[BretLudwig]

Section 8 Housing and the Gathering Storm of Crime

By Ian Jobling €¢ 6/23/08

"The Atlantic just published a superb article by Hanna Rosin about how
1990s efforts to move public housing recipients out of the inner city
have
resulted in an explosion of crime in neighborhoods to which former ghetto
dwellers relocated in large numbers. During the Clinton administration,
many cities tore down old crime-infested projects and gave their
residents
€œSection 8€� housing vouchers that they could use where they wished.
Also, cities built spiffy new projects away from the inner city. The end
result of these policies may be a massive increase in crime, rather than
the decrease liberals hoped for, however.

The new discovery about crime patterns is substantially owing to a
collaboration between crime expert Richard Janikowski and his wife,
Phyllis Betts, an expert in public housing. The two examined patterns of
crime in Memphis.

Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Bettss
map of Section8 rentals€¦ On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas
are shaded dark blue, and Section8 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.

The new suburban housing projects do not seem to have cured public
housing
recipients of their old ways. Rosin interviewed Leslie Shaw, a black
woman
€œ11 years crack free,€� who left her old inner-city project, Dixie
Homes, after it was demolished in 1997 and moved to a suburban project
called Springdale Creek. Shaw had been delighted to hear that the new
project was a gated community and hoped her standard of living would
improve there.

But slowly, she told me, Springdale Creek has started to feel less
like a suburban paradise and more like Dixie Homes. Neighborhood boys
often kick open the gate or break the keypad. Many nights they just
randomly press phone numbers until someone lets them in. The gates
main
use seems to be as a sort of low-thrills ride for younger kids whose
parents arent paying attention. They hang from the gate as it slides
open; a few have gotten their fingers caught and had to be taken to the
emergency room.

When Shaw recounts all the bad things that have happened at
Springdale
Creek, she does it matter-of-factly (even as a grandma, she says, €œI
can
jump those boys if I have to€�). Car thefts were common at
first€”Shaws neighbor Laura Evans is one of about 10 victims in the
past two years. Thieves have relieved the apartment management company of
some of its computers, extra refrigerators, and spare stoves. A few Dixie
boys€”sons of one of Shaws friends€”were suspected of breaking the
windows in vacant apartments. Last year, somebody hit a pregnant woman in
the head with a brick. In the summer, a neighborhood kid chased his
girlfriends car, shooting at her as she drove toward the gate; the
cops, who are called in regularly for one reason or another, collected
the
spent shells on the grass. €œYou know, you move from one place to
another
and you bring the element with you,€� said Evans, who stopped by
Shaws
apartment while I was there. €œYou got some trying to make it just like
the projects.€�

Memphis is not unique in this respect. University of Louisville
criminologist Geetha Suresh has noticed the same pattern:

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: €œCrime is going along with
them.€� Except for being hand-drawn, Sureshs map matching housing
patterns with crime looks exactly like Janikowski and Bettss.

The exportation of public housing recipients has actually led to
increases
in crime in some cities because local police departments, used to low
crime, are unprepared to deal with the influx of ghetto dwellers:

Much research has been done on the spread of gangs into the suburbs.
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, 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 €œmigrant gangs€� from the housing projects, and many departments
seemed wholly unprepared to respond.

Moreover, spreading out welfare recipients results in an increase in the
number of neighborhoods susceptible to serious social disorder:

Since 1990, the number of Americans living in neighborhoods of
concentrated poverty€”meaning that at least 40 percent of households are
below the federal poverty level€”has declined by 24 percent. But this
doesnt 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 €œA Cautionary Tale.€�
While
fewer Americans live in high-poverty neighborhoods, increasing numbers
now
live in places with €œmoderate€� poverty rates, meaning rates of 20 to
40 percent. 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.

Consequently, many previously peaceful cities are now experiencing
unprecedented crime waves. Some crime experts see this phenomenon as the
front of a €œgathering storm.€�

Lately, though, a new and unexpected pattern has emerged, taking
criminologists by surprise. While crime rates in large cities stayed
flat,
homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between
500,000
and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20percent a
year.
In 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group
surveying cities from coast to coast, concluded in a report called €œA
Gathering Storm€� that this might represent €œthe front end €¦ of an
epidemic of violence not seen for years.€� The leaders of the group,
which is made up of police chiefs and sheriffs, theorized about what
might
be spurring the latest crime wave: the spread of gangs, the masses of
offenders coming out of prison, methamphetamines. But mostly they puzzled
over the bleak new landscape. According to FBI data, Americas 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.

My sympathies go out to all readers in these new crime hotspots, which
are
getting a painful lesson in racial reality."

http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5046

http://inverted-world.com/index.php/...torm_of_crime/

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