As Program Moves Poor to Suburbs, Tensions Follow

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/us/09housing.html?em

by crocus • 18 years ago

11 20 18 years ago

briansmith2• 18 years ago

I've been thinking about the whether opposite kind of program would work. These programs try to take the "good" poor people out of bad neighborhoods, making those neighborhoods even worse off. Why not do the opposite: subsidize and protect large "good" businesses and educational institutions that operate in poor neighborhoods. Provide the businesses with security in the form of dedicated, deputized, police-trained security guards and increased uniformed police patrols. Hire locals to work on demolition of condemned properties in their neighborhoods.

I don't have any concrete ideas for how it would work but it seems like there's some way to do it.

yummyfajitas2• 18 years ago

Like Columbia in Morningside Heights? I don't think it did much there. When the neighborhood was bad, all you had was Fort Columbia. Now the neighborhood is better, but so is the rest of NYC.

I think most of these programs miss the real problem: the people. The poor make bad choices and have bad life skills (e.g., don't always show up to work). Sticking them in a middle class neighborhood doesn't change this.

briansmith2• 18 years ago

"Now the neighborhood is better, but so is the rest of NYC."

That sounds like a positive outcome to me.

"The poor make bad choices and have bad life skills (e.g., don't always show up to work)."

That is not true generally. If you are a hard-working person born and raised in a horrible place, it is hard to get out. And, there are people that are willing to work hard to turn their life around but could benefit greatly from some assistance. I personally know several people that benefited from government welfare/food stamps/WIC and who were able to raise their standards livings substantially because of it. It is true that there are people that won't work hard or who will abuse any help they get, but in my experience most people are pretty good.

Most importantly, children don't deserve to suffer because of their parents' stupidity. It isn't hard to see how children can benefit from moving from an inner-city school to a middle class one, if you've ever visited an inner-city school.

notauser• 18 years ago

The people around you (and the networks they open up) are very critical, and very location dependant.

Close your eyes and you would find it hard to tell if a chap who was educated in Hertfordshire was white or black - you would be able to tell in an instant if he had been to a good or bad school though.

The people you meet daily help form your expectations, can pass your CV to the right people, will only give respect to people who behave in certain ways... that kind of exposure and social pressure is exactly what helps you _avoid_ bad life choices, and if you don't get it then failing to make good ones is not entirely your fault.

Alex39172• 18 years ago

If anyone wants a really good (non-fiction) book on stuff like this, check out The World We Created at Hamilton High. It's about a wealthy suburban school that gets integrated in the 60s. Scribd isn't displaying the document properly, but here is link to chapter one:

http://www.alexkrupp.com/Hamilton1.pdf

bokonist3• 18 years ago

I heartily second the recommendation.

DanielBMarkham• 18 years ago

To me, this article is muddle-headed. It begins with a discussion on the movement of poor from the inner cities into the suburbs and then pivots to begin framing the discussion as one of race instead of poverty. Add in a few outspoken activists, and I'm not sure you have much of anything useful here.

It's a simple question, really. Are the chronic problems that people face _mostly_ a part of their own beliefs and lifestyles or is _mostly_ it something to do with luck, location, harassment, or policy? I'd entertain arguments on both sides of the issue, but this article implies the answer has something to do with race and policy. That seems to presume the to know the answer to the discussion before it even begins. (It's also lazy reporting and close to editorializing, but that's a comment for another day)

If you want to have a discussion about segregation and integration of various races into various neighborhoods, that'd be a cool story too. But that's not what this was either, unfortunately.

As for startup potential, the article obliquely mentions that foreclosure rates are associated with violent crime. I've also heard there's a close correlation with density of liquor stores and crime. I wonder if all of this crime data could be assimilated into a useful service? Perhaps something than runs on your phone? (hint, hint)

Alex39172• 18 years ago

"I wonder if all of this crime data could be assimilated into a useful service?"

