Quote:
Originally posted by Say_hello_for_me
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-hous13.html
Basically, study finds that section 8 vouchers are very concentrated in certain neighborhoods. No surprise, right? I mean, I'd read this already, just not as the result of a study. And empirical evidence should have suggested this already to any observer.
However, I was always willing to rack this up to ghetto people not wanting to leave the ghetto, for example when public housing is torn down and the residents are given vouchers. The article acknowledges that this is at least a partial cause, but also notes that there are entire communities where nobody will accept a voucher. Entire liberal, lakefront liberal, lakefront democratic liberal, communities where nobody will accept a section 8 voucher.
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I know this is a huge problem in Baltimore. A few years back the city tore down several large public housing projects (which admittedly needed to come down). Problem was, there already were too few landlords taking Section 8 vouchers in the city, and none would take them in the county, so it ended up putting about a 1000 families without a home. It was a real mess.
And even when they do accept the vouchers, the landlords are often nightmares. There was a nasty case last spring where a woman was in the hospital for surgery, and the landlord threw her out (by dumping all her stuff out in the street) because the program was late in paying for the month. When the woman got out of the hospital a couple of days later, she found all her stuff gone. Needless to say, this is not legal (landlords can't throw out tenents because of the program's late payment), and the landlord got bitchslapped in court and then again immediately afterwards on "Channel 11 I-Team Investigates!"
Interestingly (to me, anyway), there is a community in the Baltimore area known as Columbia that was founded as one of the first modern planned communities and its founder had an ideal of complete racial integration (as opposed to most suburbs, where the undertone is white flight). No idea what the section 8 market is like in Columbia, but the entire city is built with apartments, townhomes and single families all crammed together. It's a nice place (in a suburban soulless kind of way), and very successful. So you may be rights about the race/crime problem.
ETA: Of course, the firm that created Columbia, The Rouse Company, just anounced a merger with some Chicago developer, and everybody pretty much figures it's the end of any pretense of Columbia as modern utopia.
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