As found on VFR , quoting from “American Murder Mystery,” by Hanna Rosin in the Atlantic:
"...the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section 8 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." &
"...Galster explains. His paper compares two scenarios: a city split into high-poverty and low-poverty areas, and a city dominated by median-poverty ones. The latter arrangement is likely to produce more bad neighborhoods and more total crime, he concludes, based on a computer model of how social dysfunction spreads.
Studies show that recipients of Section 8 vouchers have tended to choose moderately poor neighborhoods that were already on the decline, not low-poverty neighborhoods." &
"In each case, Suresh has now confirmed, the first hot spots were the neighborhoods around huge housing projects, and the later ones were places where people had moved when the projects were torn down. From that, she drew the obvious conclusion: 'Crime is going along with them'."
JB comments:
The use of state power to enhance mobility, tends to increase the predatory/parasitical behavior, which is already elevated in the mobilized population, even when the environment should change the newcomers more than it is changed by them.
Such misbehavior, finds less interested retaliators, and is especially promoted by the mobilized, not having to live with the nest that they have fouled. Change in density of population, before and after, would have to be very steep to overcome this mobilization effect.
Considering how high and evident the correlations mentioned in the quotes are, how may one evaluate the sincerity and good faith of those who ask us to value openness to the influxes of such behavioral and other diversity? The article mentions that it is minority areas which are affected, although there is suggestion as well, that the majority types move out ahead of this influx going past its initial stages.
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2 comments:
John,
Let me tell you a story of how this worked in practice in my hometown of Nashville. In the late fifties-sixties, a wonderful neighborhood along Gallatin Road in Nashville, not far from Shelby Park along the Cumberland River, was built. It stretched for miles above the high bluffs over the river. It was beautific and a new high school was built in the area to help the classic old East High School cope. The banking elite in our city then had an idea, "now that we have tons of middle-class factory workers and lower-professionals INVESTED in this area, lets ENFORCE some diversity". They built ALOT of housing projects close to the area (some even on the other side of Gallatin Road), where the project kids would be zoned for the same high schools as these middle class kids-and also live within walking distance of their side-walked-pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. After five years of crime and school violence, the whites started to flee in MASS---out of the county in many cases, but usually further out to the county fringe to the McGavock/Hendersonville/Rivergate areas. By the early seventies this process was complete. The nice neigborhoods were sold in fire sales where peole lost their equity because of the low prices they sold the homes for. In many cases, wealthy "investors" bought these things up and rented them to the newer underlcass. The people that moved had to get new mortgages (the bankers loved that), and real estate investors got to buy up tons of rental property cheap, the real estate agents got tons of business, the developers got to develop the outer areas of the county. Whats not to like?
It was a calculated act of economic violence on the part of the city's elite against its middle class. But at what price? Now, Nashville is getting ever so closer to being a minority-majority-city within the borders of Davidson County. The whites have moved to the ring counties in many instances. Davidson county schools were only about 45% white last I checked, but its numerous private schools were overwhelmingly white.
This real estate boon for the city's elite (which live in southern Davidson County) was fomented on the northern sector of the county, ACROSS the Cumberland River for the most part, and across the large railroad tracks that cut through Nashville. Through zoning, businesses stopped on certain streets and behind certain overpasses to give no reason to loiter at the boundaries at the "correct" areas of town, but not on Gallatin Road, which was crime-infested in the late sixties and seventies.
I imagine realtors and banks love section 8 housing, because when 5 out of 15 houses on a street become section 8, the rest of those people on that street are going to move. They will sell their house cheaper than they thought they would have to, they will have to get a new mortgage, and the old house will get bought cheap--often by slumlord investors who intend to rent it out to single mothers on welfare or have them rezoned as multi-family units, etc. It destroys an old neighborhood, but it makes money for people who live on the right side of town. The paper will love it and praise it because it increased an area's "diversity".
Ive come to think more and more that "diversity" is just a way for the current elite to heap the poor and underachieving on the backs of the striving lower-middle and middle-class as a way to keep them from ever being competition for the current elite or their progeny.
There is one thing I CONTINUALLY notice about this phenomena that is particularily disgusting: The new projects or section 8 houses seemingly constantly are put in neighborhood areas of houses that are roughly 20 years old or older...............meaning that they were getting close to being paid for or were paid off. Big Banking wants everyone paying them interest and hates it when people get their houses paid off, thus they'd like to force these people to move again, into more expensive housing. Installing an insta-slum nearby is an easy way to achieve this.
Thanks for your information, and I know that changeovers like this have occurred repeatedly and on a large scale. The details of these stories are where a lot the truth lies hidden. That someone profits from disruptions is clear enough, or the ancient proverb that tells us that it's an ill-wind that blows no one any good, would be wrong. I believe that it is power-greed first and foremost, which explains these mobilizations of the destructive elements, and not the profiteering like blockbusting. Since the rich are the net taxpayers hugely more than any other group, and destruction of good communities greatly increases the burden on net taxpayers, while adding to the power of officials, it would be the power and not the money, which motivates. The power-greedy can gain from the destruction of society, but the rich are sure to lose thereby, relative to what they would otherwise have had.
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