
American Murder Mystery (2008) - simonb
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american-murder-mystery/6872/
======
Mz
I don't know what the answer to problems like this is but I have spent a fair
amount of time studying (both formally and informally) issues like poverty and
pondering how to effectively address really thorny problems. I have concluded
that government programs designed "to help the poor" generally do more harm
than good. Part of the problem is with a) requiring recipients to
psychologically identify themselves as "the poor" and b) the fact that the
very design of such programs tends to reward people for having problems and
punish them for trying to resolve their problems. A chief example is Welfare
which was designed to "help poor single mothers". It was designed when most
poor, single mothers were people we would classify as "the deserving poor":
widows. But the way it was designed changed the social contract and actively
encouraged women to choose to become poor, single moms in order to qualify for
assistance. The result: Welfare actively grew the population of poor, single
moms. Not remotely the original intent.

So I have concluded that if you REALLY want to "help the poor", you have to
start by removing "poor" from your program definition and qualifying
requirements. Instead, ask yourself: what would help the people generally and
do so in such a way that, coincidentally, poor people would benefit
significantly? For example, countries that help parents generally, regardless
of marital status or income, seem to get better results than the American
Welfare system.

~~~
Alex3917
"I have concluded that government programs designed 'to help the poor'
generally do more harm than good."

The problem is that in most countries the poor are people who can't buy
anything, whereas in the US the poor are people who can't be sold anything.
They're like the spent fuel rods of capitalism. You can try to recycle them,
or try to bury them, but moving them from place to place only causes trouble.

~~~
Mz
And I would say that the problem is with viewing them primarily through the
lens of their economic value to begin with, which puts them in the position
you describe. That is a big part of why programs designed by the American
government to help the poor typically get such dreadful results.

------
mml
This article is a bit stale, but it's true. Anyone who has lived near section
8 housing will tell you the same.

For every family that wants to escape, there are a thousand who are mad that
their check is late, and scream racism at their neighbors when told to pick up
their own trash.

~~~
ronnier
I actually used to live in section 8 housing growing up. Once I was old
enough, the path seemed so clear on how to get far removed from that
environment. I'm not sure why others don't see it and continue to accept their
situation as unchangeable.

~~~
cia_plant
It seems to me that it is unchangeable in the aggregate. A certain level of
unemployment is simply part of our system; the workers are literally incapable
of changing the economic variables which create that level. Moreover, a large
proportion of the employed are poorly-paid retail workers or laborers; again,
it is not possible for the actions of this group to change the size of the
different segments of the job market. As such it is a game of musical chairs
as to who ends up with the shit jobs, who ends up without a job. The fact that
an individual can escape by outdoing his peers only masks the fundamental
hopelessness of the situation.

------
gfunk911
People discussing this, please dispute the data, offer solutions, talk about
root causes, etc. Please don't fall into the trap of calling the data racist.

------
mynameishere
About three paragraphs in I thought, "Yeah, that's section 8" and was
preparing to be unsurprised when it didn't mention it. But it did.

Anyway, the whole point of Section 8 was to move the riffraff from the too-
close-to-rich-people city areas to the suburbs, in a Parisian style setup. The
suburbs, of course, were where middle class people fled to when the cities
were originally ravaged by similiar population movements years ago. The
eventual white flight (ie, ethnic cleansing) from the suburbs was baked into
the cake and none of the other unexpected consequences were in the least
unexpected.

------
Vivtek
Well, this made my day way more depressing.

I'm probably one of the flamier liberals here on HNN, but I have to agree with
this one - I landlorded for a short time before realizing it's not easy money,
and one of my tenants was a nice young lady on Section 8. Before she moved on,
she (or her live-in boyfriend) left holes in the walls, the garden shed
literally stuffed full of trash, the carpets full of fleas and a big hole in
the yard from the dog not permitted in the lease, dirt ground into the kitchen
floor that took me a day and a half to scrub out (like, bus-station-level
gum), and a street full of really, really pissed neighbors.

Poverty is endemic, and Section 8 doesn't help, even though I really wish it
did. However, eliminating Section 8 won't help, either, I suspect.

