Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from the previous Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.]

 

Correlation, as we have drummed into our heads in logic class, is not causation, though it definitely has meaning.  Hanna Rosin’s lengthy Atlantic article about the correlation between increased inner-ring suburban crime and the dispersal of formerly public housing residents via vouchers after demolition assembles a meaningful set of examples showing that, yea verily, when you move people who had been living in family public housing, crime goes with them.

 

Now, you criminals just stay on your side of the yellow tape, okay?

 

Who lives in family public housing?  As it is the housing of last resort (and many of its administrators think of it in those terms), in general it is the poorest of the poor.  In America, people who are extremely poor are economically impaired.  Economic impairment comes from many things:

 

Age (which we can exclude from consideration here, since most elderly public housing is separated from family)

Mental illness

Substance abuse

Illegality (people who must conceal themselves from the formal system)

Unwed motherhood

 

It’s one thing to be under-educated and single; it’s quite another to have a small baby (or two, or three) at home.  If you’re nineteen and are mothering a newborn, you’re not likely to be viable in the work force.  Conversely, if you’re a young father not married to your child’s mother, and you’re involved with illegal activities, you have multiple incentives not to marry her, including the convenience of an undocumented, no-questions-asked pied-a-terre in her apartment.

 

If only it were as few as 20,000

 

Fixing poverty isn’t just about allowing people to move; it’s about cracking a complex web of dependencies.

 

In the most literal sense, the national effort to diffuse poverty has succeeded. Since 1990, the number of Americans living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty—meaning that at least 40% of households are below the federal poverty level—has declined by 24%. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. Recently, the housing expert George Galster, of Wayne State University, analyzed the shifts in urban poverty and published his results in a paper called “A Cautionary Tale.”  While fewer Americans live in high-poverty neighborhoods, increasing numbers now live in places with “moderate” poverty rates, meaning rates of 20 to 40%.

 

Yes, that’s what happens – if you take the same number of poor people and simply relocate them, then more places will have some poor people and fewer will have all the poor people.

 

This pattern is not necessarily better, either for poor people trying to break away from bad neighborhoods or for cities, Galster explains. His paper compares two scenarios: a city split into high-poverty and low-poverty areas, and a city dominated by median-poverty ones. The latter arrangement is likely to produce more bad neighborhoods and more total crime, he concludes, based on a computer model of how social dysfunction spreads.

 

Galster’s working on his models

 

I suspect Professor Galster is working with a version of the Law of the Observant Herd, on an infectious theory of criminality.  What’s clear is that just moving somebody doesn’t make them better; it creates the opportunity for a person to be better – and that requires the person to notice the opportunity.

 

5.         You don’t change the habits of a lifetime just by a single move

 

Even though you are what you live in, the habits of a lifetime take more than a move to break:

 

In my visits with former Dixie Homes tenants who’d moved around the city, I came across the same mix of reactions that researchers had found. The residents who had always been intent on moving out of Dixie Homes anyway seemed to be thriving.

 

After all that has gone before, this is an enormous statement.  The purpose of vouchering out public housing was never ipso facto to eliminate poverty; rather, it was to give people trapped in wretched housing circumstances a chance for a better life.  If the only thing public housing deconcentration does is liberate those who want liberation, that by itself is an achievement: one to build upon.

 

Those who’d been pushed out against their will, which was the vast majority, seemed dislocated and ill at ease.

 

Nobody got pushed out against his or her will.  Residents had a right to return if they met lease-compliance terms.

 

But I also met La Sasha Rodgers, who was 19 when Dixie was torn down (now she’s 21). “A lot of people thought it was bad, because they didn’t live there,” she told me. “But it was like one big family. It felt like home. If I could move back now, the way it was, I would.”

 

As I’ve written elsewhere, a slum is a community, with its internally organized rules and laws.  Order is imposed, albeit usually by force not by law. 

 

Do what we say and nobody gets hurt

 

The social services Betts is recommending did not lift masses of people out of poverty in the projects.

 

My experience with public housing leads me to question whether the services were provided, or provided well.  Most housing authorities I know are underfunded, even being systematically starved, and hence understaffed.

 

The problems of poverty run so deep that we’re unlikely to know the answer for a generation. Social scientists tracking people who are trying to improve their lives often talk about a “weathering effect,” the wearing-down that happens as a lifetime of baggage accumulates. With poor people, the drag is strong, even if they haven’t lived in poverty for long. Kids who leave poor neighborhoods at a young age still have trouble keeping up with their peers, studies show. They catch up for a while and then, after a few years, slip back. Truly escaping poverty seems to require a will as strong as a spy’s: you have to disappear to a strange land, forget where you came from, and ignore the suspicions of everyone around you. Otherwise, you can easily find yourself right back where you started.

 

That is lovely, eloquent writing, and sound analysis.  But if so, and if we know that concentration in bad housing adds to it, should we not start with that as a first action? 

 

Conclusion

 

The only virtue of concentrating poverty is political avoidance.  By warehousing the poor in what was once ‘decent, safe, and sanitary’ housing, we can claim to have addressed their needs even as we conveniently can overlook ‘those people’ in our midst.

 

Cabrini-Green: might as well be prison

 

Dispersing the poor is good for the poor.  Maybe it’s not enough – some people never cope with leaving, at least not without help.  Maybe it creates new challenges for immigrant communities (as, throughout history, immigrants arriving in any community have created challenges).  Then maybe those are challenges we had better tackle, rather than wistfully imagining people were happier in their public housing ghettos.

 

“Publish and be damned.”

The Duke of Wellington

 

I’ll be damned if I read a blog

 

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