American Murder Mystery - The Atlantic

American Murder Mystery - The Atlantic

Hannah Rosin, writing in 2008, about the impact of Section 8 housing subsidies on crime patterns.

"According to FBI data, America's 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....

"Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government's most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city's 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....

"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."

"If replacing housing projects with vouchers had achieved its main goal--infusing the poor with middle-class habits--then higher crime rates might be a price worth paying. But today, social scientists looking back on the whole grand experiment are apt to use words like baffling and disappointing.... The best Popkin can say is: 'It has not lived up to its promise. It has not lifted people out of poverty, it has not made them self-sufficient, and it has left a lot of people behind.'...

"[Ed Goetz]'s most surprising finding, he says, 'is that they miss the old community. For all of its faults, there was a tight network that existed. So what I'm trying to figure out is: Was this a bad theory of poverty? We were intending to help people climb out of poverty, but that hasn't happened at all. Have we underestimated the role of support networks and overestimated the role of place?'"