Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from the previous Part 1 and Part 2.]

 

So far, in deconstructing the lengthy Atlantic article about deconcentrating poverty by demolishing public housing and giving residents economic mobility, an article whose premises I find somewhere between flawed and offensive, although they are unstated, indirect, and hard-to-pin-down. 

 

Cough up that theory now, there’s a good lad

 

For instance:

 

If replacing housing projects with vouchers had achieved its main goal—infusing the poor with middle-class habits—then higher crime rates might be a price worth paying.

 

Is it really worth it?

 

Notwithstanding Ms. Rosin’s assumption, that wasn’t the main purpose of converting public housing to vouchers.  In fact, the purpose was simply to replace decrepit substandard housing that people are sent to, with market-quality housing that people choose.  Deconcentrating poverty by allowing people economic mobility is also seen as a racial desegregation tool, and a potential behavioral modifier, but first and foremost, the goal was better housing. 

 

Ms. Rosin presents neither evidence nor argument to suggest that moving people out of public housing causes an increase in overall crime, just its relocation from ghetto to suburb.  She thus seems unconsciously to be agreeing with the proposition that if ‘‘those people’ are committing crimes upon each other, where we cannot see them, then we should not care.

 

Jeff Rojek, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina, issued a report in 2006 showing that serious gang activity had spread to eight suburban counties around the state [South Carolina, that is – Ed.], including Florence County, home to the city of Florence, which was ranked the most violent place in America the year after Memphis was. In his fieldwork, he said, the police complained of “migrant gangs” from the housing projects, and many departments seemed wholly unprepared to respond.

 

It took me three readings of Ms. Rosin’s article to realize the slippery correlation expressed here.  In an article about giving people housing mobility, she has now cited evidence from people who are mobile despite being housed in the concentrated public housing projects, where “at least the police had the address,” as she put it in a revealing phrase early in her piece.

 

How does the presence of housing-project gangs argue that one should not deconcentrate poverty by demolishing and restructuring bad public housing projects?

 

Looking for logic?

 

If Memphis is violent because it demolished its housing projects, why is Florence violent when it hasn’t?

 

That does not compute

 

After the first wave of housing-project demolition in Memphis, in 1997, crime spread out, but did not immediately increase. (It takes time for criminals to make new connections and to develop “comfort zones,” [Memphis Professor of Criminology Richard] Janikowski told me.) But in 2005, another wave of project demolitions pushed the number of people displaced from public housing to well over 20,000, and crime skyrocketed. Janikowski felt there were deep structural issues behind the increase, ones that the city was not prepared to handle. Old gangs—the Gangster Disciples and the LeMoyne Gardens gang—had long since re-formed and gotten comfortable. Ex-convicts recently released from prison had taken up residence with girlfriends or wives or families who’d moved to the new neighborhoods.

 

Back in 1983, when it was possible to resyndicate existing affordable properties using accruing secondary financing, I was in Memphis with my developer client looking at HUD properties, one of which was located adjacent to a troubled public housing property.  My developer client was musing that he’d been in discussions with the housing authority about taking over ownership or management of the public housing project, in a kind of neighborhood self-defense.  In the meantime, he was installing a new steel fence was being installed around our prospective property (which his company owned and managed), together with a security-guard-manned gate.  A couple of weeks earlier, he’d been called late at night by his manager, because his property was on television.  Out of the complex’s 200 family apartments, only 12 had male heads of household, yet with lots of male overnight guests (in lease terms).  One such gentleman, irate that his girlfriend was playing host to another fellow, had rammed his car through the building wall into her apartment, attracting helicopter television crews.  So now the complex was paying for 24-hour security and putting in a car-proof fence.

 

“Sounds like you’re running a low-security day-release prison,” I said with my usual grace, and Frank agreed. 

 

A day out of prison, back in the bad old days

 

In the quarter-century since then, he and I have occasionally returned ruefully to that turn of phrase, which gets truer each time we revisit it.

 

4.         The problem is not the subsidy, it’s the recipients

 

Earlier this year, Betts presented her findings to city leaders, including Robert Lipscomb, the head of the Memphis Housing Authority. From what Lipscomb said to me, he’s still not moved. “You’ve already marginalized people and told them they have to move out,” he told me irritably [Sic: impatiently – Ed.], just as he’s told Betts.  “Now you’re saying they moved somewhere else and created all these problems? That’s a really, really unfair assessment.”

 

Robert Lipscomb, irritated or impatient?

 

Once again, what Ms. Rosin thinks is left for others to deduce.  She herself skips away from the thesis that her entire article wants us to embrace:

 

Nobody would claim vouchers, or any single factor, as the sole cause of rising crime.

