Aside from, presumably, more direct experience with crime? Because housing projects do have higher crime rates, right?
It seems there may be some context missing here. Aside from the clear title, I had difficult teasing out the value in this story.
The behaviors that I witnessed, that my parents witnessed, cannot be explained economically, because the immigrant families that lived there (Eastern Europeans, Middle Easterners, and some Russians) simply didn't exhibit these same "defective characteristics" or behaviors, even though we were just as poor (and learning a new language) - it was almost exclusively from the native population that had lived there before we arrived.
This indicates that the problem is either cultural, or something else. How do you fix the culture? That I don't know.
Long story short, I don't agree with "government is the problem, government is the solution". Low culture and standards are the problem. High culture and standards are the solution. Regardless of neighborhood or income.
I think we do education all wrong. 12 years of education should leave you in a position to feed and house yourself. If it can't do that, why bother with it? I say more trade schools, less focus on college prep.
Example:
I bought a house that is essentially right on the line between the wealthy and poor areas in my town. If you go to the Wallmart on the poor side the carts are just left everywhere but the Wegmans on the wealthy side the patrons bother to put them away.
I will say that I do kind of get what you mean (in that there may be unique problems with concentrated poverty that hinder mobility -- as a theoretical, for instance, if crime was a much bigger problem in impoverished areas, that definitely would be of concern). But too much of the low quality articles written on poverty have a high tendency to fall back on stereotype... we must be careful to be more data oriented.
Personally, I don't think this story was one of those political type stories you often see on this type of subject that fall back on well-worn tropes. This was a study that simply tried to examine whether subsidized housing helps out future household earnings. For many groups, it did. For a few groups, it didn't. In light of the issues with social mobility in America at present, I didn't consider the article that low quality personally.
The original study probably would have been a fair bit more enlightening and hopefully had a much more thorough analysis: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22721?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_mediu...
But unfortunately it's behind a paywall. :|
But yeah, specific meaning varies from person to person, and culture to culture.
I'd be surprised if they did. Landlords opt-in to the Sec 8 program, and the ones that do generally do so because it's a profitable course for a "problematic" property. As a non-Sec 8 recipient I will always shy away from Sec 8 friendly housing because it tells me a lot about the landlord, the neighborhood, and the condition of the building.
Well... it was fine, for about six months. Then the lady's old boyfriend starting hanging around the house all the time, bringing his drug dealing friends around, and one day the renter just ditched the place in the middle of the night, leaving the entire place pretty much trashed. My parents had to spend weeks repairing the damage to the house and cleaning it up (my mom said the bathtub was literally black with grime).
So now they are extremely reluctant to rent to a Section 8 holder again. They lost money on the deal, considering the costs of repairs and cleaning, even with all the labor for the repairs/cleaning done by them rather than hiring a service.