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 “Section 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 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.

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 “11 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 gate’s main use seems to be as a sort of low-thrills ride for younger kids whose parents aren’t 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, “I can jump those boys if I have to”). Car thefts were common at first—Shaw’s 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 Shaw’s 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 girlfriend’s 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. “You know, you move from one place to another and you bring the element with you,” said Evans, who stopped by Shaw’s apartment while I was there. “You 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: “Crime is going along with them.” Except for being hand-drawn, Suresh’s map matching housing patterns with crime looks exactly like Janikowski and Betts’s.

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 “migrant 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 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.

Consequently, many previously peaceful cities are now experiencing unprecedented crime waves. Some crime experts see this phenomenon as the front of a “gathering 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 “A Gathering Storm” that this might represent “the 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, 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.

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

If you want this article to be exposed to a wide audience, take the time to recommend it at digg. Millions of readers traffic the site, and the more recommendations an article gets, the better its chance of being read. If you don't have digg account yet, registration is easy. Just click submit to get started.

Click here to join the Inverted World mailing list. You'll get an e-mail notice whenever IW publishes new entries.

Name:

E-mail (optional):

You can use HTML in your comments. Use these tips to make including HTML easier.

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?