INC NEWS - The Atlantic article on HOPE VI

[Pat Carstensen]

The Atlantic magazine had an article on how demolishing public housing projects has destabilized low-wealth neighborhoods without necessarily helping the folks moved from the projects. 

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime

She doesn't say we should have kept the projects, but considerably more resources should have been put into helping people move -- preserving their social support networks, getting their kids ready to succeed in new schools, etc.

Not to be alarmist -- next month's letters may say what is wrong with this article -- and Durham may be already doing a lot of the things they say make the transition more successful.

Regards, pat

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"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. Recently, the housing expert 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. This pattern is not necessarily
better, either for poor people trying to break away from bad
neighborhoods or for cities, Galster explains. His paper compares two
scenarios: a city split into high-poverty and low-poverty areas, and a
city dominated by median-poverty ones. The latter arrangement is likely
to produce more bad neighborhoods and more total crime, he concludes,
based on a computer model of how social dysfunction spreads. 

Studies show that recipients of Section8 vouchers have tended to
choose moderately poor neighborhoods that were already on the decline,
not low-poverty neighborhoods. One recent study publicized by HUD warned
that policy makers should lower their expectations, because voucher
recipients seemed not to be spreading out, as they had hoped, but
clustering together. Galster theorizes that every neighborhood has its
tipping point—a threshold well below a 40 percent poverty rate—beyond
which crime explodes and other severe social problems set in. Pushing a
greater number of neighborhoods past that tipping point is likely to
produce more total crime. 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."
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