A painful lesson in racial reality.
By Ian Jobling • 6/23/08
The Atlantic just published a superb article by Hanna Rosin about how 1990s efforts to move public housing recipients out of the inner city have resulted in an explosion of crime in neighborhoods to which former ghetto dwellers relocated in large numbers. During the Clinton administration, many cities tore down old crime-infested projects and gave their residents “Section 8” housing vouchers that they could use where they wished. Also, cities built spiffy new projects away from the inner city. The end result of these policies may be a massive increase in crime, rather than the decrease liberals hoped for, however.
The new discovery about crime patterns is substantially owing to a collaboration between crime expert Richard Janikowski and his wife, Phyllis Betts, an expert in public housing. The two examined patterns of crime in Memphis.
The new suburban housing projects do not seem to have cured public housing recipients of their old ways. Rosin interviewed Leslie Shaw, a black woman “11 years crack free,” who left her old inner-city project, Dixie Homes, after it was demolished in 1997 and moved to a suburban project called Springdale Creek. Shaw had been delighted to hear that the new project was a gated community and hoped her standard of living would improve there.