American Murder Mystery (2008)

I don't know what the answer to problems like this is but I have spent a fair amount of time studying (both formally and informally) issues like poverty and pondering how to effectively address really thorny problems. I have concluded that government programs designed "to help the poor" generally do more harm than good. Part of the problem is with a) requiring recipients to psychologically identify themselves as "the poor" and b) the fact that the very design of such programs tends to reward people for having problems and punish them for trying to resolve their problems. A chief example is Welfare which was designed to "help poor single mothers". It was designed when most poor, single mothers were people we would classify as "the deserving poor": widows. But the way it was designed changed the social contract and actively encouraged women to choose to become poor, single moms in order to qualify for assistance. The result: Welfare actively grew the population of poor, single moms. Not remotely the original intent.

So I have concluded that if you REALLY want to "help the poor", you have to start by removing "poor" from your program definition and qualifying requirements. Instead, ask yourself: what would help the people generally and do so in such a way that, coincidentally, poor people would benefit significantly? For example, countries that help parents generally, regardless of marital status or income, seem to get better results than the American Welfare system.

This article is a bit stale, but it's true. Anyone who has lived near section 8 housing will tell you the same.

For every family that wants to escape, there are a thousand who are mad that their check is late, and scream racism at their neighbors when told to pick up their own trash.

People discussing this, please dispute the data, offer solutions, talk about root causes, etc. Please don't fall into the trap of calling the data racist.

About three paragraphs in I thought, "Yeah, that's section 8" and was preparing to be unsurprised when it didn't mention it. But it did.

Anyway, the whole point of Section 8 was to move the riffraff from the too-close-to-rich-people city areas to the suburbs, in a Parisian style setup. The suburbs, of course, were where middle class people fled to when the cities were originally ravaged by similiar population movements years ago. The eventual white flight (ie, ethnic cleansing) from the suburbs was baked into the cake and none of the other unexpected consequences were in the least unexpected.

Well, this made my day way more depressing.

I'm probably one of the flamier liberals here on HNN, but I have to agree with this one - I landlorded for a short time before realizing it's not easy money, and one of my tenants was a nice young lady on Section 8. Before she moved on, she (or her live-in boyfriend) left holes in the walls, the garden shed literally stuffed full of trash, the carpets full of fleas and a big hole in the yard from the dog not permitted in the lease, dirt ground into the kitchen floor that took me a day and a half to scrub out (like, bus-station-level gum), and a street full of really, really pissed neighbors.

Poverty is endemic, and Section 8 doesn't help, even though I really wish it did. However, eliminating Section 8 won't help, either, I suspect.

I wish I knew an answer.

Single page:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2008/07/american-m...

This is a long article, here are some of the key points.

...

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.

...

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.

...

In 1976, letters went out to 200 randomly selected families among the 44,000 living in Chicago public housing, asking whether they wanted to move out to the suburbs. A counselor went around the projects explaining the new Section8 program, in which tenants would pay 25percent of their income for rent and the government would pay the rest, up to a certain limit.

...

Starting in 1977, in what became known as the Gautreaux program, hundreds of families relocated to suburban neighborhoods—most of them about 25miles from the ghetto, with very low poverty rates and good public schools.

...

Cisneros floated the idea of knocking down the projects and moving the residents out into the metro area.

The federal government encouraged the demolitions with a $6.3billion program to redevelop the old project sites, called HOPE VI, or “Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere.” The program was launched in the same spirit as Bill Clinton’s national service initiative—communities working together to “rebuild lives.” One Chicago housing official mused about “architects and lawyers and bus drivers and people on welfare living together.”

...

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.

...

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.

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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.

...

The University of Louisville criminologist Geetha Suresh was tracking local patterns of violent crime. She had just arrived from India, had never heard of a housing project. Suresh noticed a recurring pattern, 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.”

...

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.

...

In 2005, another wave of project demolitions pushed the number of people displaced from public housing to well over 20,000, and crime skyrocketed.

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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.

