Greg Anrig and Harold Pollack argue that Hannah Rosin was overreading the evidence when she concluded that Section 8 rental vouchers were responsible for a crime spike in the Memphis area.
« Afghans for Obama | Main | Pants on Fire III »
Defending Housing Vouchers
30 Jul 2008 05:57 pm
Comments (18)
The last paragraph of that piece is the most pertinent.Public housing has tremendous benefits in certain areas of public policy (and this will probably increase given the current economy). But to use it as a blunt instrument of social policy or to move "problem families" either to or from "problem areas" with no thought or planning is futile and counter-productive.
Barack Hits Back: Ad Says McCain Taking Low Road
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/30/barack-hits-back-ad-says_n_115960.html
While the housing voucher program shows promise in the small scale, that is through low use housing dispersal, it is untenable as a large scale process. On the one hand, breaking up whole communities without enough replacement housing stock--per the the removal of "one for one"--necessarily leaves many people to suffer on the "open" market. Look at the disastrous experiment in Chicago.
Barack Hits Back: Ad Says McCain Taking Low Road
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/30/barack-hits-back-ad-says_n_115960.html
Barack Hits Back: Ad Says McCain Taking Low Road
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/30/barack-hits-back-ad-says_n_115960.html
2,420 yahoo hits for "Hannah Rosin". Matt's not the only person to make that mistake.
It's worth mentioning that it's not Hanna Rosin's theory. Her article is about the work of two professors, Richard Janikowski and Phyllis Betts.
Even on a generous read, I thought the most obvious takeaway from the original piece was that we needed MORE poverty dispersal, not an abandonment of the idea. But I hadn't realized how much poverty dispersal programs had been cut back.
From what I remember from the story, the housing vouchers worked well. What didn't work was demolishing all the projects and forcing the residents to move elsewhere whether they wanted to or not.
Wait a second. Anrig and Pollack say:
Since poverty and crime are correlated, you would expect that inner-ring suburban crime went up and central city crime went down -- but that's only a statistical artifact of changing neighborhood composition rather than a causal effect of poverty on crime. The correlation of crime and poverty, old news to be sure, is the only thing demonstrated by the map in the article.
Isn't that exactly what Rosin is saying? Move the poor people, and the crime follows? So aren't Anrig and Pollack confirming her thesis, rather than refuting it??
Noah,
Actually, the suggestion in the original article was that dispering poverty might not just move crime around, but might also increase the overall crime rate. The theory was that there was a threshhold effect where poverty levels beyond a certain point cause wider community effects, and that by dispering poverty you would be pushing more communities past this threshhold. But if crime rates simply track poverty rates without any such threshhold effect, then how poverty is distributed shouldn't affect overall crime rates.
DTM - Got it. Thanks.
Noah
you may not be the first person in the history of commenting that actually accepted another person's amiable correction, but it does make me hold out hope for intelligent debate.
the point made by Klug, that Rosin is only reporting what 'Professors' are saying, is well taken. I am an (associate) professor at a pretty good research university. In general I would say that my colleagues are pretty skeptical about research that gets reported in the popular media. There is certainly an element of jealousy involved in this, but at the same time it is hard to not feel that the research most likely to be reported in the MSM is that which either panders to or attacks general stereotypes, independent of its theoretical support or experimental/statistical rigor. There is sometimes a temptation for a generally left magazine like the atlantic to publish contrarian articles as a badge of evenhandedness, but really they flow from the same font as the rest of their material. that said, I love the blogs here and the atlantic in general (and I'm quite glad they've stopped with the prognostication--it was wearing a bit thin)
Greg Anrig has already pretty much convinced me he's an idiot by holding up the Bush administration as some sort of paragon of small-government Republican ideology, so I'll read anything he says about Hannah Rosin's work with extreme prejudice.
We had a section 8 house two doors down for a couple of years and it was an absolute nightmare for the neighborhood. It's amazing how much harm one bad property can do to a place.
Obviously this is a single anecdote, but I feel it's a bit delusional to believe that there aren't problems associated with the program.
Noah/DTM -- as I understand Anrig and Pollack it goes beyond that. Inner-ring suburbs got poorer throughout the country even without the section 8 dispersals, and that's what causes the increase in crime there. In fact the claim seems to be that the section 8 folks wound up in those suburbs because they're poorer: "Section 8 voucher holders typically migrate to lower-cost housing, which tends to be concentrated in poor neighborhoods where crime is a serious concern."
I should say that the poverty of inner-ring suburbs is correlated with the increase in crime, not that it causes it.
Comments closed August 13, 2008.
| 
Heads in the Sand
I think you mean Hanna Rosin. Matthew, ye need a copy editor.
Posted by AMP | July 30, 2008 6:32 PM