As our nation's big cities have broken up public housing projects and dispersed low income renters throughout the Section 8 housing program reforms of the 1990s, many people - particularly those on the "ghetto culture produces criminal pathologies" right - assumed that crime rates would begin to decline across the nation. And based on the early evidence, it looks like they did. Sort of. But in some places the crime followed the people, and now people are starting to wonder why.
I'll give you one answer: poverty. Dispersing the people through Section 8 changed their living situations, but it often didn't do much for their economic ones. And although this really should go without saying, apparently it does not: poor people, no matter where they are living, are much more likely to commit crime than people who are well off. Culture matters, no doubt, but it doesn't act alone.
Andrew Sullivan calls it a "case study in unintended consequences," and although I suppose that's technically true, it sounds like its saying something interesting when it is really saying something very mundane. Why? Because assuming that you knew enough to recognize that crime wasn't just the result of culture, this was an entirely foreseeable outcome. In fact, even if you did foolishly believe that, you still should have seen it coming, unless you were deluded enough to think that by virtue of moving to the suburbs people would magically transform their behaviors and become something much closer to model citizens almost overnight.
This isn't my area of expertise, but I've done enough work in the area to know that over the course of the second half of the 20th century, virtually all of our efforts to "reform" welfare have had two contradictory goals: reducing spending and reducing poverty. But doing both simultaneously is virtually impossible, a lesson that we should have learned clearly in the aftermath of the 1996 welfare reforms. In the end, it costs more to provide someone with the services necessary for them to get back to work than it does to simply send them a check. Over the long run, if you do it right you can end up saving an enormous amount of money, but in the beginning you see a huge increase in costs. And that's where the problems start.
This might have been unintended, but it should have been foreseen. And my guess is, had we not been so enamored with the idea that "those people" and "their culture" were our only problem, we might have foreseen it and done something about it.
Anyway, all of that is a very roundabout way of recommending Hanna Rosin's new piece in the Atlantic. Here's a small taste:
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 percent of households are below the federal poverty level--has declined by 24percent. 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 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.
Studies show that recipients of Section8 vouchers have tended to choose moderately poor neighborhoods that were already on the decline, not low-poverty neighborhoods. 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. Galster theorizes that every neighborhood has its tipping point--a threshold well below a 40 percent poverty rate--beyond which crime explodes and other severe social problems set in. Pushing a greater number of neighborhoods past that tipping point is likely to produce more total crime. In 2003, the Brookings Institution published a list of the 15 cities where the number of high-poverty neighborhoods had declined the most. In recent years, most of those cities have also shown up as among the most violent in the U.S., according to FBI data....Nobody would claim vouchers, or any single factor, as the sole cause of rising crime. Crime did not rise in every city where housing projects came down. 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. Dennis Rosenbaum, a criminologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me that after the high-rises came down in Chicago, suburbs to the south and west--including formerly quiet ones--began to see spikes in crime; nearby Maywood's murder rate has nearly doubled in the past two years. In Atlanta, which almost always makes the top-10 crime list, crime is now scattered widely, just as it is in Memphis and Louisville.
In some places, the phenomenon is hard to detect, but there may be a simple reason: in cities with tight housing markets, Section8 recipients generally can't afford to live within the city limits, and sometimes they even move to different states. New York, where the rate of violent crime has plummeted, appears to have pushed many of its poor out to New Jersey, where violent crime has increased in nearby cities and suburbs. Washington, D.C., has exported some of its crime to surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia.
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