
As Program Moves Poor to Suburbs, Tensions Follow - crocus
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/us/09housing.html?em
======
bokonist
This reminds of the anti-singularity thesis: increasing wealth from technology
enables a decline in cultural values. ( [http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/antisin...](http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/antisingularity.html) ).

In 1910, inner city crime like we have today simply did not exist. Baltimore,
Philadelphia, New York, London - all these cities had homicide rates that
today you can only find in Pleasantville suburbia. It was the age of stern
Victorian values and law and order policing. People did not have the luxury of
giving criminals the benefit of the doubt, nor of allowing any kind of public
disorder, lest their neighborhoods turn unsafe.

The trouble is, law and order tactics are a blunt instrument, and they are
likely to offend and hurt good people too. Today, we are generally wealthy
enough that moving away from crime is a possibility for the middle and upper
class. Running has become easier than coming together as a community to solve
the crime program. This especially true when "coming together as a community"
means navigating big city politics, and cracking down on crime can get you
labeled as racist. Today, when a community suffers from high crime rates,
decent folk move out. First it was moving from the inner cities to the
suburbs. Now, in many cases, people are moving from the suburbs back to
expensive neighborhoods in the city. High real estate prices have become a
substitute for crime control.

I think at some point we're going to have to stop the running and figure out
how to stop the ongoing warfare in our cities. Allowing the crime is not doing
anyone any good. Inner city men have astounding deaths from homicide. And the
middle class is spending ever increasing portions of their income on housing.
Everyone loses.

~~~
smanek
" _In 1910, inner city crime like we have today simply did not exist._ "

Do you have any data to back up that claim? It's the exact opposite of any
data I've ever seen ...

I've been told that violent death rates are ~ an order of magnitude lower now
than a century ago. Take a look at
[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html),
for example.

Hell, violent crime is down nearly 50% since the 70's
(<http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/viort.htm>) when the gov. started
keeping the numbers.

~~~
bokonist
Murder rates by location:

Baltimore 1911: 5.8 Baltimore 2006: 43.3

Philadelphia 1911: 4.4 Philadelphia 2006: 27.7

New York 1911: 5.9 New York 1990: 30.7 New York 2006: 7.3

Newark 1911: 4.0 Newark 2006: 37.4

Chicago 1911: 9.0 Chicago 2006: 16.4

Washington DC 1911: 7.8 Washington DC 2006: 29.1

England & Wales 1910: 8.1 England & Wales 1997: 14.1

In many of our great cities, murders _increased by an order of magnitude_.
Only in New York, where the finance boom priced out the poor are homicide
rates down ( the crime all went to Newark and other ring cities, which is the
phenomena I pointed out in my original post).

Pinker may be right about the middle ages to 1900. But he's dead wrong about
the 20th century. The 20th century saw a millennium of progress get wiped
away. Europe had two world wars that displayed levels of barbarism unseen
since the Mongol invasion. Population explosions in Latin America, India, and
Africa resulted in masses of people living in violent, malnourished,
overpopulated slums. The great cities of the United States collapsed into
burned out, dystopian ruins, which look like something out of the late Roman
empire ( see The Ruins of Detroit for a small taste -
<http://detroityes.com/home.htm> \- but it is the same story in many other
cities). What the hell happened?

Source for 1911 stats:
[http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F07E5D91E3FE...](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F07E5D91E3FE432A25754C0A9649D946395D6CF)

For 2006 stats:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_r...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_rate)

