Atlantic Mag: Public Housing Demos Cause Crime Spike
June 30th, 2008 by Dan Lavoie
A piece in the July issue of The Atlantic is stirring up quite a controversy. In “American Murder Mystery,” journalist Hanna Rosin tries to find the root cause behind the crime spikes in many of the nation’s mid-sized cities.
Her controversial culprit: the demolition of public housing and the spread of those using Section 8 vouchers out into other neighborhoods.
The article focuses largely on the surge of violence in Memphis, Tenn., and the findings of two married University of Memphis researchers — Richard Janikowski, a criminologist who had been tracking emerging crime patterns in the city, and his wife, Phyllis Betts, a housing expert who had been evaluating where residents went after the city demolished its public-housing projects.
Over dinner conversations, the couple realized the geography of their work was overlapping. They wondered if it was more than a coincidence.
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 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.
Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country. Eventually, they thought, they’d find other researchers who connected the dots the way they had, and then maybe they could get city leaders, and even national leaders, to listen.
The piece generated a fascinating back and forth on NPR’s new morning show The Takeaway today. The show’s host interviewed both Hanna Rosin and Xavier de Souza Briggs, an MIT professor of sociology and urban planning, to rebut Ms. Rosin. It’s definitely worth a listen.
Also, you can watch researcher Phyllis Betts talk about her findings in Memphis:
Tags: affordable housing, crime, media, public housing, the atlantic, urban agenda, urban policy
June 30th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
As you can imagine this story has ruffled the feathers of many in the affordable housing world, mine included. Not a week goes by when I don’t get a call at my day job (www.clccrul.org) from a Housing Choice Voucher holder who has been illegally discriminated against while seeking housing, having been turned away based on their race, familial status, or source of income (a protected class in Chicago and a handful of other places, but not Memphis). Below is the text of an e-mail I sent to the editors of The Atlantic:
Dear Editors,
in “American Murder Mystery” Hana Rosin neglects to mention one of the largest factors influencing the lives of Housing Choice Voucher holders who are thrust into the private market - illegal (and sometimes legal) discrimination. The vast majority of Voucher holders are African American and they are disproportionally disabled and single mothers. Race, familial status, and disability-based discrimination are the most frequently occurring forms of housing discrimination. When you add into the mix that landlords in Memphis and its suburbs can legally discriminate against a prospective tenant based on their source of income (such as a Housing Choice Voucher), the picture for a family seeking an affordable apartment in a decent neighborhood becomes awfully bleak. Tack on the prejudices that most hold about those who previously lived in public housing and the picture is downright depressing. How many landlords do you think there are that will willingly rent to disabled, African American single moms who are former residents of public housing? And, for those handful of landlords who will willingly rent to these families, where do you think their apartments are located?
Housing discrimination plays an enormous role in our now mostly voucher-based public housing system. If we expect tenants to be successful in the private market, they need support and training but also the opportunity to fully participate in that market. Otherwise, HUD should re-name their “Housing Choice Voucher” as the “Crappy Apartment in a High Crime Neighborhood Voucher”.
Sincerely,
Justin Massa
executive director
MoveSmart.org
June 30th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Glad to see you sent that letter, Justin. This was quite a hot topic on a number of the blogs I read and podcasts I listen to, as well. If you haven’t listened to the interview from this morning’s The Takeaway, take a few minutes to do it. Clearly, behind the scenes the producers of the show thought the Atlantic piece was nonsense. So, they had Hanna Rosin on and really laid into her — pushing back on her premise very hard. That is rare in the comity-filled world of big-time journalism. It’s a really interesting listen — and Xavier de Souza Briggs gives some much-needed perspective to the controversy.
(As a sidenote, The Takeaway is a new product of WNYC, New York’s public radio station, as well as a few other media types like the NYT and BBC. After a rocky start a few weeks ago, the show is really coming into its own. It’s like Morning Edition if it went off it’s ADD drugs. This morning, they interviewed two regular guys named Wally to get their reviews of the new Pixar film Wall-E. The show is weird, irreverant and sometimes straight-up rude to its guests….but I’m really growing to love it. Check it out at http://www.TheTakewaway.org)
June 30th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
I meant http://www.TheTakeaway.org. It helps to spell things right.
July 1st, 2008 at 8:14 am
The interview on The Takeaway (which someone turned me onto last week and I’ve been loving) is interesting, but I was a bit disappointed that Briggs didn’t raise the issue of discrimination. One of our board members frequently says that with along with racial and ethnic integration comes a more equal distribution of the “hard to house” - families who need lots of support and scaffolding. When discrimination leads to concentrated poverty, community structures in those neighborhoods are overburdened and most times unable to deal with the sheer numbers of families who might benefit from their assistance. That process of “discrimination (and other factors) -> concentrated poverty -> increased crime” is where I was hoping both The Atlantic article and responses to it would have focused.
