Tariq Nelson

What happens when you take a group of people with social problems in a highly concentrated area (like a housing project) and spread them throughout the city without ever addressing their underlying problems?

Memphis, TN recently saw a spike in its crime rate (while its highly corrupt political leadership looked the other way) in areas that were previously low crime areas.An area of town known as Hickory Hills was an upscale neighborhood in the early 1990’s, but now it is known as “Hickory Hood”.

This article in the Atlantic gives the answer that everyone in  Memphis always knew:

Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades.

Then a criminologist and his wife then began to correlate the rise in crime in the new areas to the places where the former residents of the housing projects lived:

About five years ago, Janikowski embarked on a more ambitious project. He’d built up enough trust with the police to get them to send him daily crime and arrest reports, including addresses and types of crime. He began mapping all violent and property crimes, block by block, across the city. “These cops on the streets were saying that crime patterns are changing,” he said, so he wanted to look into it.

When his map was complete, a clear if strangely shaped pattern emerged: Wait a minute, he recalled thinking. I see this bunny rabbit coming up. People are going to accuse me of being on shrooms! The inner city, where crime used to be concentrated, was now clean. But everywhere else looked much worse: arrests had skyrocketed along two corridors north and west of the central city (the bunny rabbit’s ears) and along one in the southeast (the tail). Hot spots had proliferated since the mid-1990s, and little islands of crime had sprung up where none had existed before, dotting the map all around the city.

Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn’t been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts and Janikowski have two dogs, three cats, and no kids; they both tend to bring their work home with them. Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government’s most ambitious initiatives: 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.

When these residents started moving into Hickory Hills, we began to see shopping carts being left in apartment buildings (they would take the shopping carts home from the grocery store), more litter, and more loitering. At that point, middle and upper class people (of all races) began to move into the deeper suburbs as they feared that their property values were declining. The nicer restaurants then began to close and Hickory Hills became “Hickory Hood”.

Betts, however, helps the city track where the former residents of public housing have moved. Over time, she and Janikowski realized that they were doing their fieldwork in the same neighborhoods.

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (“He has a better imagination,” she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 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.

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country.

The news is usually too bad to want to face. Many of these people that were now in a more suburban environment had never lived in a home and were used to maintenance coming by to fix make repairs, cut the grass and other things home owners (or renters) must take care of themselves. Then there was the assumption that a change in environment would mean an automatic change in mentality. They never addressed the root of the social problems and figured a new home would do the trick. All they did was disperse the problems into more places.

But then again, where Memphis is concerned, the only thing they thought of was getting those ugly housing projects torn down as quickly as possible to make way for the new upscale homes, condos and a basketball arena. We’ll deal with the results of moving the residents out later.

It’s difficult to contemplate solutions to this problem when so few politicians, civil servants, and academics seem willing to talk about it—or even to admit that it exists. Janikowski and Betts are in an awkward position. They are both white academics in a city with many African American political leaders. Neither of them is a Memphis native. And they know that their research will fuel the usual NIMBY paranoia about poor people destroying the suburbs. “We don’t want Memphis to be seen as the armpit of the nation,” Betts said. “And we don’t want to be the ones responsible for framing these issues in the wrong way.”

The following is why Memphis will not improve for the near future, unless there are drastic changes. DENIAL:

she gets frustrated when she sees sensitivity about race or class blocking debate. “You can’t begin to problem-solve until you lay it out,” she said. “Most of us are not living in these high-crime neighborhoods. And I’m out there listening to the people who are not committing the crimes, who expected something better.” The victims, she notes, are seldom white. “There are decent African American neighborhoods—neighborhoods of choice—that are going down,” she said.

The leadership in Memphis is corrupt and they don’t care. The hard working black Americans in that city are victimized and no one seems to care. They are squeezed on both sides. Everyone talks about the whites that leave, but no one talks about the blacks that play by the rules, work hard, pay their taxes only to see some thug rob them. Sort of like what Chris Rock said about the two groups of black people.

In the early phases, most of the victims were working-class African Americans who saw their neighborhoods destroyed and had to leave. Now most of them are poor people like Leslie Shaw, who are trying to do what Lipscomb asks of them and be more self-sufficient.

[...]

“People were moved too quickly, without any planning, and without any thought about where they would live, and how it would affect the families or the places,” complains James Rosenbaum, the author of the original Gautreaux study. By contrast, years of public debate preceded welfare reform. States were forced to acknowledge that if they wanted to cut off benefits, they had to think about job training, child care, broken families. Housing never became a high-profile issue, so cities skipped that phase.

Because they were in a rush to get their downtown areas revived.