Well, it’s a bit complicated – not just “poor” and “not-poor” neighborhoods:
My apologies for not having a reliable cite. On the other hand Ralph didn’t really have one either but for some reason you neglected to ask him for a cite. From what I’ve read --which I suppose isn’t a great cite-- one of the reasons poor people are more likely to be busted for drug possession and use is that for them it takes place in relatively open areas.
If you’re relatively wealthy where are you going to get the bulk of your drugs? Behind closed doors at parties, clubs, or through acquaintances. If you want to score some coke the odds are you won’t be driving into the bad part of town at 2 A.M. to find some. I’m not saying it never happens but I don’t believe it’s the norm.
Marc
Why? Would that change your answer?
Career criminals don’t have an accountable income, and therefore qualify for Section 8 Housing. Or they find a Section 8 Housing woman, give her a few gifts and a promise of a better life, and move in with her.
There is a law here that parolees of major & violent crimes cannot live in Section 8 Housing. People tried to block it, claiming it was “discriminating against people who had paid their debt and was breaking up families.”
People define poverty differently. To most middle-class people, povrty isn’t “not having much money.” Poverty is when you give up trying. Being “poor” is a matter of values, attituides, and culture, not money.
Edit: You can be poor but have a lot of money. Look at people like Britney Spears or ball players who binge on coke and booze and blow their fortunes.
What about them? Whatever word applies to their conditions, “poverty” does not.
I was on Section 8 housing back in the 70s (for about a year). I lived in an apartment complex, but I didn’t know a single other Section 8 family. This was in the middle class suburb of Schaumburg (about a half mile outside Chicago city limits).
There are those who take advantage of the system and those who use it for what it was intended…a leg-up while you improve your situation.
My son’s father was the former. When our annual review came up, he wanted to misrepresent the situation so we could continue to be in the program. That’s when the lightbulb over my head became bright enough to see him for the slacker he was. Once I left him, I no longer had a need for public assistance. The system worked as designed, in our case.
I think that’s a big piece of it right there. Section 8 sets a ceiling to the amount it’ll pay, which automatically knocks some neighborhoods out of the picture. And not all landlords will take Section 8 tenants (I think, legally, landlords can’t discriminate, but in practice there’s little to stop them). Neighborhoods that take a certain number of Section 8 tenants become less desirable to other kinds of tenants, tempting landlords to take Section 8 tenants and their guaranteed incomes. The phenomenon is self-perpetuating, in other words.
Plus, to the extent that Section 8 tenants tend to fall into a certain social echelon, they might want to be in proximity to others in their own echelon. So they congregate, and bring their culture-of-poverty behaviors along with them. Crime goes up.
I think where I live might benefit from a spreading out but there’s too much concentrated housing and/or neighborhoods and not enough places to evenly distribute the section 8 population.
They’re definitely the major source of crime and there’s little to be done about it except require a heavy police precence at them 24/7.
Another data point worthy of analysis would be the result of the displacement of poor people from New Orleans after Katrina. They were given extremely generous subsidies for housing and other expenses. Many of them have permanently relocated out of the city.
150,000 of them went to Houston. In the next year, Houston’s violent crime rate went up by 41%. 21% of all homicides in Houston last year were traced back to Katrina refugees. These are refugees who are still receiving more in government subsidies and outright handouts than the poor anywhere else. The current unemployment rate for Katrina refugees who have not returned home is still over 30%, despite their having relocated into areas with low unemployment rates and having been given all kinds of job assistance.
Once again, you get a sense that central planning and progressive manipulation of society has unintended consequences and does not achieve the results the planners hoped. The inner city projects were based on ‘sound’ reasoning in the first place - create a place where the poor can live, give them subsidies, and now you can focus aid on these areas, give them good schools, and more efficiently lead them out of poverty. Thus, the ‘projects’. In the end, it had a negative effect on the poor. So now the plan is to get them out of the dense areas they were originally encouraged to move into, and subsidize their move into the larger community. Surprise! That’s not doing what they thought it would either.
It reminds me of people who decide there are too many rabbits, so they hunt them all down. Then the coyotes die off, and the rabbits come back in twice the numbers. So then Coyotes are protected and encouraged to grow, and the large amount of food causes their numbers to swell, displacing other predators, which causes the other predator’s secondary food source to swell in number. And so it goes - constant shortages and gluts, inefficiency and unintended consequences.
People have generally learned not to mess with nature like this unless absolutely necessary, because they can’t begin to understand the full workings and interactions of a complex ecosystem. Yet a society is also a complex ecosystem, but that doesn’t stop the meddlers from wanting to constantly push and prod it in the direction they think it should go.
A real problem noted in the article (I read it too) has to do with the fact that the people who moved out of the projects in the first place lost an identifiable neighborhood, with friends, family, churches and informal support structures. They felt rootless in their new surroundings.
We really shouldn’t be surprised at this, as it happened the same way thirty or forty years ago when those same poor people (different generation, but often the same people) were moved out of identifiable neighborhoods and warehoused into those awful large housing projects where crime and disfunction could concentrate. And even there, people found community - eventually.
It would be nice if these areas could be redeveloped in such a way that people are moved into better, mixed-income housing very close by where the projects are coming down. However, that’s probably too much to hope for in a society that is by its nature mobile and transient. Neighborhoods change over time if left alone, even without these large projects underway.
So perhaps this is just something that needs to even out until people feel a sense of place again - during which crime in those communities can be addressed as a crime issue, using strategies we generally understand to work. In the meantime, community leaders ought to see what can be done to help their new residents establish a sense of a neighborhood again - that sort of thing will help the crime and poverty issues by helping people feel not so stranded.
The idea that landlords can’t discrimination against Section 8 is one of the biggest ideas we have to fight. A landlord cannot say “I’m not taking you because you are on Section 8.” However, it is so easy to find a reason not to take Section 8 (I prefer a working person, thank you very much).
Anyone who thinks Section 8 is “guaranteed income” has never been to court trying to get a Section 8 tenant to pay their portion of $300. They have never rented an apartment to a Section 8 tenant and six months later, when they stop paying rent and you are taking them to court, have them call the City to come out and the City finds a bunch of violations YOU have to fix (we had it approved six months ago. You would not believe the amouint of damage done since then).
I’ve work with Section 8 for over 20 years. Very few of the people are those who just need “help getting back on their feet.” For most of them, it is a way of life. They don’t want to pay their own way. They think the world owes them a living.
And a cement mixer. 
My uncle locked the doors to his apartment (upstairs from his business) for this reason. he rented to a section 8 tenant-and was in and out of housing court. The tenants would smash the bathroom fixtures (the law allowed them to stop paying rent until the repairs were done). Once my uncle got them evisted, he never rented the place again.(It was too much trouble).
Link for those who are going like 
The stories I can tell about Section 8 tenants. The ones who break the sheriff’s lock after they are locked out. The lovely little bitch who called the cops when the sheriff came to lock her out. The look on the cop’s face when he saw the sheriff and me (I knew him) standing there.