
New data challenges the cultural consensus on public housing - e15ctr0n
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/12/the-remarkable-thing-that-happens-to-poor-kids-when-you-help-their-parents-with-rent/
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ThrustVectoring
There's a significant difference between what happens when you give an
intervention to part of a population and all of it. Specifically, the overall
system they're a part of will respond differently.

Take education, for example. It's pretty obvious that getting a college degree
will help any one individual out - everyone applies for jobs, and employers
will look favorably on those with a college degree. The calculus changes when
you make it way easier for _everyone_ to get a college degree, since employers
can't prefer everyone.

I have a similar worry about UBI and other anti-poverty interventions. If the
system is set up to squeeze the poor until they are inches away from starving
or rioting, then an extra $500/yr will help any individual stuck there out by
quite a lot. If you give everyone in that situation an extra $500/yr, I'm
worried that what'll happen is that it gets sucked up by various landlords and
rentiers. There's historical precedent for it, too - the lives of the American
poor were not substantially improved by the vast amounts of excess wealth and
productivity that let almost everyone off the farms.

~~~
Mz
Thank you for commenting.

Poverty has more to do with a lack of rights, lack of knowledge, lack of
connections, lack of opportunity, etc. Those things lead to a lack of money.
Giving people money does not tend to resolve those issues, but resolving those
issues leads to more money.

I think the UBI is a terrible idea. It is a theoretically easy answer. In
reality, it would do more harm than good, for a great many reasons.

~~~
mjevans
You are correct in that UBI alone won't magically solve the problem.

I've thought that the primary goal for UBI is an attempt to solve wealth
distribution inequality.

Other things that also help with that issue are providing basic subsistence at
a rate that the market is free to undercut; ideally also affordable with UBI.

That would allow for competition, but provides a price cap for the market as
well. If you say X cannot go above Y, or else the government will find a way
to address this social need that society is not, then you can encourage
competition while limiting predatory impacts.

~~~
mrec
> _I 've thought that the primary goal for UBI is an attempt to solve wealth
> distribution inequality._

I disagree; I think the primary goal for UBI is to remove perverse incentives.
For example, removing welfare traps (where you end up worse off if you start
working), or expanding the reach of price discovery (social tenants have no
incentive to move somewhere cheaper if the govt covers your rent either way,
and landlords have no incentive to charge less than the HB ceiling because
tenants on HB don't care).

I think it's well worth doing even if it doesn't reduce inequality (though
obviously it'd be nice if it did that too).

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dre85
"Remarkable" things happen when kids grow up in projects, such as earning 500
bucks more ANNUALLY. Maybe the authors managed to p-hack their way to some
statistical significance with this number, but I would think that the life
significance of an extra 500$ a year in the U.S. is not something astounding.

~~~
nouveaux
The poverty level in United States is $11,880. At the top end, $500 is 4.2%
and plenty of people are making less than $10,000 a year. At that rate, I
think $500 is starting to look statistically significant.

[https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-guidelines](https://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty-
guidelines)

~~~
Hydraulix989
Let's not conflate the very different concepts of "statistical significance"
and magnitude of the effect.

An effect with a small magnitude can be highly statistically significant, and
vice versa.

If you don't understand the very important difference, then you probably
flunked out of freshman stats.

~~~
dredmorbius
Sadly, I suspect a _significant_ number of people who didn't flunk freshman
stats have trouble with this. The terminology is simply poor.

No need to throw shade, BTW.

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owenversteeg
Everyone here is focusing on the $500/yr, which I agree sounds like nothing
although is actually substantial to many of these families. But the
incarceration figures in the article are pretty interesting: an 11% smaller
chance of ending up in jail sounds pretty good to me.

~~~
tgb
Yeah and it was 500 per year per year of public housing. You might easily
spend five or ten years there, for a very significant increase in income.
(treating this as linear is reasonable since the number comes from comparing
siblings and so should be an average of the effects per year over a wide range
of years. Compared to a study that just investigated the first year they were
there.)

On the other hand, that was only for girls. Which makes me worried that they
were picking out outcomes that matched their end goal.

~~~
mjevans
Even if it only helped out the girls it shows SOME correlation and a need for
more family stability assistance.

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maerF0x0
>"earn hundreds of dollars more each year " ...

Uh, not worth spending millions on public housing then..

IMO the "Section 8" (housing vouchers) seems to be a market solution to
housing issues and helps fight segregation (when landlords arent doing illegal
things). One of the solutions to classism is to have people mix more. Live
together, school together, work together, marry together.

~~~
josho
Agreed but for rather different reasons.

I've travelled through the US and stumbled into public housing projects on a
few occasions. I found them simply repugnant. Public policy that clumps the
poor together is beyond stupid. It's made even worse when you factor in how
schools in the US get their budget (property taxes). So, this housing policy
further guarantees that the poor stay poor because they end up in crappy
schools.

It's like America doesn't actually want to fix any of their social problems.

