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Rumble on Policy Street Given any thought to urban policy lately? Don’t worry, not many other normal folk have either. But this forlorn and mildewy ghetto of the social science establishment will soon be getting an expensive new facelift. When a former community organizer takes his seat in the Oval Office in a couple of weeks, he’s going to have a heaping helping of urban policy ready on his desk ready to shovel over to Congress. While we wait, perhaps we might take a look at the state of this long-neglected art, and the rules under which it is conducted. Right now, there’s a good, loud commotion echoing around the blogs and the policy pundits that seems to offer a little parable on the current state of affairs, and it enters some ground where a lot of right-thinking Americans fear to tread. Hanna Rosin, in an Atlantic article called American Murder Mystery, tells the story of an area on the North Side of Memphis where the rate of violent crime has lately been soaring, leading the trend in a city that has climbed to the top of the national crime statistics. The hook for her story was the data compiled by a Memphis criminologist named Richard Janikowski, who was able to match his crime maps with maps showing the location of homes rented under the government’s Section 8 voucher program. Starting from that, Rosin assembles the evidence and solves her mystery. North Memphis neighborhoods were dying, and she fingered two of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s biggest programs as the culprits. HOPE VI was an innovation first proposed by Jack Kemp, and enacted in the Clinton years. Its purpose was to erase one of the government’s most glaring urban policy failures—public housing—and rebuild the levelled sites with homes and apartments of a less hideous architecture, designed to attract families with a mix of income levels. Section 8, a reform originally designed in the Nixon years to get people out of public housing, was a voucher program that allowed poor clients to go find a home wherever they could, with the government picking up most of the rent. Public housing residents forced out by HOPE VI demolitions were given Section 8 vouchers, and left to their own devices. When those programs were hatched, the biggest concern among policy makers was ‘concentrated poverty’. The theorists held that the old federal policy of bottling up the poor—really, the minority poor—in ghettos had led to the spectre of a permanent underclass. The only way to break the cycle of poverty was to break up the project ghettos. It took a while, but that is exactly what Washington is attempting to do. Scholars who in the 90’s issued dire warnings about concentrated poverty suddenly had to shift gears after the 2000 census, when it appeared that poverty was beginning to spread out. At the same time, inner-city and even some suburban neighborhoods all over the country found themselves living in interesting times. Crime and drugs became an issue. Swaggering teenagers commanded the streetcorners and the sidewalks in front of the convenience stores; block clubs and neighborhood groups desperately badgered the police for help. In the neighborhoods, few had any problem explaining what was happening. People didn’t blame the change on the ‘poor’ or on ‘blacks’ (indeed, the problem was often most severe in previously stable black neighborhoods). Black and white, coast to coast, they complained about ‘Section 8 people’ moving in, bringing the gangster habits of the old project ghettos with them. Janikowski and Rosin and the Atlantic deserve much credit for bringing the Section 8 problem to the nation’s attention. But why didn’t someone sound the alarm sooner? It took the press nearly a decade to haltingly, politely pinpoint a roaring phenomenon that was already all too familiar to most everyone living in the inner city. In our times, anyone daring to bring up accusations against a program like Section 8 would be laying themselves open to charges of racism, of ‘blaming the victims’. No newspaper or television news program would have touched the issue, and there is no record that any one ever did. Just what happens when a journalist finally takes on the shibboleths of urban policy makes for an interesting story. Three weeks after American Murder Mystery appeared, a furious riposte came in Shelterforce Online, the organ of the National Housing Institute, written by Xavier de Souza Briggs and Peter Dreier and endorsed by a long list of academic luminaries (including at least one member of Senator Obama’s Urban Policy Committee). It’s long; it’s somber and it’s serious. The authors accuse Ms. Rosin of an ‘exaggerated and circumstantial case’ and in some ways they’re right. They catch her out in overestimating the number of people displaced by project demolitions in Memphis, and more importantly in implicating the housing programs as the cause of the crime spike in Memphis as a whole. Shifting people around might make crime go up in certain neighborhoods, but not in the city as a whole. Academics, traditionally, haven’t been much help at dealing with urban problems. Since well before the New Deal, they have provided the intellectual consensus behind every destructive governmental initiative, and afterwards they have proved singularly adept at sweeping the mess under a rug. They can talk a worm out of an apple once you get them riled up. Briggs and Dreier resorted to an old dodge; they say Rosin has provided no real evidence that the new arrivals were responsible for the crime wave. She only demonstrated a correlation, and as we all know ‘correlation is not causation’. Who are you going to believe, your own eyes or the experts? The meat of their argument is the claim that Rosin exaggerates the effect of housing programs. Only two million families, they note with some regret, are getting Section 8 vouchers. As experts though, they are well aware that only a few thugs in the mix are capable of generating an immense amount of street crime. Briggs and Dreier probably do not live in the kind of neighborhood that Section 8 is currently troubling, and they may not be aware of the huge difference the few rotters can make in quality of life, residents’ perceptions, and their decisions whether to stay or to move out. The authors of the Shelterforce piece would have done well to look at Shelterforce itself before they opened their mouths (it’s an excellent journal, by the way, one of the best resources for what’s going on in the neighborhoods). Back in 2003, it published an article by Christopher Swope called Section 8 is Broken, detailing how an influx of Section 8 residents was ravaging the Patterson Park area of East Baltimore. Patterson Park is typical of one way Section 8 does harm. It’s a struggling, integrated patch of