Posted on 10/20/2007 10:46:29 AM PDT by Lorianne
>>All they do is perpetuate slumlords<<
Totally true.
Once you give an able bodied person a nice home, what’s the motivation to ever get off welfare? All the government is doing is condoning bad lifestyles. But of course, according to the liberal school system, that is racist to say that someone’s lifestyle is bad. Not working, living off the government, getting all the handouts you can get, not bothering to get married, letting a bum of a boyfriend who doesn’t work live with you while you are raising someone else’s children, that’s bad, and the government shouldn’t be in the business of subsidizing people’s wicked life-style choices.
It’s been going on for years. Techwood Homes was the first Federal housing project, opened by FDR in 1936 (-ish); it was torn down before the 1996 Olympics, replaced with the Olympic village (now dorms for Georgia Tech and Georgia State) and mixed-income apartments.
East Lake Meadows, one of the worst projects in the area, was razed 8 or 9 years ago and replaced with a mixed-income community. The nearby golf course, once Bobby Jones’ home course, was revitalized and has hosted at least one PGA championship (I don’t follow golf) and a ton of pro-am and charity tournaments. I have several friends who’ve bough houses in East Lake, in areas where none of us would want to be caught after dark just a decade ago.
It’s not just Atlanta. Chicago’s Cabrini Green, one of the largest, most ambitious and most infamously drug-, crime- and gan-riddled projects, is no more.
As I’ve been saying for years, the War on Poverty is over, and we won. Our “poor” have color TVs, two cars and air conditioning. Their primary nutritional problem is not malnutrition, but obesity.
Housing projects made sense when the problem was a lack of decent, basic shelter, when people were living in shanty towns with leaky roofs, no running water, and third-world sanitation. Food stamps made sense when the problem was hunger — literally, folks suffering severe and chronic ailments from malnutrition.
Those days are gone. The problem today is not a lack of food or shelter, but a lack of family and community. Housing projects are nothing but stockyards for a permanent underclass, grim places devoid of much hope for the future. Children who grow up there grow up with no positive role models, because by definition success means leaving the projects. The only folks who have any material success, who have anything interesting going on, are the pimps, drug-dealers and gang-bangers.
Getting poor families into real neighborhoods gives those kids examples to follow. Folks who get up in the morning and go to work, and reap the rewards. Whether they’re on Indian reservations, in urban housing projects, or in the Appalachian backwoods, what perpetually poor families need is integration to the American mainstream — it may be too late for some of the adults, but at least the children can see that there is a better life within their reach, and the way to get to it is to stay in school and work for it.
And not to put a damper on FR’s favorite pastime, but sometimes an idea makes so darn much sense that it ceases to be partisan. Enterprise zones were Jack Kemp’s pet project as Bush 41’s HUD secretary, and were then adopted enthusiastically by the Clinton administration. Atlanta’s mayors, city council members and housing board members have been almost all Democrats, but they’ve been supported in this new direction by both Republicans and Democrats at the county, state and federal level. It’s a rare and heartening example of folks wiling to admit that something works and get behind it, even if the other guy thought of it.
It’s like the old saying, no matter where you go, there you are.
Just changing the location of a person doesn’t change their way of thinking. Yes, the environment plays a role, but it isn’t the only thing that needs to change.
sec 8 alone doesn’t work.
Alone? Certainly not. But it's a step in the right direction. It could hardly have a worse record than the New Deal model of federal housing projects.
East New Orleans used to be very nice. It was called the Pearl of New Orleans. Then came Section 8 and the rest is history.
Maybe a step in the right direction, but it shouldn’t be the step that’s taken first. Jobs should be the first step via workfare.
bmflr
The flaw in the theory is that the role models will leave in short order, or where they live Sec. 8 housing is not taken by landlords.
In Chicago there are a group of small towns on the southeast edge of Chicago that are highly concentrated with Sec. 8 housing. On the northern end of Chicago you have some of the most affluent towns in the country. They don't have any Sec. 8 housing. How did the Sec. 8 housing tenants end up in the southeast suburbs?
It's hard for me to tell if you simply forgot the < /sarc > tag or if you're from another dimension.
You haven't lived until you've lived near one of these "Section 8 families".
If ever there has been an attempt to define "hell on earth" this would be among my top three definitions.
You can't "create" a civilized homeowner out of a "family" used to getting everything for free with no personal stake, responsibily or effort on their part...
Never could. Never will.
All you can accomplish is to spread filth and crime more "democratically". I hope you like pit bulls...
Oh, and the kids. For God's sake, think of the kids!
Valid point. Atlanta has roughly quadrupled its population in the last 30 years -- in the '80s and early '90s, the growth was concentrated in the suburbs. Starting with the run-up to the Olympics, a lot of development has gone on downtown, reversing white flight to a degree, because the traffic in the 'burbs got so nightmarish.
Intown housing has been on a years-long boom, so far (knock wood) with enough population growth to support it. Developers have moved eagerly into neighborhoods formerly on the skids, both with new construction and a lot of warehouse and office conversions to residential. In designated enterprise zones, developers get property tax abatement -- but a condition of that is that they have to set aside X number of units for rents below $Y a month. I don't know if they're required to accept Section 8 or not.
Whether poor residents pull a neighborhood down or the neighborhood helps pull them up is in part a function of numbers. And there Atlanta also benefits from local trends. The new housing -- in which I include renovations of neglected properties as well as construction or conversion of new ones -- has been sufficiently widespread that the population of section-8 recipients in a given neighborhood doesn't hit the ripping point (an overused, but still useful, concept).
Of course, what I'm talking about is only a little more than a decade's experience. It could still go wrong, especially if Atlanta's boom slows down (if, for example, we have to halt new development because we run out of *&^ing water). And that's where your point about one-size-fits-all programs hits the nail on the head -- the programs need to be flexible enough to adjust not just from place to place, but over time.
In cities where population growth is stagnant or even negative, where there's aging surplus housing, the dynamic would be very different. Even leaving out medium-sized cities like Camden, NJ and Gary, IN, which are just basket cases, and Detroit, which is headed toward becoming a medium-sized city,
They wouldn't be in orphanages very long. People are so eager to adopt they are going to other countries to find babies.
According to one essay I read, vouchers are especially insidious.
Some vouchers pay (at least as much as) the average rent in the area. That can mean they cover a higher rent payment than a "working-poor" individual in the same area can afford.
The landlords might dislike the habits of vouchered tenants, but they find it hard to turn down the increased income. The result is, the voucher holders get the better housing and the working poor get the leftovers. This is a disincentive to work.
Also, landlords have often been more eager to accept the vouchered tenants, because the government would pay the landlord automatically each month.
Chicago did that and murders dropped by 33%.
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