Kexter does a pretty good job at mashing up GIS data with Craigslist housing.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

“I know it sounds horrible, but they’re scary. I’m sorry,” said Ms. Reynolds, who like her two friends said she was conflicted about her newfound fear of black youths. “Sometimes I question myself, and I think, Would I feel this way if they were Mexican or white?”

Nice tidy quote there. "Typical white person." Yep, when the government terrorizes your neighborhood, and animalistic thugs threaten your very life, the first impulse of polite people is to feel guilt, and question their own motivations. Let's see how this happens:

1. You have a nice neighborhood, and suddenly there's a spike in the black population. If you've seen this happen, you know that going from 0 percent to 5 percent can result in an astonishing increase in the frequency of ugly attitudes, bad behavior, noise, and general violence.

2. The "racists" move out. They are attacked as "racists" and everyone agrees that they are "racists". However, they get out in time before housing prices collapse...

3. As the population shifts, serious crime is high enough that, racist or not, everybody who can get out, including middle-class blacks, gets out.

4. Property values drop to next to nothing. The neighborhood is basically a spread-out inner city.

5. Eventually, given the super-cheap houses, adventurous young men and homosexuals (ie, people who don't have to worry about their wives being raped) move in and clean up the place. Gays are great because "ganstas" don't want any association with them. Gentrification occurs...

6. The poor and violent people are still poor and violent, and so the government tries to "fix" them by introducing them into a new nice neighborhood.

The upshot is that there is constant churn in the real estate market. Continual soft ethnic cleansing from city to suburb to city moves literally 100s of billions of dollars of houses. It's a great marketing program.

There was some black writer who suggested that the real problem with the black community was the move from southern farms to the cities. Rural blacks simply don't have the same problems, and never have...

logjam• 18 years ago

I'm mildly curious about whether you have any actual data to back up some of this, because frankly it sounds like you are really overgeneralizing in an unreasonable and very emotional way. You could have more accurately noted that poor people moving into an area drive property values down and bring crime, and are not created by the "spike in the black population."

Instead, your anecdotes focused on black people as the culprit of all this evil. Why?

smanek3• 18 years ago

Because, statistically speaking, race is a good predictor of violent crime.

According to Bureau of Justice statistics, between 1976 and 2005, blacks, while 13 percent of the population, committed over 52 percent of the nation’s homicides, or about 400% more than expected.

However, poor people (arbitrarily defining poor as a household income of under $25k) only account for ~double as many crimes as expected. (The government doesn't actually keep data on income of violent crime perpetrators - I used the household income of violent crime victims from http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/cv05.htm weighted by census data from http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/hhinc/new06_000.htm as a proxy)

Now, maybe income is a better predictor; I couldn't say conclusively with the data at hand. But you have to agree that race is pretty important.

maxklein• 18 years ago

You realise that as the population shifts, a generation of kids grow up in nice area suburbia, and become those university students with ghetto parents. You can condemn people to generations of ghetto, or you can move them into suburbia:- this will not change the attitude they grew up with, but their children will grow up very different.

Every neighbourhood has bad people. Every neighbourhood has disorderly people. But if a neighbourhood has a few black people who are disorderly, every black person walking around is immediately stamped as being the same.

There is nothing wrong with being angry at people disturbing or changing your neighbourhood, but don't them stamp people as 'animalistic', 'ganstas', 'stay in farms'.

menloparkbum• 18 years ago

Is there an area where this has actually happened? It's a weird version of the standard gentrification fable. It is incorrect in most situations where it could be descriptive because the gentrification "success stories" did not happen in african-american neighborhoods. For example, Williamsburg, Brooklyn was an industrial area surrounded by Polish, Puerto Rican and Hasidic communities.

Also, the story doesn't work if you take into account the actual locations the article mentions. No adventurous young gays and art students will ever be moving to Antioch or the suburbs of Salinas and Mobile, Alabama.

occam• 18 years ago

Who is killing slightly controversial comments here? What's wrong with the following dead comment?

They have tried this extensively. Inner city block grants, subsidizing business, etc.