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a follow-up to the highly positive, highly publicized Gautreaux study of 1991—produced results that were “puzzling,” said Susan Popkin of the Urban Institute. In this study, volunteers were also moved into low-poverty neighborhoods, although they didn’t move nearly as far as the Gautreaux families. Women reported lower levels of obesity and depression. But they were no more likely to find jobs. The schools were not much better, and children were no more likely to stay in them. Girls were less likely to engage in risky behaviors, and they reported feeling more secure in their new neighborhoods. But boys were as likely to do drugs and act out, and more likely to get arrested for property crimes. 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.”

Also, the military is giving gang members top notch gun/ambush training now:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2506292,CST-NWS-graffiti18...

I read this one a while back. Anyone know of a source for more recent data?

summary:

buildings where a lot of bad-behaving people lived were closed and/or residents were forced/incented to move out. After they moved to new buildings, sometimes in more suburban areas, many of those same people continued behaving badly, and thus the crime rate rose there. The overall net impact on behavior/crime was often neglible or actualy worsened. A large percentage of the people engaging in the bad behaviors were, for whatever reasons, black.

I just saved you about 4 pages of reading.

the OA title sucks because it's not about a murder mystery. I only clicked through because I'm doing research on actual murder mysteries for a side project of mine. So I was a bit disappointed to discover it was just about crime trends and social factors, not a specific murder case.

This article kind of misses the point. That is, it seems to focus too much on the effect of dismantling the projects and moving people around, and not at all on why they got there. And it accepts at face value the proposition that these cities were moving those people out of the projects, sometimes out of city limits, for the purpose of improving their lives and in that way fighting poverty, crime, etc. I find it truly hard to believe that any city in the US would undergo that kind of effort to help out poor black people. The idea should strain anyone's credulity. More likely that more affluent white folks want to live in the city these days, and cities want that tax revenue. Sure, efforts were made in some cases to try to improve the lives of the people being displaced, but as an afterthought and not as the prime motivator. I mean, this demographic shift has been underway for a while now, where folks are leaving the suburbs and moving back to the cities, and property values are going up there, and generally life is improving in the cities. I can't tell if it's the intent, but this article almost seems to lay responsibility for all this on some changes to a federal housing program. It's nonsense. And the idea that mayors and city councils nationwide don't want to hear about the damaging effects of this displacement because it disproves their theories on poverty is certainly complete horseshit. They don't want to hear it because they've got their shiny new neighborhood, crime is down, and whatever happens in the suburbs they don't give a shit because it isn't their problem anymore. And regarding their theories on poverty, well they haven't got any of those. They're politicians, not sociologists. They have elections.

So what this article should have been about, but isn't, is why we still have so many poor black people committing so many crimes and taking up so much space in so many prisons, over 40 years since the civil rights movement, and in spite of the fact that most of America can apparently get its shit together enough to vote for a black man for President anyway.

The answer to that one is pretty straightforward, well known, and easy to understand. And it has little to nothing to do with race. America is simply not an egalitarian society. It never really has been, but over the past 30 years or so it's moved away from it faster than ever. The gap between rich and poor in America is remarkably high, and with that fact come all sorts of social ills (see below). And not just for the poor either, but quality of life tends to decrease across the board. The libertarian position that a rising tide will lift all boats, or that income distribution doesn't matter as long as average wage continues to increase, this idea that remains popular across the political spectrum in the US, and that is wholly within the sphere of consensus in the US media, does not pass scientific muster. It is absolute shit. And as Americans seem incapable of even discussing this simple fact yet, the problem of poverty and social dysfunction in America, among blacks as well as whites, et al, will remain unsolved.

http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/docs/social-dysfunction.pdf

http://www.cognitionandculture.net/index.php?option=com_cont...

it's the economy. this is the worst recession since the great depression. americans are without jobs. people without jobs are angry and sometimes have to resort to other means of providing for their families. most of the jobs are in the cities so you see this vacuum of life left over in some of the suburbs.