Open Thread (7/24/2008)

Over time, there has been much discussion about housing and in various posts the use of statistics. The purpose for posting the following is as a reminder when statistics are used it is very important to be careful how these are used. The following is a response to an article printed in the July/August Atlantic about the relationship between housing vouchers and increase in crime rates in Memphis and extropolating the results to the rest of the county. Those interested in low income housing were very distressed how the statistics were used and how much visual press Ms. Rosin received.Pattsi Petrie  When journalists and social scientists write about poverty, crime, race, and housing policy -- especially when they stir them together -- it is bound to provoke controversy.  Journalist Hannah Rosin recently stirred up a hornet's next with her cover article, "American Murder Mystery," in the July/August issue of The Atlantic magazine (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime) , arguing that two federal programs designed to give poor families more housing choices are responsible for a major increase in crime.  She claimed to show that efforts to "deconcentrate" poor families (particularly families of color) out of high-poverty areas backfired by spreading crime into otherwise stable neighborhoods, using Memphis as an example, but generalizing about the entire country.  Her larger point is that liberal do-gooders failed to anticipate the harmful consequences of their well-intentioned but naive policy ideas.  Rosin's article has generated a lot of interest on the right-wing blogosphere and in the mainstream media.  Well, guess what? Rosin got her facts, analysis, and conclusion wrong.  She not only got the facts-on-the-ground in Memphis wrong, but she also misled readers by  generalizing from the Memphis example.  She mischaracterized the housing programs and credited them with a much larger impact than they really have, given their small size.  Professor Xavier de Souza Briggs (at MIT) and I pulled together some of the nation's leading housing and urban policy researchers and experts to examine Rosin's claims. Our response to her article, "Memphis Murder Mystery? No, Just Mistaken Identity," is now available on the National Housing Institute website: (http://www.shelterforce.org/article/print/1043) In this election year, when the nation is in the middle of a sustained debate about the proper role of government in addressing social and economic problems, it is less than helpful when  a respected magazine publishes  such a misleading, irresponsible  story.  The leading housing researchers and experts who have signed this document -- which rebuts many of Rosin's major claims -- felt compelled to set the record straight. Rosin interviewed some of the experts who signed this document and drew on their research; some are even quoted in the article.  The experts who drafted and endorsed this statement don't all agree with each other on every aspect of housing policy, but they do share a strong belief that public policy (and journalism about policy) should be guided by the facts and by rigorous research.  In drafting this statement, we drew on the latest research about the Section 8, HOPE VI, and Moving to Opportunity programs, as well as data about poverty and crime, in order to examine Rosin's claims. 

The controversy over Rosin's article is not simply about the causes of crime in Memphis, but also about how we formulate and evaluate policy in general and , in particular,  policy to help address the dilemma of poverty in America. It is also about the use and abuse of social science research by the media.   In offering a critique of Rosin's article, we hope to contribute to a spirited debate about these issues.  

As we write in our article, academics and policymakers have learned a great deal from both the mistakes and the successes of anti-poverty programs, including those focused on high-poverty neighborhoods, since the 1960s. Housing policy is a vital piece of the agenda, but now more than ever, we understand why it can’t lift people out  poverty on its own.  We know that the best anti-poverty program is a good job. Full employment at living wages is the best solution to America’s poverty quagmire. We also need to invest in education and job training, to raise the minimum wage at least to the poverty level, to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit so it reaches more families, and to provide low-income parents with the support they need to enter the job market, such as child care and health insurance. Redoubled efforts to fight crime in the most violent neighborhoods, and to protect those places, which tend to be poor racial ghettos, from an utterly disproportionate share of our society’s environmental hazards, are vital too.  Giving the poor a strong voice in the political arena -- through community organizations, unions, and other vehicles -- is also critical.

Feel free to  circulate this statement to others, post  it on your website,  and (for those of you who teach) use it in your classes (along with Rosin's original article) .

Peter Dreier 

----------------------------------------

Peter Dreier

E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics

Director, Urban & Environmental Policy Program

Occidental College

1600 Campus Road

Los Angeles, CA 90041

Phone: (323) 259-2913

Email: dreier@oxy.edu

Webpage: http://employees.oxy.edu/dreier

Section 8 vouchers, especially when tied to counseling for tenants and recruitment of landlords, can be an important tool to help families choose where they want to live and pay the rent, so long as there’s an adequate supply of rental housing and so long as the relocation programs are run carefully alongside efforts to strengthen vulnerable or declining neighborhoods.

To You Anon, know it alls, How about lightening up? Pattsi was trying to post something She thought We all might like to read, If this is a problem for You, you are free to go elsewhere with your anoymous BS, and Yes IP I know I'm not running this blog but I am tired of the "hit&run " posters here.  Pattsi Thank You ! for your posts.

I agree with Gregg, I also have spent the time to put in the paragraph breaks and format the whole thing and then post it only to have it come out in a big block. It's not the posters fault and really no reason for the anon to be a-- insert you're own word.