traditional Baltimore rowhouses that was putting up a strong effort to reverse its decline. But here, speculators (and where HUD treads, speculators are never far behind) find it profitable to pick up cheap properties, add a few cosmetic improvements, and collect high HUD rents until the place falls down. There will be at least one neighborhood like it in your city too; if you follow the crime pages of your paper you probably already know where they are. The other Section 8 nightmare comes when large owners or management companies try to cash in on a declining apartment complex by converting it en masse to HUD clients. These often become ‘projects’ much like the ones HUD is spending so much money to demolish, and they too make the papers with some frequency when crack people get a foothold. The most spectacular case so far comes from the Weinland Park area of Columbus, near the Ohio State campus, home to what was the biggest scattered site Section 8 project in America, where 89% of tenants were single mothers. Here, things got so bad that the university was forced to buy up a management company’s entire portfolio of 1,335 units (through a development corporation), relocate the tenants and fix it up. Briggs and Dreier transparently, cynically, don’t even believe their own arguments. In the end they give the game away. Section 8 is fine, they conclude, ‘…so long as the relocation programs are run carefully alongside efforts to strengthen vulnerable or declining neighborhoods.’ If one of our programs is dragging neighborhoods down, relax; we’ll cook up another one that will fix everything. That, in effect, is what Washington has been doing for over seventy years. But the real question is: we’re a reasonably clever nation; why has it proved impossible for America to even once create an urban program that does its job, without systemic failure, massive unintended consequences, and the relentless destruction of neighborhoods? In school, most of us are taught the myth of how the postwar collapse of the inner cities was the product of a sudden ‘white flight’ to suburbia. But study the sad careers of public housing, FHA-sponsored redlining, urban renewal, the interstate program, Model Cities, Section 235, the Office of Economic Opportunity, court-ordered school integration and Section 8, not to mention a welfare program that was designed to subsidize poverty instead of fight it, and you’ll learn a very different story. And there is HUD itself, by general acclaim the most corrupt and dysfunctional bureaucracy Washington has ever spawned, one that cannot even audit its own books let alone run a successful housing program. Search the policy journals for anything like the real story of HUD and the rest of Washington’s interventions, and you will search in vain. In theory, Section 8’s calamitous effects on neighborhoods could be reversed. As a voucher program, it is simpler and more cost-effective (as GAO audits show) than the programs it replaced. All it requires would be a mechanism for preventing concentrations of voucher recipients on any block, and in any neighborhood, while taking vouchers away from the troublemakers. Then, the relocated project poor might enjoy the benefits of living in a stable, safe neighborhood, instead of watching it turn into a place like the one they left behind. Anyone familiar with HUD can tell you that such a reform could never happen. But the experts, instead of insulting the nation’s intelligence by denying the problem exists, might find a better use of their time in exploring the possibilities for reform, and just what in the nature of the Congress and the bureaucracy is standing in its way. Until they start coming clean, instead of merely papering over the disasters of past and present policy, national discourse on urban issues will remain deceitful and incoherent, and the errors of the past will continue to repeat themselves. Repeat themselves? Sometimes the ironies are stunning. Back in the 50’s, a section of the urban renewal law encouraged local authorities to build mixed-income model projects, designed to attract the middle class back to distressed neighborhoods. Most of these rapidly became indistinguishable from the rest of the projects. Now, HOPE VI funds are demolishing them too, and replacing them with—mixed-income model projects designed to attract the middle class back to distressed neighborhoods. Which brings us back to President Obama. Understandably enough for a man who has spent the last year campaigning, he has been pretty cagey about his plans in all fields, including urban policy. Most of his platform is still sketchy at best, though in the proposal for ‘Promise Neighborhoods’ in twenty of the most desperate inner cities, we can see a clear echo of the other two all-purpose programs that set out to attack social problems by massing money and effort across the board to make a decisive difference in selected areas of concentrated poverty. These were Model Cities in the 60’s, and Empowerment Zones/Enterprise Communites under Clinton. In both, billions were spent, no noticeable improvements were detected, and just what happened and where all the money really went will never be known. Also in an Obama administration, we will surely see a reprise of the ‘Healthy Places Act’ he introduced to an unimpressed Congress in 2006. It’s a stealth bill, a foot in the door towards the creation of new codes and regulation and new bureaucracies to enforce ‘health impact assessments’ (like environmental impact statements) on every activity of state and local government, especially in planning and transportation. The bill’s language is Byzantine enough, but its roots clearly lie in the 90’s fad for ‘environmental justice’. We’ve been here before too; in Detroit and other cities, EPA mounted a bizarre effort to shield inner-city residents from the disproportionate share of pollution that they do admittedly suffer. But the remedy proposed was to force businesses and jobs out of inner cities, where they are most needed, and into the suburbs. In Michigan, a massive outcry from blacks and black elected officials made them stop, at least temporarily, and in the aftermath the Detroit News discovered that most of the research behind the EPA’s claims were largely false, and that the agency had engaged in a cover-up to prevent the facts from becoming known Over the decades, no one in the media has given the manifold disasters of federal urban policy much attention, and in all the sound and fury of an economic crisis it does not look like this will change. So far, no one in the incoming administration has given any sign of learning from past mistakes. If anything, we can expect they will be repeated. The long, sad story rolls on, federal incompetence and incoherence making urban problems worse, on and on, over and over without end. |