I wish I knew an answer.

~~~
cagey
You indeed sound an awful lot like _my_ (ex-)neighbor who decided to "move up
in the world" to a nice house in a much richer neighborhood, while keeping
your existing home (in our (til then) quite nice upper middle class
neighborhood) for income purposes. And, like either (a) a flaming liberal, or
(b) someone to whom the higher rent from Section 8 tenants, and the fact the
Uncle Sugar was writing the rent check, was mighty appealing, decided to rent
to Section 8.

Yes, I would would be one of your VERY VERY PISSED OFF neighbors. I hope it
cost you plenty, but I'm sure Uncle Sugar made you whole with our tax dollars
(if they didn't, word would get out that Section 8 landlording was a losing
proposition, and the 'crats can't have that! Anyway, it's not _their_ money).

Me? Bitter about Section 8 (landlords)? Me?

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Single page:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2008/07/american-m...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2008/07/american-
murder-mystery/6872/)

------
ronnier
This is a long article, here are some of the key points.

...

Crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities
(with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing,
sometimes by as much as 20percent a year.

...

The demolition of the city’s public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide
experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated
poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former
residents federal “Section8” rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move
out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next
nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro
community.

...

In 1976, letters went out to 200 randomly selected families among the 44,000
living in Chicago public housing, asking whether they wanted to move out to
the suburbs. A counselor went around the projects explaining the new Section8
program, in which tenants would pay 25percent of their income for rent and the
government would pay the rest, up to a certain limit.

...

Starting in 1977, in what became known as the Gautreaux program, hundreds of
families relocated to suburban neighborhoods—most of them about 25miles from
the ghetto, with very low poverty rates and good public schools.

...

Cisneros floated the idea of knocking down the projects and moving the
residents out into the metro area.

The federal government encouraged the demolitions with a $6.3billion program
to redevelop the old project sites, called HOPE VI, or “Housing Opportunities
for People Everywhere.” The program was launched in the same spirit as Bill
Clinton’s national service initiative—communities working together to “rebuild
lives.” One Chicago housing official mused about “architects and lawyers and
bus drivers and people on welfare living together.”

...

In the most literal sense, the national effort to diffuse poverty has
succeeded. Since 1990, the number of Americans living in neighborhoods of
concentrated poverty—meaning that at least 40 percent of households are below
the federal poverty level—has declined by 24percent. But this doesn’t tell the
whole story.

...

George Galster, of Wayne State University, analyzed the shifts in urban
poverty and published his results in a paper called “A Cautionary Tale.” While
fewer Americans live in high-poverty neighborhoods, increasing numbers now
live in places with “moderate” poverty rates, meaning rates of 20 to 40
percent.

...

In 2003, the Brookings Institution published a list of the 15 cities where the
number of high-poverty neighborhoods had declined the most. In recent years,
most of those cities have also shown up as among the most violent in the U.S.,
according to FBI data.

...

The University of Louisville criminologist Geetha Suresh was tracking local
patterns of violent crime. She had just arrived from India, had never heard of
a housing project. Suresh noticed a recurring pattern, A particularly violent
neighborhood would suddenly go cold, and crime would heat up in several new
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.”

...

In some places, the phenomenon is hard to detect, but there may be a simple
reason: in cities with tight housing markets, Section8 recipients generally
can’t afford to live within the city limits, and sometimes they even move to
different states. New York, where the rate of violent crime has plummeted,
appears to have pushed many of its poor out to New Jersey, where violent crime
has increased in nearby cities and suburbs. Washington, D.C., has exported
some of its crime to surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia.

...

In 2005, another wave of project demolitions pushed the number of people
displaced from public housing to well over 20,000, and crime skyrocketed.

...

If replacing housing projects with vouchers had achieved its main
goal—infusing the poor with middle-class habits—then higher crime rates might
be a price worth paying. But today, social scientists looking back on the
whole grand experiment are apt to use words like baffling and disappointing.

...

a follow-up to the highly positive, highly publicized Gautreaux study of
1991—produced results that were “puzzling,” said Susan Popkin of the Urban
Institute. In this study, volunteers were also moved into low-poverty
neighborhoods, although they didn’t move nearly as far as the Gautreaux
families. Women reported lower levels of obesity and depression. But they were
no more likely to find jobs. The schools were not much better, and children
were no more likely to stay in them. Girls were less likely to engage in risky
behaviors, and they reported feeling more secure in their new neighborhoods.
But boys were as likely to do drugs and act out, and more likely to get
arrested for property crimes. The best Popkin can say is: “It has not lived up
to its promise. It has not lifted people out of poverty, it has not made them
self-sufficient, and it has left a lot of people behind.”

------
ck2
Also, the military is giving gang members top notch gun/ambush training now:

[http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2506292,CST-NWS-
graffiti18...](http://www.suntimes.com/news/24-7/2506292,CST-NWS-
graffiti18.article)

------
midnightmonster
I read this one a while back. Anyone know of a source for more recent data?

------
mkramlich
summary:

buildings where a lot of bad-behaving people lived were closed and/or
residents were forced/incented to move out. After they moved to new buildings,
sometimes in more suburban areas, many of those same people continued behaving
badly, and thus the crime rate rose there. The overall net impact on
behavior/crime was often neglible or actualy worsened. A large percentage of
the people engaging in the bad behaviors were, for whatever reasons, black.

I just saved you about 4 pages of reading.

------
mkramlich
the OA title sucks because it's not about a murder mystery. I only clicked
through because I'm doing research on actual murder mysteries for a side
project of mine. So I was a bit disappointed to discover it was just about
crime trends and social factors, not a specific murder case.

------
bluedanieru
This article kind of misses the point. That is, it seems to focus too much on
the effect of dismantling the projects and moving people around, and not at
all on why they got there. And it accepts at face value the proposition that
these cities were moving those people out of the projects, sometimes out of
city limits, for the purpose of improving their lives and in that way fighting
poverty, crime, etc. I find it truly hard to believe that any city in the US
would undergo that kind of effort to help out poor black people. The idea
should strain anyone's credulity. More likely that more affluent white folks
want to live in the city these days, and cities want that tax revenue. Sure,
efforts were made in some cases to try to improve the lives of the people
being displaced, but as an afterthought and not as the prime motivator. I
mean, this demographic shift has been underway for a while now, where folks
are leaving the suburbs and moving back to the cities, and property values are
going up there, and generally life is improving in the cities. I can't tell if
it's the intent, but this article almost seems to lay responsibility for all
this on some changes to a federal housing program. It's nonsense. And the idea
that mayors and city councils nationwide don't want to hear about the damaging
effects of this displacement because it disproves their theories on poverty is
certainly complete horseshit. They don't want to hear it because they've got
their shiny new neighborhood, crime is down, and whatever happens in the
suburbs they don't give a shit because it isn't their problem anymore. And
regarding their theories on poverty, well they haven't got any of those.
They're politicians, not sociologists. They have elections.

So what this article should have been about, but isn't, is why we still have
so many poor black people committing so many crimes and taking up so much
space in so many prisons, over 40 years since the civil rights movement, and
in spite of the fact that most of America can apparently get its shit together
enough to vote for a black man for President anyway.

The answer to that one is pretty straightforward, well known, and easy to
understand. And it has little to nothing to do with race. America is simply
not an egalitarian society. It never really has been, but over the past 30
years or so it's moved away from it faster than ever. The gap between rich and
poor in America is remarkably high, and with that fact come all sorts of
social ills (see below). And not just for the poor either, but quality of life
tends to decrease across the board. The libertarian position that a rising
tide will lift all boats, or that income distribution doesn't matter as long
as average wage continues to increase, this idea that remains popular across
the political spectrum in the US, and that is wholly within the sphere of
consensus in the US media, _does not pass scientific muster._ It is absolute
shit. And as Americans seem incapable of even _discussing_ this simple fact
yet, the problem of poverty and social dysfunction in America, among blacks as
well as whites, et al, will remain unsolved.

<http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/docs/social-dysfunction.pdf>

[http://www.cognitionandculture.net/index.php?option=com_cont...](http://www.cognitionandculture.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=602:better-
live-in-sweden-or-anywhere-else-than-in-the-us-why-more-equal-societies-
almost-always-do-b&catid=37:nicolas&Itemid=34)