And stats from England:
[http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111....](http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf)

~~~
smanek
My apologies - I was wrong.

Thanks for the info, learn something new every day.

------
mynameishere
_“I know it sounds horrible, but they’re scary. I’m sorry,” said Ms. Reynolds,
who like her two friends said she was conflicted about her newfound fear of
black youths. “Sometimes I question myself, and I think, Would I feel this way
if they were Mexican or white?”_

Nice tidy quote there. "Typical white person." Yep, when the government
terrorizes your neighborhood, and animalistic thugs threaten your very life,
the first impulse of polite people is to feel guilt, and question their own
motivations. Let's see how this happens:

1\. You have a nice neighborhood, and suddenly there's a spike in the black
population. If you've seen this happen, you know that going from 0 percent to
5 percent can result in an _astonishing_ increase in the frequency of ugly
attitudes, bad behavior, noise, and general violence.

2\. The "racists" move out. They are attacked as "racists" and everyone agrees
that they are "racists". However, they get out in time before housing prices
collapse...

3\. As the population shifts, serious crime is high enough that, racist or
not, everybody who can get out, including middle-class blacks, gets out.

4\. Property values drop to next to nothing. The neighborhood is basically a
spread-out inner city.

5\. Eventually, given the super-cheap houses, adventurous young men and
homosexuals (ie, people who don't have to worry about their wives being raped)
move in and clean up the place. Gays are great because "ganstas" don't want
any association with them. Gentrification occurs...

6\. The poor and violent people are still poor and violent, and so the
government tries to "fix" them by introducing them into a new nice
neighborhood.

The upshot is that there is constant churn in the real estate market.
Continual soft ethnic cleansing from city to suburb to city moves literally
100s of billions of dollars of houses. It's a great marketing program.

There was some black writer who suggested that the _real_ problem with the
black community was the move from southern farms to the cities. Rural blacks
simply don't have the same problems, and never have...

~~~
logjam
I'm mildly curious about whether you have any actual data to back up some of
this, because frankly it sounds like you are really overgeneralizing in an
unreasonable and very emotional way. You could have more accurately noted that
_poor people_ moving into an area drive property values down and bring crime,
and are not created by the "spike in the black population."

Instead, your anecdotes focused on _black people_ as the culprit of all this
evil. Why?

~~~
smanek
Because, statistically speaking, race is a good predictor of violent crime.

According to Bureau of Justice statistics, between 1976 and 2005, blacks,
while 13 percent of the population, committed over 52 percent of the nation’s
homicides, or about 400% more than expected.

However, poor people (arbitrarily defining poor as a household income of under
$25k) only account for ~double as many crimes as expected. (The government
doesn't actually keep data on income of violent crime perpetrators - I used
the household income of violent crime victims from
<http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/cv05.htm> weighted by census data from
<http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/hhinc/new06_000.htm> as a proxy)

Now, maybe income is a better predictor; I couldn't say conclusively with the
data at hand. But you have to agree that race is pretty important.

------
occam
Who is killing slightly controversial comments here? What's wrong with the
following dead comment?

 _They have tried this extensively. Inner city block grants, subsidizing
business, etc.

The idea that you can 'fix' another person's neighborhood is equally as racist
as the policies that caused blacks to concentrate in those neighborhoods in
the first place (they were chased out of the countryside in the KKK era and
left with few alternatives to the city). What if the government started
offering grants to 'fix' your neighborhood? How demeaning that is, and how
absurd! As though subsidized bike shops and coffee shops are going to pressure
crack dealers to go away.

As for the police patrols and condemned properties, do you think that there is
a functioning local government in these areas? Look at DC and Detroit! The
local city government is so corrupt that they can't even provide basic
services, or basic levels of non corrupt policing, much less an effective
attempt at crime reduction. On my way to work in DC a few years ago I would
see the same police officer asleep under the same overpass every single day.
This was right next to the highway, so maybe 2000 people would see him every
morning, and yet he would sleep away, sometimes with his face pressed on the
drivers side window. Do you think a bagel shop can fix that!?_

------
briansmith
I've been thinking about the whether opposite kind of program would work.
These programs try to take the "good" poor people out of bad neighborhoods,
making those neighborhoods even worse off. Why not do the opposite: subsidize
and protect large "good" businesses and educational institutions that operate
in poor neighborhoods. Provide the businesses with security in the form of
dedicated, deputized, police-trained security guards and increased uniformed
police patrols. Hire locals to work on demolition of condemned properties in
their neighborhoods.

I don't have any concrete ideas for how it would work but it seems like
there's some way to do it.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Like Columbia in Morningside Heights? I don't think it did much there. When
the neighborhood was bad, all you had was Fort Columbia. Now the neighborhood
is better, but so is the rest of NYC.

I think most of these programs miss the real problem: the people. The poor
make bad choices and have bad life skills (e.g., don't always show up to
work). Sticking them in a middle class neighborhood doesn't change this.