 

Well, is crime rising?  Or is it just being shifted, and becoming more visible? 

 

Crime did not rise in every city where housing projects came down.

 

Is there any correlation at all, therefore?  Or is it just one correlation, one data point that itself could be the confluence of multiple factors?

 

In cities where it did, many factors contributed: unemployment, gangs, rapid gentrification that dislocated tens of thousands of poor people not living in the projects. Still, researchers around the country are seeing the same basic pattern: projects coming down in inner cities and crime pushing outward, in many cases destabilizing cities or their surrounding areas.

 

Another case of what I call Zoroastrian logic: A happened, and B happened, therefore A caused B.  Very popular with journalists, as it can be used to imply anything. 

 

I read David’s blog post.  I earned money at work.

Therefore reading David’s blog post at work makes me money

 

“You’re putting a big burden on people who have been too burdened already, and to me that’s, quote-unquote, criminal.” To Lipscomb, what matters is sending people who lived in public housing the message that “they can be successful, they can go to work and have kids who go to school. They can be self-sufficient and reach for the middle class.”

 

That’s the dream, that’s the vision.  Whether it’s worked is at best clouded. 

 

But today, social scientists looking back on the whole grand experiment [of vouchering – Ed.] are apt to use words like baffling and disappointing. A large federal-government study conducted over the past decade—a follow-up to the highly positive, highly publicized Gautreaux study of 1991—produced results that were “puzzling,” said Susan Popkin of the Urban Institute. In this study, volunteers were also moved into low-poverty neighborhoods, although they didn’t move nearly as far as the Gautreaux families. Women reported lower levels of obesity and depression. But they were no more likely to find jobs. The schools were not much better, and children were no more likely to stay in them.

 

Another data point, a bit harder to interpret in the absence of knowing what neighborhoods, with what context.  Further strengthens the presumption that we need not just mobility and relocation but also training for employment and integration into a wider economic society.

 

One recent study publicized by HUD warned that policy makers should lower their expectations, because voucher recipients seemed not to be spreading out, as they had hoped, but clustering together.

 

The Law of Economic Gravity: income concentration is economically rational.  Vouchers are capped at rents equal to the 45th percentile – that is, slightly below median income.  This means that 55% of all apartments are economically out of reach.  Those that are in reach will tend to be in neighborhoods, not randomly dispersed.  Further, about half of all landlords refuse to take vouchers, not necessarily on racial or classist grounds, but rather because they don’t like the HUD paperwork (a valid concern) or are worried about a resident whose rent-paying power could cease (another valid concern). 

The result is that only about one-quarter of a metro area’s apartments are truly available for voucher holders.  Guess what – they concentrate!

 

 

[George Galster of Wayne State] theorizes that every neighborhood has its tipping point—a threshold well below a 40% poverty rate—beyond which crime explodes and other severe social problems set in.

 

There goes the neighborhood

 

While I wouldn’t use a phrase like ‘crime explosion’ (and wonder whether Mr. Galster would use it himself, or whether that’s the author’s paraphrase), my personal rule of thumb, applied at the property level, is tipping at 25%.  Once 25% of the residents in a property are supported by deep income subsidy (like Section 8), then you have to give all the remaining residents a rent discount (or an income subsidy) to prevent a rolling vacancy that converts the property to 100% deep income-targeted.  The same finding has emerged from HOPE VI, where the ‘formerly public housing’ apartments (as they are called) are normally limited to about a quarter of the total.

 

The “Gathering Storm” report that worried over an upcoming epidemic of violence was inspired by a call from the police chief of Louisville, Kentucky, who’d seen crime rising regionally and wondered what was going on. Simultaneously, the University of Louisville criminologist Geetha Suresh was tracking local patterns of violent crime. She had begun her work years before, going blind into the research: she had just arrived from India, had never heard of a housing project, had no idea which were the bad parts of town, and was clueless about the finer points of American racial sensitivities. In her research, Suresh noticed a recurring pattern, one that emerged first in the late 1990s, then again around 2002. A particularly violent neighborhood would suddenly go cold, and crime would heat up in several new neighborhoods. In each case, Suresh has now confirmed, the first hot spots were the neighborhoods around huge housing projects, and the later ones were places where people had moved when the projects were torn down. From that, she drew the obvious conclusion: “Crime is going along with them.” Except for being hand-drawn, Suresh’s map matching housing patterns with crime looks exactly like Janikowski and Betts’s.

 

I buy that – public housing has historically been the limited-security day-release prison of America’s underclass. 

 

What makes an underclass, and will relocating them make any difference?

 

Bringing our culture with us

 

[Concluded tomorrow in Part 4.]

 

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