The Atlantic has a fascinating article on the effects of demolishing housing projects (HP) and pushing Section 8 (S8) housing.
The bottom line is this:
1. HP neighborhoods were violent crime hot spots since their inception
2. In a way of thinking similar to the whole public school busing fiasco, the thought was that what poor & violent (P&V) people needed to no longer be P&V was to live next to people who
weren't P&V.
3. Thus came the Fed -subsidized S8 housing blitz, where HPs were demolished and their residents sent packing bearing vouchers for rent.
4. This dispersal disrupted the gangs and criminal element to an extent...for a time.
5. Violent crime in downtown & inner cities plummeted in large metro areas like NYC & LA, as their P&V went to the burbs.
6. Over a few years time, the violent crime rates in mid-sized cities & suburbs started to rise
7. Which was a product of gangs & such acclimating to the new environemnts
The Atlantic article is heavy on human interest and light on the data, despite the data existing and driving the discovery of the phenomenon. Too much lit-crit & not enough stats on the part of the author's education.
Also, quite a bit of mincing verbiage & beating around the bush while trying to tell facts to minority policritters who would rather ignore them .
Long, but well worth the read:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crimeA snippet:
About five years ago, Janikowski embarked on a more ambitious project. Hed built up enough trust with the police to get them to send him daily crime and arrest reports, including addresses and types of crime. He began mapping all violent and property crimes, block by block, across the city. These cops on the streets were saying that crime patterns are changing, he said, so he wanted to look into it.
When his map was complete, a clear if strangely shaped pattern emerged: Wait a minute, he recalled thinking. I see this bunny rabbit coming up. People are going to accuse me of being on shrooms! 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 (the bunny rabbits ears) and along one in the southeast (the tail). 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.
Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadnt been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts and Janikowski have two dogs, three cats, and no kids; they both tend to bring their work home with them. Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city governments most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the citys public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal Section8 rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.
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 Bettss map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe ( He has a better imagination, she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. 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.
