The Battle Over Housing the Poor

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Everyone acknowledges that many housing projects had a high crime rate. There were many factors contributing to that. It’s actually not particularly more anti-poor or racist to observe that dispersing people out of the projects didn’t always fix the problem. I personally find arguments that crime correlates with poverty because of lack of opportunity, frustration, isolation, unemployment, discrimination, and structural obstacles to be stronger and less patronizing than the idea that if you put enough poor people together the loss of middle-class role models causes crime to sprout out of nowhere.

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So I don’t find the Memphis pattern Rosin’s academics describe hard to believe: Large numbers of people facing all those obstacles and challenges and histories were dispersed throughout much of the city and nothing else about their situations changed.

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Plenty of housing advocates, often in the pages of Shelterforce, have criticized HOPE VI projects for not providing enough replacement housingor relocation support to allow residents to return, and for disrupting support systemsand communities that people valued and relied upon, even as they deserved and wanted a safer and more pleasant physical environment. (I was, in fact, speaking recently with someone new to the field who was remarking on how surprising the apparent widespread support for the clearly questionable HOPE VI was.)

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Many people in the housing field have also noted that in many cases people displaced by HOPE VI were not moving far and tended to re-concentrate in near-poor neighborhoods, limiting any good effects that de-concentrating poverty might have had.