if man was a product of his environment... we'd all STILL be living in caves!!! FREE WILL puts man above the animals... most of us anyway.
Posted on 12/31/2006 2:58:00 PM PST by Lorianne
Government Test Tracks Families Who Moved; Girls Flourish, Not Boys ___
JACKSONVILLE, N.C. -- A decade ago, Lydia Grayson got as far away from her drug-addled, East Harlem housing project as she could. At the time, she was a 28-year-old mother of three, and, she says, a drug user. She took a federal housing voucher and packed her family on a Greyhound bus with one-way tickets to North Carolina.
Climbing out of poverty hasn't been as easy as getting on the bus. She says her life is now drug-free and more stable, and her children are growing up in a better environment. Yet in many ways, her struggles traveled with her.
"You really need to have a focus to get out of the ghetto," says Ms. Grayson, a New York native.
Her experience offers clues to a question society has wrestled with for years: Can a family escape poverty by getting out of the neighborhood where it takes root? It also sheds light on the government's shifting efforts to use housing policy as a solution to poverty.
A $16 billion federal infrastructure has built up around housing vouchers designed to give poor families more choices about where to live. About two million families currently use "Section 8" vouchers that allow them to move with subsidized rent. Since 1993, the government has been demolishing urban housing projects and forcing families to resettle in other places, sometimes with vouchers.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Oh God. Poverty doesn't come as a result of one's neighborhood or surroundings. It comes as a result of one's own behavior. The fact that she moved has little to do with whatever success she's had. She stopped doing drugs (behavior) when she got to the new location. Something she could have done at the old location anyway.
Overall, (Todd Richardson, deputy director of HUD's Program Evaluation Division) says, it's better to move people than leave them in giant housing projects with high concentrations of poverty, one reason HUD has been demolishing public housing.
So, it doesn't work, but we'll keep doing it. What about the cost to the taxpayers? What about the new neighborhoods ruined or devalued because of the voucher clients moved in? This project has a cost, and unless it has a proven benefit, we should get rid of it.
"For property crime, there were 58 arrests for every 100 boys who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods,"
You can take the thug out of the ghetto but you cant take the ghetto out of the thug. I don't want these people moving out of the ghetto into my neighborhood or town.
New Orleans EWast was a great example of section 8 vouchers doing no good. The riff raff moved in and middle class moved out.
Interesting that the girls did better though. I would have thought the opposite.
Well, at least they speak English, are in the country legally and don't march in our streets demanding we change the entire country into what they left behind. How do you feel about illegal alien barrios in your neighborhood?
I work in a new, upsacale neighborhood that the city council saw fit to locate low-income housing. Shootings, crime, graffitti, it all came with them. They finally had to shut down a foot bridge that connects the slum to neighborhood park because of vandalism (the sign on the boarded-up bridge says, "closed due to vandalism").
Funny how things degrade to the lowest common denominator, but don't expect the "social scientists" to understand entropy.
if man was a product of his environment... we'd all STILL be living in caves!!! FREE WILL puts man above the animals... most of us anyway.
The results I have seen are more like cancer. The money pays for exporting slum criminality to unsuspecting neighborhoods.
"How do you feel about illegal alien barrios in your neighborhood?'
I'd take Via Cuna to East St Louis any time.
btt
"Well, at least they speak English, are in the country legally and don't march in our streets demanding we change the entire country into what they left behind. How do you feel about illegal alien barrios in your neighborhood?"
Wouldn't it be nice to have neither?
I live in a large apartment project that (on occasion) takes Section 8 vouchers. I almost always know when they've moved a new family in, because we start seeing tagging around the building, the three am courtyard arguments start, other apartments get broken into and, frequently, the convenience store across the street gets robbed. After a couple of months, the management catches on and evicts them, and things go back to normal again.
Doesn't happen every time, but often enough that the correlation is obvious. You can take the dude out of the hood, but.....
Poverty is a state of mind, not a financial situation. Blacks are each other's own worst enemies when trying to get out of the getto. Any child that suceeds in their education is accused of being "too white" and dragged back down into the filth of poverty.
Without a doubt, the dumbest (leading) question of 2006!
A more relevant question in the real universe would be:
How Much Do the Poor Affect A Neighborhood?
At least in the universe that I've experienced, the affect has been invariant and negative.
Which suggests a serious discussion about the definition of "poor".
Attitude has a great deal to do with it.You can leave the ghetto and all the rampant crime but if you stay in that narrow framework of thinking that the world revolves around gossip,bling bling and partying,it will be all for naught.
Especially important when raising kids.I have seen SO many very bright young black kids get intellectually smothered by mothers who have small minded ghetto mentalities and pass them on to the kids.Thats why its common to hear six and seven year old kids cussing and acting like little thugs.Imprinting is a motha,if I may be punful.
i've heard it said that "Slums don't make slum people, slum people make slums just like Good Churches don't make good people, good people make good churches."
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