July 1st, 2008 at 1:50 pm
The Rosin article is a sensationalized, and perhaps deliberately deceptive, piece of “journalism.” There are a lot of problems with the article, but the 2 most basic are:
1. The article creates the impression that the movement of low income households in Memphis was the result of some grand liberal social experiment, suggesting it had something to do with Gautreaux or MTO, when in fact neither had anything to do with Memphis. The article is actually about HOPE VI, the latest generation of urban renewal. In Memphis, as in other cities, public housing families were involuntarily displaced from demolished projects. You have to read the article very carefully to discern that they didn’t move as part of a Gautreaux-type voluntary mobility program, and were relocated to declining city neighborhoods, not the suburbs. HOPE VI should be critiqued for doing relocation “on the cheap.” But there is nothing particularly new or noteworthy about the fact that low income families, when displaced by urban renewal projects, move into the next ring of vulnerable minority neighborhoods.
2. The reporter violates the first rule we all learned in Soc 101 — correlation does not prove causation. There isn’t any data, much less peer reviewed research, from Memphis that shows the movement of the displaced families into the identified neighborhoods “caused” an increase in crime. A more plausible explanation is that the displaced families moved into areas that were already economically declining (that is why the landlords were willing to accept their vouchers) and where crime was on the increase. Certainly the idea that crime rates are higher in poor or declining neighborhoods is no news flash.
July 1st, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Great points, Barbara. There is a song by the band Soul Coughing with the recurring line: “correlation is not causation.” It kept bouncing through my head the entire time I read the piece. I was similarly struck by the somewhat facile argument that underlaid the entire article. I still think it was an interesting piece and one worth reading, but it seemed to me to be kind of faux-contrarian.
July 10th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Justin Massa is right that discrimination is a primary issue, but I find it curious that he goes on to say that “If we expect tenants to be successful in the private market, they need support and training but also the opportunity to fully participate in that market.”
My take on this is that it is those in the private market that require training, especially in terms of notions on community, equity, economics, etc. In New Orleans, a Landlords Association has made it clear that they have overwhelming agreed to not accept Section 8 vouchers. The HOPE VI redevelopment of the city’s public housing projects is such that only a small percentage of former residents will be able to return.
These neighborhoods are increasingly referred to as ‘concentrations of poverty’, yet here in New Orleans it is the very same neighborhoods that have provided the bulk of the music and cultural production activities that the city and its tourism industry relies upon…and is providing the most significant contribution to the city’s ongoing recovery…..with this in mind, many of us here view the Magnolia, Calliope, LaFitte and other neighborhoods as ‘concentrations of creativity’, embodying the ‘improvisational impulse’ the city is so renowned for……
The Atlantic article highlighted in a very big way the abuses of the private market and HOPE VI has always been of more benefit to real estate developers than it has ever been to residents of public housing. It seems to have been (exclusively) designed that way. Way too many folks have been cheerleaders for HOPE VI than the program ever, ever deserved.
Katerine Silbaugh offers some more perspective on the subject in WOMEN’S PLACE: URBAN PLANNING, HOUSING DESIGN, AND WORK-FAMILY BALANCE, Fordham Law Review, (2007), and I would also highly recommend Loic Wacquant’s recent “Urban Outcasts, A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality”.
No amount of training for America’s public housing residents will overcome the structural barriers presented by the nation’s increasingly dysfunctional and exclusionary economic system and the destabilizing of the wage labor sector…..
I would also recommend Martin Hess’ 2004 piece titled, ‘Spatial’ relationships? Towards a reconceptualization of embeddedness, for the journal Progress in Human Geography, in which he writes,
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“Activities that began as social i.e. of a non-market economy with their forms of reciprocal and redistributive exchange, were constituted on the basis of shared values and norms that had their roots in social and cultural bonds rather than monetary goals, societies based on market exchange reflect only those underlying values and norms that consider price. They do not recognize any other obligations. Therefore, Polanyi conceived market economies as disembedded from the social-structural and cultural-structural elements of society.
…… while historically preceding economies were embedded in society and its social and cultural foundations, Polanyi argues that modern market economies are not only disembedded, but ‘instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system’ (Polanyi, 1944:57)
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This is the crux of the matter and expecting public housing residents and other of our nation’s citizens at the bottom of the economic ladder to engage in ‘training’ to learn how to deal with this is as ineffectual as the system that has imprisoned them at the bottom….