Odious Wall Street

The Wall Street Journal, infamous for its blindly conservative leanings in its editorial pages, has come out with an odious editorial by James Bovard on Section 8 Housing, "Raising Hell in Subsidized Housing", which unfortunately is walled off behind a subscription. 

I'll quote from it as much as I can without violating the "fair use" principle, although I fear there is so much odiousness in it that I might very well end up quoting it in its entirety.



James Bovard starts off with "Section 8 rental subsidies have long been one of the most controversial federal social programs. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under the Obama administration is making a troubled program worse."  Leaving aside the fact that he does not inform us with whom it is "controversial", there is little evidence Obama's Administration is making things worse.

He then goes on to talk about how the budget for the housing vouchers have "skyrocketed" since 1994.  Last time I looked, there were a few other presidents between then & now.  He whines that "Section 8 recipients receive monthly rental subsidies of up to $2,851 in the Stamford-Norwalk, Conn.,area, $2,764 in Honolulu and $2,582 in Columbia, Md."  Maybe because those are very expensive places to live in?

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reports that the Section 8 voucher program, although not increasing as an overall proportion of HUD's budget, is costing more because housing costs are higher and because the families it assist are poorer, as well as the fact that project-based housing contracts are expiring and not being renewed. Rather than simply being tossed out on the street, the households living in buildings no longer under contract to HUD are given Section 8 vouchers. The President actually is requesting less for 2012 than he did for 2011 with the tenant-based voucher programs.  For project-based housing, he is requesting only an 1% increase, probably just enough to fund current contracts.

Mr. Bovard refers to a Louisville study by Geetha Suresh that found crime hot spots followed Section 8 vouchers as they move into other areas.  What Mr. Bovard is not clear on here is that it is the Section 8 residents that very often are the victims not the perpetrators. After all, old relationships, both good and bad, are not broken just because someone changes a zip code.

Mr. Bovard makes the same omission when citing a Dubuque, Iowa study by Northern Illinois University's Center for Governmental Studies.  First, let's look at what he said about this:

Dubuque, Iowa, is struggling with an influx of Section 8 recipients from Chicago housing projects. Section 8 concentrations account for 11 of 13 local violent crime hot spots, according to a study by the Northern Illinois University Center for Governmental Studies. Though Section 8 residents account for only 5% of the local population, a 2010 report released by the city government found that more than 20% of arrestees resided at Section 8 addresses.

Dubuque's city government responded by trimming the size of the local Section 8 program. HUD retaliated by launching a "civil rights compliance review" of the program (final results pending).

The reality?  Leaving aside the Chicago influx which he seems to have imagined (note that Chicago is on the opposite side of Illinois from Iowa) as well as the 20% which I can't find, Dubuque was panicking over what they perceived as a crime wave.  But the group from NIU concluded that Dubuque wasn't statistically different than other similar communities.  In fact, from the City of Dubuque's press release:

Dubuque does not have uniquely high rates of violent crime, with the only exception being aggravated assault, the most common violent crime. When analyzing UCR violent crime, Dubuque reported the third-highest average UCR violent crime rate and this difference from the average was statistically significant. This can be attributed to the misclassification previously mentioned.

However, when simple assault and aggravated assault rates are added together for all of the communities, Dubuque's average violent crime rate is in the middle instead of in the top three.

The press release goes on to state:

As part of the study, NIU/CGS reviewed research that has been done regarding general causes and characteristics of crime in mid-sized communities, the relationship between Section 8 housing and crime, effective crime prevention strategies, and the factors that contribute to perception of increased crime and ways to alleviate those perceptions. They did not review research on the causes of poverty or the reasons poverty and crime tend to be interrelated. In general, the research they reviewed shows:

Section 8 housing projects that are smaller, more dispersed garden-style, have defensible space, and are located in less resource poor neighborhoods tend not to be linked to crime and crime dispersion, while large high-rise towers that are concentrated in resource poor neighborhoods do tend to affect crime rates....

Areas with high levels of concentrated disadvantages (high levels of poverty, unemployment, female-headed households, and minority concentrations) tend to also have high violent crime rates.

Hmm.  So housing assistance should be smaller, more dispersed, in more affluent neighborhoods...why, that sounds like the very thing the Mr. Bovard is arguing against!
But let's dig deeper.  Remember how Mr. Bovard wrote about the relationship between Section 8 Housing and crime hot spots?  What was it that he wrote?  More than 20% of arrestees resided at Section 8 addresses?

Authorized Section 8 participants on average represent 5.2 percent of Dubuque's population; 5.8 percent of Dubuque's unique adult arrestees were, on average, Authorized Section 8 participants.

