Saturday, July 05, 2008

Violent Crime Outsourced: Another Libtard "Soilution" Gone Horribly Wrong?

The Atlantic has one of those articles that points out the persistence of crime in the public housing area, and the persistence of crime among the former dwellers of public housing when the projects are demolished & Section 8 subsidies are given to the former inhabitants to relocate. Old vices die hard, and the apparent decline in violent crime & murders in the '90s may have multiple reasons, but one of them is NOT Section 8. Indeed, a recent comeback in violent crime & murder in the 'burbs may be because Section 8 has swept the dirt to adjacent suburbs---not eliminated drug- and crime-neighborhoods. Here's an Atlantic spotlight on Memphis:
The inner city, where crime used to be concentrated, was now clean. But everywhere else looked much worse: arrests had skyrocketed along two corridors north and west of the central city (the bunny rabbit’s ears) and along one in the southeast (the tail). Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city.

Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn’t been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts and Janikowski have two dogs, three cats, and no kids; they both tend to bring their work home with them. Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government’s most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city’s public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal “Section8” rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.

If police departments are usually stingy with their information, housing departments are even more so. Getting addresses of Section 8 holders is difficult, because the departments want to protect the residents’ privacy. Betts, however, helps the city track where the former residents of public housing have moved. Over time, she and Janikowski realized that they were doing their fieldwork in the same neighborhoods.

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (“He has a better imagination,” she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

The rest of this excellent Atlantic piece shows how our urban political class is trying to cover up the outsourcing of crime from high-rise projects to near-suburbs without getting nailed for relocating criminals

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