Suppose you’re a suburbanite living in a nice, clean, safe neighborhood – not necessarily an all-white neighborhood, but all your nonwhite neighbors have been assimilated to a middle-class American culture with white roots, so you’re not afraid of them.
Now, suddenly, going up next door is a low-income housing project to be inhabited by exactly the kind of people you have been taught all your life to fear and avoid – inner-city poor blacks!
But, consider: Your friendly local police know where that project is. They probably keep a list of every resident. If anything happens, that’s the first place they’ll look for suspects. The project’s presence probably won’t affect the local crime rate perceptibly – in the city a kid can snatch a purse and vanish into the crowd, but that can’t happen where you live.
And their kids will go to school with yours – and be assimilated to middle-class American culture. Now, there is also the possibility that their presence will turn your kids into “whiggers,” but that is a mostly harmless phase. You will have to endure the ridiculous spectacle of your kids cultivating dreadlocks and wearing pants that hang on their thighs – but not, say, robbing liquor stores for drug money. Or drugstores for liquor money.
The placement of low-income housing projects in the suburbs does NOT mean the destruction of the suburbs.
It does, in some ways, mean the transformation of the suburbs.
I found some websites saying low-income housing doesn’t bring down neighboring property values, so I suppose there’s a separate debate to be had on that point.
Nevertheless, it is in my experience the standard argument against.
My neighborhood has no land available for low income housing even if it was approved. But there are already low rent apartments in town, most towns do have at least one apartment complex that is already there that is fairly low rent. Hey, people have to work those fancy restaurants downtown and there are no bus routes. Not seeing those places having an affect on million dollar McMansion a half mile away.
It may not mean the destruction of the suburbs, but it definitely can mean increased crime and a general decline in the stores and businesses in the area.
Why do I say this? Because the part of town I live in basically had that done to it by judicial fiat some 30 or so years ago, and that’s what happened. A Federal judge ruled that basically the city couldn’t centralize its low income subsidized housing, and forced it to disperse it to the suburbs, including the part of town that I live in. They did this by forcing apartment complexes to accept Section 8 housing.
All in all, it really doesn’t seem to have helped the low income people much, and has definitely crapped up the middle class neighborhood. I’m pretty convinced it was either a bad idea, or terrible execution, because the results are pretty self-evident that it didn’t help anyone in the low income community- the parts of north Dallas where they moved are some of the lowest income, highest crime parts of town, and it definitely hurt the residents who were already there. Don’t misunderstand me though; I don’t have a problem with living where I do- I chose it. But based on my research, the current state is directly attributable to Judge Buchmeyer’s ruling, not normal market forces, etc… and is a perfect example of how NOT to do it.
I tend to think that if there’s already an existing, mostly crime free neighborhood, then any efforts to export low income people into it needs to be done in a way that keeps the neighborhood as it is. It’s not the existing residents’ problem or responsibility to deal with whatever bullshit comes with the low income residents being brought in from elsewhere.
I am a little confused- how does a city disperse its low income housing to the suburbs - or are the “suburbs” you are talking about different neighborhoods inside the city limits?
Not every suburb is in a separate city. Lots of cities have either suburbs that grew organically within the city limits, or were annexed later. The defining thing is that they’re usually well outside the city center/built up urban area, and they’re primarily single-family homes and retail businesses.
The part of Dallas I live in was on the far northern outskirts of the urban area in the 1970s, and is still suburban in most ways.
The way that Dallas did it was to basically require apartment complexes in certain parts of town to accept Section 8 housing residents. Prior to that, only some complexes in a small part of town did, and all the poverty, crime, etc… was concentrated there. So they compelled other complexes to accept those residents via a court decision, and that started the ball rolling on what I describe in my previous post.
Depends on how property taxes are calculated. My property value would have to crater for me to see a reduction in property taxes because in my state, property tax growth rates are capped and the value of my house increased faster than the cap for many years (since it was built).
Did the judge require every apartment complex to accept Section 8 housing, or just those with federally-backed mortgages? I’m guessing it was just those with federally backed mortgages, in which case, this seems like a logical requirement – Section 8 is a federal program.
Some factors to consider when siting higher-density housing, regardless of the income of the inhabitants, are proximity and transportation to jobs and services. Decentralization poses some challenges here.
Does my mortgage go down based on the current value of my property? The answer is no. My home represents the single largest purchase I am ever likely to make during my time here on Earth. It is very much to my advantage to make sure my property value is retained and it’s hard not to fight against something that might lower its value. If someone proposed a low income housing project be built next to my neighborhood I would fight it. Not because I was concerned about crime but because I would be concerned about my property values.
Some sort of voucher system, I gather. It happened more than 10 years before I moved to the Dallas area.
As I see it, it didn’t really help the low-income people much in my area at least, and it definitely did not improve the neighborhood to move the people from the projects to the neigborhood.
Are you planning on selling your house and actually getting that money back?
THAT is the main reason to be overly concerned about property values. Otherwise, it doesn’t really matter very much at all unless you’re upside down on your mortgage.
The lack of bus routes in the area where I grew up is one reason why I think it would be unsuitable for low-income housing (or even high-income dense housing). There’s also the fact that the area requires people to have well water and septic tanks, so I doubt high density would work.
Now it’s possible to have low-income housing that isn’t on a bus route, but that requires the residents to have a car, or rely on taxis/Uber/Lyft.
It’s not just section 8 apartments that people fight, it’s any low income housing.
Back in the day, I got involved through my church with Habitat for Humanity. We’d be out there pounding some nails in boards, and people would come by and curse at us. They didn’t want “The Poors” living in their neighborhood, even though HfH caters to a more responsible crowd than section 8.