Authorized Section 8 participants experience slightly higher victimization rates than non-Section 8 residents (5.9 percent on average compared to 5.4 percent) and somewhat lower complainant rates than non-Section 8 residents (5.7 percent on average compared to 6.2 percent).

When adding in the persons who gave Section 8 addresses at the time of a crime incident but who were not matched as an authorized Section 8 participant at that time, the rates of victimization overall are 1.6 times greater for Section 8 residents than non-Section 8 residents and the adult arrest rates are overall 2.49 times as high as the rates for non-Section 8 residents.

So the problem isn't necessarily the Section 8 residents, but very often people who give their addresses as a Section 8 address that are not authorized to live there. This can be a relative staying because he/she has nowhere else to go (how many mothers can say to their children, "go forth and be homeless?"), or even a relative giving a family member's address without actually living there.  Unauthorized residents are already against Section 8 Housing rules, so greater enforcement would be called for. 

Mr. Bovard also seems to gloss over the fact that the majority of Section 8 project-based housing are older more dense and concentrated buildings, and the spatial maps from the NIU study indicates that they are clustered around downtown area very close together, so the problems very well could be due to concentrated poverty in that area rather than being Section 8 specific.  After all, the NIU study concluded that 82.5% of Section 8 "hot spots" do not overlap with crime hot spots.  Mapping shows no apparent problem with the more scattered locations. 

The NIU group actually recommends greater dispersion, "Although not densely concentrated, Section 8 housing remains largely centered in the downtown area of Dubuque. Further efforts are necessary to disperse Section 8 housing units into neighborhoods with greater social resources in order to avoid the cumulative disadvantage negative effects discussed above" which is the opposite of what Mr. Bovard rails against at the end of the editorial. "The Obama administration is now launching a pilot program giving local housing authorities wide discretion to pay higher rent subsidies to allow Section 8 beneficiaries to move into even more affluent zip codes. Hasn't this program helped wreck enough neighborhoods?"

It's almost like he hasn't read any of the studies he cites.  His premise seems to be against the voucher program, but just about every study he refers to includes, to a large part, public housing and project-based buildings.  In fact, some actually promote the voucher program as a good tool.

But let us move on to other cities!  In Indianapolis, the housing authority used a federal grant of $1.3 million to conduct a thorough investigation into a variety of programs, resulting in an impressive decline in crime connected to housing assistance as well as good number of arrests.  This investigation just about paid for itself in over $1.2 million in recovered federal funds.  But Mr. Bovard, instead of concluding, "Golly, perhaps we should give housing authorities more administrative funds so they'll have staff resource to do a decent job?" simply rattles off some cherry-picked statistics and moves on.

Mr. Bovard criticizes HUD for going after communities such as Cincinnati, Antioch, and Antelope Valley that pursued policies designed to make life unpleasant for Section 8 voucher holders.  Mr. Bovard seems to think that Section 8 residents should be held to a different standard than other city residents, losing their housing assistance over minor offenses (eviction over loud music!). 

But the most odious thing Mr. Bovard wrote may be this, emphasis mine:

Earlier this year, the agency decreed that Section 8 tenants (as well as other renters) who are evicted because of domestic violence incidents may sue for discrimination under the Fair Housing Act because women are "the overwhelming majority of domestic violence victims." In essence, this gives troublesome tenants a federal trump card to play against landlords who seek to preserve the peace and protect other renters.

Domestic violence is a serious issue that is finally starting to receive the attention it deserves, but an issue is often landlords will often evict tenants who have been abused.  Sometimes this is because of chronic nuisance policies in communities and landlords are pressured by the police to "solve the problem" which can result in eviction. (Note:  The City of Milwaukee recently revised its chronic nuisance ordinance so that domestic violence-related incidents will no longer be a trigger for the letters.)   It's appalling that he calls them troublesome tenants, but apparently Mr. Bovard thinks that a woman who is battered by her ex-boyfriend should be evicted as well.

Mr. Bovard is a Libertarian which means that by nature he is opposed to many federal programs, and, indeed, seems to have created a career for himself in criticizing federal programs (never mind that you'd find many of the same problems elsewhere-human nature), which explains his cherry-picking of statistics and facts to "prove" his premise, which is that Obama is wrecking neighborhoods (I didn't bother getting into some of what he says on this).  He does not seem to care what best practices would be for better outcomes.  He simply rails against those programs rather than thinking, "how do we better assist people who are elderly, who have disabilities, and/or low-income households while preventing problems documented here?"

Update:  Misspellings of Mr. Bovard's name corrected.