The idea that you can 'fix' another person's neighborhood is equally as racist as the policies that caused blacks to concentrate in those neighborhoods in the first place (they were chased out of the countryside in the KKK era and left with few alternatives to the city). What if the government started offering grants to 'fix' your neighborhood? How demeaning that is, and how absurd! As though subsidized bike shops and coffee shops are going to pressure crack dealers to go away.

As for the police patrols and condemned properties, do you think that there is a functioning local government in these areas? Look at DC and Detroit! The local city government is so corrupt that they can't even provide basic services, or basic levels of non corrupt policing, much less an effective attempt at crime reduction. On my way to work in DC a few years ago I would see the same police officer asleep under the same overpass every single day. This was right next to the highway, so maybe 2000 people would see him every morning, and yet he would sleep away, sometimes with his face pressed on the drivers side window. Do you think a bagel shop can fix that!?

bokonist3• 18 years ago

This reminds of the anti-singularity thesis: increasing wealth from technology enables a decline in cultural values. ( http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/antisin... ).

In 1910, inner city crime like we have today simply did not exist. Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, London - all these cities had homicide rates that today you can only find in Pleasantville suburbia. It was the age of stern Victorian values and law and order policing. People did not have the luxury of giving criminals the benefit of the doubt, nor of allowing any kind of public disorder, lest their neighborhoods turn unsafe.

The trouble is, law and order tactics are a blunt instrument, and they are likely to offend and hurt good people too. Today, we are generally wealthy enough that moving away from crime is a possibility for the middle and upper class. Running has become easier than coming together as a community to solve the crime program. This especially true when "coming together as a community" means navigating big city politics, and cracking down on crime can get you labeled as racist. Today, when a community suffers from high crime rates, decent folk move out. First it was moving from the inner cities to the suburbs. Now, in many cases, people are moving from the suburbs back to expensive neighborhoods in the city. High real estate prices have become a substitute for crime control.

I think at some point we're going to have to stop the running and figure out how to stop the ongoing warfare in our cities. Allowing the crime is not doing anyone any good. Inner city men have astounding deaths from homicide. And the middle class is spending ever increasing portions of their income on housing. Everyone loses.

smanek3• 18 years ago

"In 1910, inner city crime like we have today simply did not exist."

Do you have any data to back up that claim? It's the exact opposite of any data I've ever seen ...

I've been told that violent death rates are ~ an order of magnitude lower now than a century ago. Take a look at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth..., for example.

Hell, violent crime is down nearly 50% since the 70's (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/viort.htm) when the gov. started keeping the numbers.

bokonist3• 18 years ago

Murder rates by location:

Baltimore 1911: 5.8 Baltimore 2006: 43.3

Philadelphia 1911: 4.4 Philadelphia 2006: 27.7

New York 1911: 5.9 New York 1990: 30.7 New York 2006: 7.3

Newark 1911: 4.0 Newark 2006: 37.4

Chicago 1911: 9.0 Chicago 2006: 16.4

Washington DC 1911: 7.8 Washington DC 2006: 29.1

England & Wales 1910: 8.1 England & Wales 1997: 14.1

In many of our great cities, murders increased by an order of magnitude. Only in New York, where the finance boom priced out the poor are homicide rates down ( the crime all went to Newark and other ring cities, which is the phenomena I pointed out in my original post).

Pinker may be right about the middle ages to 1900. But he's dead wrong about the 20th century. The 20th century saw a millennium of progress get wiped away. Europe had two world wars that displayed levels of barbarism unseen since the Mongol invasion. Population explosions in Latin America, India, and Africa resulted in masses of people living in violent, malnourished, overpopulated slums. The great cities of the United States collapsed into burned out, dystopian ruins, which look like something out of the late Roman empire ( see The Ruins of Detroit for a small taste - http://detroityes.com/home.htm - but it is the same story in many other cities). What the hell happened?

Source for 1911 stats: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F07E5D91E3FE...

For 2006 stats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_r...

And stats from England: http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111....

As Program Moves Poor to Suburbs, Tensions Follow

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