~~~
ghaff
While you're right about property taxes going to schools, the reality is that
urban schools tend to have higher expenditures per pupil than many upscale
suburban schools.

For example, in Massachusetts, Boston has per-pupil expenditures about $1,000
more (~5%) than Concord, one of the tonier western suburbs. Sure, Boston has
many upscale areas but it also includes neighborhoods like Dorchester and
Roxbury.

Yes, you can look through the data and find especially old industry cities
that have lower spending than many suburban towns but expenditure/pupil
doesn't really follow clear patterns based on the income of the community.

------
JDiculous
In NYC, the problem is a severe shortage of low to middle income housing
units, whether that be market-rate or public housing. Every new building that
pops up is a luxury building - serving as an investment or pied-a-terre for
rich foreigners or front for money laundering. Our mayor's plan to expand
affordable housing is to have these luxury building developers set aside a
percentage of these luxury units to house low income people in their luxury
buildings, which obviously is an extraordinarily inefficient way to provide
affordable housing and doesn't even come close to meeting the demand.

Since private developers aren't building apartments catering to low income
people, the government needs to step in and develop them themselves. High-
rises with barebones utilitarian apartments. Get rid of this 150 square feet
mandate on living rooms, living rooms are a luxury already as it is since most
tenants erect makeshift walls to convert them into additional bedrooms to make
the rent affordable.

The units should be market-rate, but governments will prioritize applicants
who are U.S. citizens, have children, don't have a criminal record, etc. If
they were to sell as condos, then priority would be given to first-time
homebuyers and people who actually will live in the place.

A certain percentage can be allocated to low income people, but unlike current
public housing, you shouldn't be able to just live there forever, especially
if your income increases to a point where you're no longer low income.

The main idea is that we need to increase the supply of non-luxury apartments
to compensate for the failure of the private markets to do the same. This
would be similar to public housing, except that it would have market-rate
apartments.

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tonmoy
> earn hundreds of dollars more...

I don't know the exact numbers but if the mean is nearly ten thousand and the
standard deviation is nearly one thousand then this is a statistically
insignificant p-value

~~~
chillydawg
That's not true. If you have a large enough sample, you can be confident that
even a small improvement in mean, despite a large stddev is meaningful.
Whether it actually matters in the real world and causes positive outcomes for
people is an entirely different matter.

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DanielBMarkham
"...studied the effects of Section 8 and did not find evidence that vouchers
were any better for children than traditional public housing..."

Aside from, presumably, more direct experience with crime? Because housing
projects do have higher crime rates, right?

It seems there may be some context missing here. Aside from the clear title, I
had difficult teasing out the value in this story.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
People like us that used to care just got fatigued out on these issues. We're
never given the full story. The right doesn't cover these topics, and the left
exaggerates and manipulates them. Leaving a large gap of information about
causes and effects both long term and short term. My relatives came to America
with little to nothing, they were dirt poor back home, and dirt poor when they
moved here. Lived in a poor neighborhood and the first thing they did was get
the hell out of there. Reason: the lack of civility of the people living
there. Not all poor people are "uncivilized" but not all poor people are "just
unfortunately people trying their best" either. Too many of them are where
they are for a reason, defective characteristics. And it seems no one wants to
be honest about that.

~~~
natrius
"Civility" is learned behavior, and an unending history of government-imposed
racial and economic segregation is bound to result in a gap in learned
behaviors. Maybe we should stop allowing our governments to create exclusive
neighborhoods for the wealthy. The market has no power to exclude cheaper
homes.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
Uh, we're from eastern Europe where everyone in the country is the same
ethnicity. We had the extreme rich and the extreme poor and we all behaved.
Money and civility are two different things. In fact we had communism which
followed and really kept people out of opportunities. We didn't walk around
acting like rednecks or gangsters. Same as in the USA 50 years ago. When
blacks and whites used different bathrooms, and racial segregation was at its
peak, still both black and white communities dressed well to go to church,
authority was more respected, the family stayed in tact, sex before marriage
was taboo. Now despite "integration and desegregation" culture and morality
has rotted out society.

Long story short, I don't agree with "government is the problem, government is
the solution". Low culture and standards are the problem. High culture and
standards are the solution. Regardless of neighborhood or income.

~~~
natrius
America is not integrated. I agree culture and standards are the solution.
Those do not spread easily in segregated societies.

~~~
ChrisNorstrom
Culture & standards were higher during segregation, we are more integrated
than we were in the past and the culture rot is even worse. Your narrative
that race and separation has everything to do with it is incorrect.

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madenine
> "However, for black boys growing up in the very poorest projects, the
> benefits of housing assistance when they entered the labor force were also
> indistinguishable from zero."

So public housing/vouchers slightly raises income and reduces the likelihood
of going prison, except when it doesn't.

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ysavir
> Comparing the older children to their younger siblings, who will spend more
> time living in the project, allows the researchers to focus specifically on
> the effects of housing assistance as opposed to those of parenting or other
> factors unique to each family.