Regnad Kcin--did we read the same articles? There are a lot of statistics included in both articles. Maybe you prefer the term, data. Hum-m-m-m, it is interesting that you are persuaded by an article written by an investigative reporter who knows nothing about housing as compared to those individuals who took the time to write the counter article--all of whom are housing experts and have been studying the issues surrounding housing for years, decades. This tells me a lot about how the public learns.

The conversation about the original article continues on PLANET, the academic urban planning listserv. The following by one of the primary authors is from one of these exchanges. It contains more sources that might help readers of Illinipundit gain more understanding about providing housing for the low income populations and the attending issues to do this.

Pattsi Petrie--sorry I can not make the text breaks work again.

i hear on the grapevine that rosin is very non-defensive about the criticism she's getting and understands that she overstated the causation piece. that, and not the unmet need for supportive services, was what we knew right-wing attack dogs would center on. and the blogs and other pieces confirm that. also, rosin indicts poverty deconcentration "theory" quite directly, from her references to the HUD reformers big ideas to the drive-by assessment of MTO's shortcomings. a number of us felt this story would also find a ready audience: social engineers screw things up again, and their big idea was flawed to begin with. but since she didn't really explore the costs and benefits of demand vs. supply-side subsidies as such, we didn't focus there. on that front, more and more, the research i do on vouchers leads me back to the need for 'hard' supply in tight markets, especially in low-crime, relatively low poverty areas. the lack of same is a major reason that moving to opportunity didn't sustain "locational" gains well (http://www.urban.org/publications/411635.html). i find the "project basing" of vouchers, in LA and elsewhere, important and promising as one element of a revitalized supply-side strategy. CHAPA here in boston authored a good, straightfwd report on this recently ("targeting rental assistance to create more deeply affordable permanent housing"): http://www.chapa.org/pdf/BuildingTheStock4.pdf and as the joint center once again instructs in the latest "state of the nation's housing" report (http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/son/index.htm), preserving the unsubsidized low-rent stock is probably our biggest source of leverage as a nation--and one we've barely addressed. PLANNING magazine just did a good article on that, illustrating the kinds of things localities can and can't do to work with property owners and management companies. -- xav
___________ Xavier de Souza Briggs
Associate Professor of Sociology + Urban Planning
and Director, The Community Problem-Solving Project @ MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 9-521
Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A.

Didn't work

Run, maybe try editing or composing posts in the plain text editor; i've sometimes found that easier to deal with when trying to format a post, if the filtered HTML setting (the default) is acting up.

HG

There are some anecdotal comparisons to be made here. Oft commented on in this forum is the change in temperament of southeast Urbana. Over the last 8-10 years there has been a significant increase in voucher housing in the area. Crime in the area has risen, and the impression people have of the character of the area, based on some intuitive and observational ‘stats’; pan handling, loud cars and often intoxicated people roaming about into the wee hours, people being stopped and asked if they want to buy some drugs (at least as people have frequently alleged here). A relatively small number of buildings are said to the primary culprits. Hard numbers clearly show a significant increase in crime in the area, although it tends to be in pockets. There have been three murders in Urbana this year, all of them within a few blocks of Sunnycrest. Nothing in the news accounts of those crimes suggest that the public at large is in any  increased danger of death, but still, it reflects on the overall situation.

Lakeside terrace, like Cabrini Green, was torn down. At one time Lakeside was pretty much crime-center in town. Did all of that activity stop because the location went away? Or did the activity get relocated over a broader area?

Response to Dane--the reason I posted this thread is to put sunshine on low income housing and all surrounding issues. I do not have sufficient information to comment about what you have described in SE Urbana--and one would have to be careful about any analysis.

I do think that there are several concrete points to be taken from the section titled, Lessons Learned, within the reply article. One being that the best and most effect approach is generation of jobs for these folks. Next has to do with the process involved in moving people from one living location to another. We know, based on the lack of success in Chicago, and success in other cities that it is important to work with the people moving, giving them tools with which they can handle new housing, new neighborhoods, new neighbors, bill payments, etc, and to work with the new neighbors so there is a community understand and introduction for the new people moving in. None of this was done in Chicago for those displaced from CHA housing and the result was a fiasco, figure pointing by the new neighbors when anything when wrong in the neighborhood to the "newbees," no integration into the neighborhood, anger, frustration, lack of trust, etc. When reads the op-ed about tearing down HUD one expands one understanding about an aspect that is built into public policy that guarantees failure rather than sufficient funding to provide the environment for success.

Pattsi Petrie

Xian--absolutely, this is the other side of the story. However, in the world of "housing" the errors made during this transformation are already being written about and pressure is on in the city. It took decades to acknowledge and write about the abombination that the CHA housing representated all driven by the great sociology brains at the University of Chicago and various Chicago ward alterman who did not want CHA "in their back yard" lo those many years ago. What happened in Newark, NJ with Hope VI is another example of less than "best practice."

Pattsi Petrie

I can't believe I'm agreeing on something with Xian, but on this, I do.  Reduction of crime means just that, not shifting it to some other place or population; and anyone with half of brain should know that if you tear down housing before replacements are built, you're going to have massive problems.