Housing vouchers a golden ticket to pricey suburbs

[cali]

By Stephanie McCrummen, Published: June 25

CHARLOTTE — It was clear that Liza Jackson’s luck had changed when she drove her pearl-white Dodge sedan, the one with the huge pink plastic eyelashes over the headlights, into Pinebrook, an eight-year-old subdivision where residents tend to notice cars with huge pink eyelashes.

“There goes the neighborhood,” one homeowner said when she heard that her potential new neighbor had a federal housing voucher known as a Section 8.
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But Jackson could well be Pinebrook’s salvation, a means by which landlords can rent an empty, crime-magnet of a house to a tenant with a steady, government-backed check.

From Jackson’s point of view, the dismal housing market appeared as a glorious reversal of fortune: Fresh swaths of suburbia were opening up to the very people it has so often excluded.

<snip>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/housing-vouchers-a-golden-ticket-to-pricey-suburbs/2011/06/23/AGDNc7kH_story.html?hpid=z3

[Warpy]

1. As long as they can afford transportation, it's probably a good deal

especially since they can get their kids into better schools.

I've lived next door to section 8 recipients and they're generally hard working and motivated people who could stand a little support and guidance. Once they get that, there is no stopping them.

Unfortunately, conformity is where it's at in the burbs, so her car is going to have to lose its lashes if she wants to blend in enough to make friends.

It's why I don't live in the burbs. I can stand inner city, small town, even a rural home if it doesn't last forever. Just don't put me into a suburb unless you want the homicide rate to rise.

[Codeine]

2. My section 8 neighbors sucked.

They tore the shit out of the apartments next door and fought at all hours. Trash all over and constant traffic coming and going. And one of them walked up to my door and blatantly stole my doormat in the middle of the day. Luckily I saw it happening and retrieved it -- fucker didn't even have the good grace to apologize; "It's funny. I like it. *shrugs* Whatever."

I was glad to see those assholes go after it took months to evict them.

[Igel]

3. It's the research-driven cure from the '90s.

A way to break up pockets of persistent, intergenerational poverty. Knock the props out from under the peer pressure that validates self-destructive behavior and put in place an environment that reinforces more traditional, middle-class work ethics and trust.

The research in the '80s and '90s looked excellent. Clinton started the first really large scale program. It was tied in with tearing down of some of the more damaging pockets of intergenerational poverty, the various inner-city projects scattered around the country that had reached the end of their operational life. Granted, there was a racial tinge to the entire affair--blacks may be disproportionately represented in projects and such programs, but are usually a few percentage points shy of an absolute majority; they were portrayed as really the sole beneficiaries of the program. (It's the same objection I have with NPR's military coverage: the grunts they interview are primarily minority or female, in line with the perception from Vietnam that minorities made up a majority of the cannon fodder and the military was racist; minorities are about 1/4 of the "gruntage," blacks and Asians are underrepresented, especially in combat roles, and Latinos and whites overrepresented,l while females make up a few percentage points.)

In the '00s the negatives on the Clinton program started coming in. People often returned to where they came from or to similar areas; it's where they felt most "at home," however much they hated it. They couldn't overcome the race and in some even more important respects the SES and cultural differences that made the neighborhood reasonably homogeneous to start with. Their kids wanted to be "authentic," which usually meant coming in with significantly lower educational achievement than the longer-term residents of a neighborhood and significantly higher crime rates.

I think it was in Tennessee--Nashville?--where some researchers came up with a strikingly positive correlation between this program and crime rates on a block-by-block basis. That was perhaps 2, perhaps 4 years ago. That makes the expression "crime magnet empty houses" seem almost sardonic. The research was criticized as insensitive, racist, or uncaring because of the findings; I didn't hear the methodology being criticized on any substantive grounds, just that people didn't like the results.

As with most such things, proponents look at those who actually take advantage of the new digs to cut ties with former associates, set up a new life, adopt a modified life style, and whose kids make a go of it academically and, later, professionally. Usually this "look" is anecdotal and feel good. Foes look primarily at the fairly high recidivism rate, coupled with the higher crime and lower educational achievement rates' effect on schools and property values. Both sides pick geography with data that favors their viewpoint.

I figure it's a calculated risk: The government gambles with some people's welfare in order to offer a better life to others. As the risk has been demonstrated to be higher and the payoff lower than originally predicted, I've gone from proponent and advocate to neutral to moderately hostile.

[Celebration]

4. That research was from Memphis

Proving it is difficult to change culture through geographic relocation. Now Michael Orr was an exception, LOL.