We knew one young woman who had an affair with an older man, got pregnant, then moved out of moms house into a hotel. She then called up the gov't and went right to the top of their list (pregnant single woman with no means of support and no skills, and in temporary housing). The next week, she was living in a nicer condo than I could afford. She had free housing, food, medical, and legal.
We visited the old neighborhood a few years after we left and there were open air drug markets.
I think a negative income tax would be a much better approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM
At the end of the day, you can't address urban poverty by creating ghettos. Such areas just become the breeding ground for the next generation of urban poor--kids who have no exposure to successful behaviors and attitudes, but do have a cultivated distrust of authority and social structure. It's not an "unfair" burden on residents. It's a burden that we have to bear in order to create integrated, successful communities.
I am a Detroit native so I hate the idea of ghettos but I would prefer to live around people of similar means / financial ability. Public housing introduces inorganic problems with equality and perceived equality.
When I worked at the Chicago Tribune, I covered crime extensively and saw some distinct patterns that coincided with gentrification in Wicker Park: an increased concentration of night time crime, specifically theft and muggings, along Milwaukee avenue. Because crime is down on average, crime definitely did not go up in Wicker Park, but theft, assault, and battery did not go down as quickly as the average in the night life zones. That said, it seems very likely some former public housing residents caused trouble in some of their new neighborhoods.
Similarly, I had a petty thief from the projects once tell me that on 35th street, he saw me as either a drug buyer or a do-gooder, but either way it wouldn't make a lot of sense to mess with me. But if he saw me in Hyde Park, where I lived at the time, he would have seen me as "prey". I think it's safe to say that to some degree, affluent neighborhoods are targeted by criminals because they are affluent.
There are parallels here to mass transit. Minor theft is very high at downtown CTA stations, places with tremendous foot traffic and jostling bodies. It's one of the few crime categories that has seen some increase/very little decrease and it seems to track with the widespread use of smartphones.
Your comment also gets at some of the really tough questions of social ethics around these issues. For example: is it better to have more petty crime or to incarcerate people at unprecedented rates?
None of this stuff is easy, but the ways it is often framed -- like making unsubstantiated causal links between Section 8 and crime -- make the conversation that much harder.
(Full disclosure: I'm the author of the piece)
Bundling up the poor in massive housing complexes was/is a structurally racist, classist move.
So you've doubled down on the hardship these children have to overcome. Even if you are ok with this from a moral perspective (which is a pretty high bar to get over in my opinion) it seems like a pretty ineffective way to limit the number of "unproductive" in your society.
Now if you want to say that none should be, I agree. Find a way to stop crime. Spreading crime around is not that way.
(FYI my thinking on this issue draws far more from neo reactionaries than libertarians.)
There is also the idea that by separating out problem elements, that in the long term you decrease overall crime.
A child in a ghetto who knows not of the potential for escape will likely stay in that ghetto. A child who is surrounded by choices, options, and multiple role models has a choice to make.
Not knowing one can leave can be handled with direct communication. For example, billboards: "get a job and you can leave this place. Any adult is here by choice."
- Not having sex means no babies.
- Don't do drugs.
- Stay in your local, neighborhood school to perform as equally well as your similarly-aged peers in schools located in more affluent areas.
Well, maybe that last one not so much.
Your argument strikes me as a reason people raise in objection to mass transit: the "undesirables" might come to town. I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to your position. I live in an area of my city that, on paper, has a pretty high average household income but due to history also has a decent amount of petty crime. The answer isn't to redline those people off to somewhere else. There is a huge difference between being poor and committing crime, except that the poor tend to go to jail and the wealthy tend to pay a fine with no admittance of wrongdoing. And the latter also tend to screw over more people in one pop.
The answer is to make it socially unacceptable, in all areas, to commit crime and to demonstrate that the law and society won't tolerate it.
If you scroll up, you'll see that I agree with you about stopping crime. I oppose our current system of anarcho tyranny (to borrow an excellent term).
It's easy to say "just get a job and leave the slums." It's much, much more difficult to do that, especially when there is a bifurcated society.
I guess the solution to this is some sort of paternalistic dictatorship? Is the purpose of spreading the poor around merely to dilute their vote?
It seems to me the classic economic arguments you're making need to be turned around: In an environment where the options in the mainstream economy are unstable, low-reward work and you lack the capital to secure credit to get an education or make serious investments, wouldn't you think about joining the drug economy?
Also both the gangs and community groups were entirely capable of self-governing.