreaux study, released in 1991, showed spectacular results. The sociologist James Rosenbaum at Northwestern University had followed 114 families who had moved to the suburbs, although only 68 were still cooperating by the time he released the study. Compared to former public-housing residents who’d stayed within the city, the suburban dwellers were four times as likely to finish high school, twice as likely to attend college, and more likely to be employed. Newsweek called the program “stunning” and said the project renewed “one’s faith in the struggle.” In a glowing segment, a 60 Minutes reporter asked one Gautreaux boy what he wanted to be when he grew up. “I haven’t really made up my mind,” the boy said. “Construction worker, architect, anesthesiologist.” Another child’s mother declared it “the end of poverty” for her family.

 

Since then, there has been Gautreaux revisionism, as the scalability and reproducibility of Gautreaux’s results have been called into question:

 

Ed Goetz, a housing expert at the University of Minnesota, is creating a database of the follow-up research at different sites across the country, “to make sense of these very limited positive outcomes.” On the whole, he says, people don’t consistently report any health, education, or employment benefits. They are certainly no closer to leaving poverty. They tend to “feel better about their environments,” meaning they see less graffiti on the walls and fewer dealers on the streets. But just as strongly, they feel “a sense of isolation in their new communities.” His most surprising finding, he says, “is that they miss the old community.”

 

Edward Goetz, Minnesota

 

Professor Goetz’s findings aren’t so different from Laura Tach’s.  As I posted a while back:

 

Filtering Ms. Tach’s findings through the lens of my own experience with mixed-income affordable housing, we have two very different interpretive frames that derive from the very different personal paths newcomers and incumbents took to become neighbors:

 

 

We see what we expect to see, and when we move to a new neighborhood, it’s easy to see indifference and coldness verging on hostility, whereas the old stomping grounds are familiar, and therefore readily interpretable:

 

“For all of its faults, there was a tight network that existed. So what I’m trying to figure out is: Was this a bad theory of poverty? We were intending to help people climb out of poverty, but that hasn’t happened at all. Have we underestimated the role of support networks and overestimated the role of place?”

 

We probably have.  More on this below.  That’s not an argument against mobility, it’s an argument for increasing the transition support, both before and after the move.

 

When Nancy and I visited Ellis Island, aside from being enormously uplifted by the spectacle of hope and opportunity represented by such a portal of entry – unprecedented in world history – we were struck by how extensive were the support networks for the immigrants.  Long before they bought their one-way steamship tickets, they had scouted out relative, friends, countrymen in America.  Once arriving, and walking through the gates and into Manhattan, they had within a few miles established fully ethnic acclimation communities in a score of neighborhoods throughout the city. 

 

They cam with the clothes on their backs …

… and their knowledge, and their social networks

 

We see the same thing today, with Russian or Cambodian or Afghani or Somali expatriate communities that reach a gravitic cluster somewhere in the United States.  People migrate across great distances not as pioneers but as if being handed off, one to another, in a cultural bucket brigade.

 

Keep handing off

 

The value of decontracting poverty was embraced, twenty years after Gautreaux, in HOPE VI:

 

The federal government encouraged the demolitions with a $6.3 billion program to redevelop the old project sites, called HOPE VI, or “Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere.” 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.”

 

While elaborate efforts were made to create such a support network for Gautreaux recipients, in general with HOPE VI, it is lacking, because nobody thought it important.  Now that we have a decade’s experience, that postulate is becoming ever more plausible.  We help people out of rental and into homeownership.  When Hurricane Katrina hit, we helped Katrina refugees resettle into new lives (many of them very successfully).  Maybe we should also help them out of public housing and into the private market.

 

Don’t monkey around with my prejudices, okay?

 

Unfortunately, there is one social group readily able to adapt to new surroundings:

 

Much research has been done on the spread of gangs into the suburbs.

 

Coming to a suburb near you?

 

[Continued tomorrow in Part 3.]

 

 

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