That sounds like a very questionable control group...

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davesque
I'm sure people have suggested this, but what's the thinking about giving
people housing stipends instead of making them live in a specific building
which is annexed for a housing project? Seems like this could address some of
the shortcomings of housing projects such as racial segregation and
concentration of crime.

~~~
maxsilver
We effectively already offer this in the US -- it's Section 8 "Housing Choice
Voucher", as the article mentions.

[http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/topics/housing_choi...](http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/topics/housing_choice_voucher_program_section_8)

~~~
ch4s3
You will find that places accepting Section 8 vouchers are highly
concentrated, poorly connected to transit, and highly segregated. Local
property owners often vigorously fight zoning that allows any new, better
connected, or mixed income development that accepts section 8 payments. So in
effect you get privately managed projects. Its pretty tragic really.

~~~
ulber
Is there a good reason this aid is given as a voucher versus giving out money
against proof of a rental contract (e.g. how it works in Finland)? Simplified
bureaucracy? This would solve at least some of the discrimination problems
since there wouldn't be a class of people recognizable by them holding a
special form of money.

~~~
kodablah
What specifically does "against proof of a rental contract" mean? Rental
contracts, at least apartment ones here in the states, often require some up
front cash. Is this not the case in Finland? If it is the case, is the
government provided money given to the render before or after the contract? If
given before, how do they prevent people from just stealing it? If given
after, how do people without money provide the up-front cash?

These and similar questions are some common reasons behind using
vouchers/stamps instead of cash.

~~~
ch4s3
Yeah, this is one of many reasons I'm in favor of direct cash grants rather
than vouchers and dispensation of services that could be purchased more
cheaply on an open market. Don't get me wrong, I'm not free market zealot, but
the current housing voucher program is one of the least efficient means of
housing individuals I can imagine.

------
Kenji
The remarkable thing that happens when the state funds rent like that is
increasing rents until the original situation is reached again or the bubble
bursts. We already have enough trouble with the low or even negative interest
rates that launch house prices into unprecedented heights.

------
rayiner
Instead of spending huge amounts of money on inner-city school districts, we
should build public housing in good school districts in the suburbs.
Integration is the answer to inter-generational poverty, not the highly
refined "separate but equal" of our current policies.

~~~
bcx
Part of the reason the suburban schools in good districts are so good is
because they have relatively low population density and relatively high
property tax revenue. So they can spend more money per student.

At some point there are probably diminishing returns to the amount of $$ spent
per student in a school system. But you can imagine that most suburban parents
would have a hard time reducing the $$ spent on their own kids for the benefit
of the greater good.

~~~
larrik
I don't believe this is true.

Look at a state like Connecticut, which features very affluent areas and very
poor areas within. If you like at the top performing schools, sure the best
ones tend to be in affluent areas, and the worst ones are in cities, but
that's not at all how much money gets spent per student. For instance, the
town in the state with the absolutely lowest spending per student, Wolcott, is
one of the top school districts in the state, and even has a school that won
the national "Blue Ribbon" aware for excellence last year.

There are also numerous studies (which I'm way too lazy to go find) that
indicate the affluence of the parents to be more important than the affluence
of the school on a child's school success (this article is about adult income,
though).

~~~
maxerickson
How do the schools in Connecticut compare to the schools in a state like
Nebraska?

I ask because I think it can be hard to generalize from an area like
Connecticut that is really quite high population density and quite wealthy to
the US in general (in CT a student might be a reasonable distance to 3 or 4
large high schools. In Nebraska, they might be a reasonable distance to 1 tiny
school).

~~~
larrik
I can't truly speak for the whole country, but Connecticut schools seem to be
a class above most anywhere else. Every time I've considered moving somewhere
cheaper, the school system research is completely depressing. I know parents
who tried to move to Florida and found the schools to be 2 years behind CT
grade-level-wise (so their 4th grader is learning stuff they learned in 2nd
grade in CT). They actually simply moved back, it was that bad.

Keep in mind that CT is a bit of a sinking ship, with companies and jobs
leaving, and the population often following it. It's not some place that
everyone is flocking to, but it has a long history of being at the forefront
of things like education and mental health.

I've also heard, from numerous people, that having a few years experience as a
teacher here in CT will make getting a job teaching in most other places
completely trivial.

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newtons_bodkin
As somebody that grew up in a poor family in the 80s this really resonates
with me.

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jvm
The claim is that Section 8 vouchers aren't better than public housing, I
wonder how either would compare to the equivalent benefit granted through e.g.
food stamps or cash.

I was also under the impression that vouchers were cheaper to administer and
provide, so for equivalent benefit might still be worthwhile.

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the_watcher
> because there is no way to know for certain how those families would be
> doing without the help

Not taking a side here, but this specific problem is why, no matter the
research, there will almost certainly be arguments on both sides of the
debate.

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andrewclunn
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg5SwyTvAHw

It's not a new complaint. But I found that video more informative.