~~~
tman
You've obviously thought very hard about all this. But you do know that blacks
commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not just America? The answer has
everything to do with race. Most people on HN belong to another ~ 10x crime
group. We're males. I personally don't mind my tendencies that much. But to
say they're cultural? Stop pretending it's the sixties. The blank slate is
dead. Science killed it.

There are still things to be done about crime. Concentrating poverty (the
projects) turns out to have been one of those really stupid progressive ideas.
Crime rates for blacks in the south tend to be lower than in the north (I'll
pass on that one). The post-1950s destruction of the black family (eclipsing
slavery's destruction of it) seems to have been a bad thing. There are things
you can fix. Just don't expect the effect to be huge.

~~~
jauer
"But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere, not
just America?"

That's a bit incendiary without a citation. Got one?

~~~
tman
Sure, in America there are at least three independent lines of evidence for
the 10x figures. DOJ arrest rates, DOJ violent crime victim surveys, and
simply by looking at the race of murder victims (50% are black -- most murder
in the US seems to be intraracial).

Globally, you can look here:
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/oct/13/homicide...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/oct/13/homicide-
rates-country-murder-data)

The numbers in Africa look bad, but South Africa is really the only place in
Africa together enough to do statistics on this stuff. Of course, they also
have the highest murder rate in the world (one assumes that other parts would
have them beat handily if they could count it all). Jamaica also tops the list
in our Hemisphere. The rate cited there for Haiti is half as high as I've seen
it elsewhere, but Haiti isn't a great place for accurate data collection, of
course.

I've got some estimates for crime rates of African populations in places where
they are severe minorities (there's a figure on the internet that claim 80% of
London gun crime is African/Caribbean), but it's really hard to be very exact
about this sort of thing.

It's a mess of numbers, but there just doesn't seem to be much room for the
case that America's problems are special (Brazil, for example, has somewhat
similar population demographics, and broadly similar problems).

~~~
hugh3
So your data are limited to the few places on Earth that there's a significant
population of Africans; being the US, the Carribbean, Europe and (of course)
Africa.

Now, it's also true that in all of these places, people of African descent are
poor, and it's also well-observed that poverty is correlated with crime, so
I'm not really convinced that your "black people commit more crimes because of
a biological tendency to do so" hypothesis is any better than the more
conventional "black people are poor for historical and cultural reasons, and
poor people commit more crimes" hypothesis.

~~~
gruseom
I wonder, where are people of African descent least poor? That is, if one made
a list of countries sorted by wealth of their African-descent populations,
what would be the first few items?

------
epynonymous
it's the economy. this is the worst recession since the great depression.
americans are without jobs. people without jobs are angry and sometimes have
to resort to other means of providing for their families. most of the jobs are
in the cities so you see this vacuum of life left over in some of the suburbs.