~~~
briansmith
"Now the neighborhood is better, but so is the rest of NYC."

That sounds like a positive outcome to me.

"The poor make bad choices and have bad life skills (e.g., don't always show
up to work)."

That is not true generally. If you are a hard-working person born and raised
in a horrible place, it is hard to get out. And, there are people that are
willing to work hard to turn their life around but could benefit greatly from
some assistance. I personally know several people that benefited from
government welfare/food stamps/WIC and who were able to raise their standards
livings substantially because of it. It is true that there are people that
won't work hard or who will abuse any help they get, but in my experience most
people are pretty good.

Most importantly, children don't deserve to suffer because of their parents'
stupidity. It isn't hard to see how children can benefit from moving from an
inner-city school to a middle class one, if you've ever visited an inner-city
school.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The outcome for morningside heights is positive, but I see no reason to
believe it is related to Columbia. Columbia didn't improve morningside,
Rudy+good economy improved all of NYC.

As for the work skills of the poor, there are 7.7 million working poor,
compared to 24.2 million poor adults. "Working poor" == "in the labor force
(working or seeking work) 27 weeks/year or more".

So less than 1/3 of poor adults spent at even half the year working or trying
to work.

As for children, it may or may not help. It's not obvious to me that a good
school can overcome the effects of a bad parent.

Sources for my figures:

<http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2005.pdf>

[http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/DocServer/2006-SUM.pdf?...](http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/DocServer/2006-SUM.pdf?docID=7722)

(Yes, I subtracted 2006 numbers from 2005 numbers, but I expect they didn't
change much between years.)

~~~
siculars
I actually live in Morningside Heights, and not the part that had always been
good. IMHO, a lot of the progress in New York can be directly attributed to
Rudy and his team. They really cleaned up this place. Nevertheless, Columbia
should get a fare share of credit by pouring tons of money into the area.

When I moved here in 2000 the area was already on the up and up but really hit
its stride when Columbia went on a building spree. They built three buildings
within one block of my apartment which really raised the bar for this
immediate area.

But wait, there's more! Soon Columbia will begin construction on an entire new
campus on the far west edge of Harlem called Manhattanville. This will really
push the entire area much higher and bring a lot of opportunity to those that
live here now.

------
Alex3917
If anyone wants a really good (non-fiction) book on stuff like this, check out
The World We Created at Hamilton High. It's about a wealthy suburban school
that gets integrated in the 60s. Scribd isn't displaying the document
properly, but here is link to chapter one:

<http://www.alexkrupp.com/Hamilton1.pdf>

~~~
bokonist
I heartily second the recommendation.

------
DanielBMarkham
To me, this article is muddle-headed. It begins with a discussion on the
movement of poor from the inner cities into the suburbs and then pivots to
begin framing the discussion as one of race instead of poverty. Add in a few
outspoken activists, and I'm not sure you have much of anything useful here.

It's a simple question, really. Are the chronic problems that people face
_mostly_ a part of their own beliefs and lifestyles or is _mostly_ it
something to do with luck, location, harassment, or policy? I'd entertain
arguments on both sides of the issue, but this article implies the answer has
something to do with race and policy. That seems to presume the to know the
answer to the discussion before it even begins. (It's also lazy reporting and
close to editorializing, but that's a comment for another day)

If you want to have a discussion about segregation and integration of various
races into various neighborhoods, that'd be a cool story too. But that's not
what this was either, unfortunately.

As for startup potential, the article obliquely mentions that foreclosure
rates are associated with violent crime. I've also heard there's a close
correlation with density of liquor stores and crime. I wonder if all of this
crime data could be assimilated into a useful service? Perhaps something than
runs on your phone? (hint, hint)

~~~
Alex3917
"I wonder if all of this crime data could be assimilated into a useful
service?"

Kexter does a pretty good job at mashing up GIS data with Craigslist housing.

