Maybe Section 8 People Are Just Evil or Perhaps Living in the "C" Sucks in Multiple Ways

Well the “C” is back in the news with the Atlantic article, American Murder Mystery. Basically the article states there is a correlation between Section 8 housing and crime, especially violent crime. While I’m about as far from being a sociologist or urban anthropologist as you can get, I have been writing a lot about the conditions in the “C”. What I have been trying to do is illustrate how complex the problems that plague the “C” are. What I worry about with this article is that people are going to scape-goat Section 8 housing for the crime happening all over the city. The maps that Dr. Betts and Dr. Janikowski have made most certainly do show violent crime happening near section 8 housing. Yet there are a whole lot of over things that are around where violent crime is happening.

I’m going to list previous posts I have written about various problems in the “C”. I don’t provide links to take you directly there, but just go to the archive month to find them if you want. (Sorry for the colorful language too. I was young and immature in 2006 and 2007.)

Let’s start with things that have a strong correlation with areas with high rates of violent crime.

1) Low Income-

A. Thursday, August 17, 2006

Welcome to the "C"

B. Thursday, July 13, 2006

How Much of Memphis Lives in Poverty?

2) Financial strip mining by predatory lenders

A. Thursday, November 08, 2007

Financial Strip Mining Here in Memphis

B. Friday, September 29, 2006

Check Cashing/Predatory Lenders and Hispanics

3) Lack of legitimate financial institutions

Friday, August 25, 2006

The "C", Banks, and the African American Community

4) You live near a church or a liquor store

Friday, June 01, 2007

Liquor and God in the "C"

5) Black folks moved there over the past 25 years

Thursday, July 12, 2007

"Pride is Fucking with Your Head" or "How Learned to Love Demopublicans"

6) You are a Democrat

Friday, December 29, 2006

Race and Partisanship in Shelby County-Part II

7) You’ve got a pretty good chance of having lead poisoning

Thursday, August 23, 2007

We Were Lead Poisoning Our Kids Before Mattel.

8) You’re house is getting foreclosed

Monday, February 25, 2008

Subprime Loans Should Be Classified as Economic Meth

9) Influential people want to keep putting resources in places that already have resources

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Zipper Zone Translated-Fuck You Poor, Non-White People

10) Places where people moved away from

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Welcome to Memphis' Green Zone

11) Throw in areas with blight, low educational attainment, high number of single parent families, other environmental contaminations, Red Cross assisted victims of residential fires, etc

So there is a list of more than 11 other things which correlate with the areas of high rates of violent crime. Is Section 8 housing a more valid cause of violent crime than low income? This is the passage of the article that caught my attention the most.-

“Studies show that recipients of Section8 vouchers have tended to choose moderately poor neighborhoods that were already on the decline, not low-poverty neighborhoods. One recent study publicized by HUD warned that policy makers should lower their expectations, because voucher recipients seemed not to be spreading out, as they had hoped, but clustering together.”

In the end, all the problems that I have listed above are linked to inequality. Unless you invest in your citizens and provide adequate resources, you will have all these interrelated problems. Picking one issue out of many over simplifies the situation and creates an environment for demagogic politicizing.