Letters to the Editor

Hanna Rosin fingers the wrong suspect for the alarming jump in murder rates in Memphis’s suburbs (“American Murder Mystery,” July/August Atlantic). She purports to use social-science research, including our own, to lay the blame on the HOPE VI public-housing program. We and other researchers worked at length with Ms. Rosin to make it clear that Housing Choice (Section 8) vouchers, the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program, the Gautreaux program, and HOPE VI differ greatly from each other, but all have helped improve the lives of poor families in many ways.

Rosin twists these findings into an incriminating link between such antipoverty efforts and increased crime. She quotes Susan Popkin as saying that MTO and HOPE VI did not boost families’ self-sufficiency and that HOPE VI “has left a lot of people behind.” Yes, these housing programs have not increased employment, but Rosin’s summary understates their positive results and distorts the facts.

Many families who got housing vouchers through these programs are much better off now than they were in public housing. In their new neighborhoods, they no longer have to fear for their children’s safety, and the mental-health benefits for women and girls are on par with the results for antidepressant therapies. Because of the realities of the rental market, families who get vouchers often end up renting in transitional neighborhoods that may already be experiencing an increase in crime and poverty. There is no evidence that helping families move with vouchers causes crime. The people Popkin says are left behind are the most-vulnerable families. For these families, better housing is not enough, because they are struggling with serious health problems, substance abuse, and poor credit histories.

In questioning the Gautreaux results, Rosin disregards Stefanie DeLuca and colleagues’ recent findings that 15 to 20 years later, more than two-thirds of the families are still in better neighborhoods, and many mothers continue to enjoy employment gains and fewer require welfare. Housing policy alone does not solve all the problems facing urban families. However, cherry-picking research to write off the housing programs that do make a difference only misleads readers who want to understand the challenges and accomplishments of policies designed to help vulnerable families.

Susan J. Popkin
Principal Research Associate Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center
The Urban Institute
Washington, D.C.

Stefanie DeLuca
Assistant Professor Department of Sociology
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Md.

Hanna Rosin replies:

Of course housing reforms have improved some lives in some ways. You couldn’t spend that much money and effort and make no difference. The question is: How much, and at what cost? The measurable improvements that social scientists point to are important but elusive: an increased sense of security and less depression. These are not on the same level as the concrete goals laid out when this program began: jobs, better education, and escape from poverty. Many experts I met were still supportive of the housing effort, yet all were confounded or disappointed by how it has turned out so far.

What happened in that controlled Gautreaux experiment bears no relationship to what happened when tens of thousands of public-housing residents were forced to leave their homes. Residents got a voucher, but little guidance about where to move. Most moved into transitional neighborhoods, where they lost a sense of community and an external support system. Worse yet, they helped tip these marginal neighborhoods into dysfunction and crime. As a result, the inner rings of suburbs around American cities look nothing like they did 10 or 15 years ago.

The most common criticism I get from academics is that I have no proof that the dispersal of Section 8 voucher holders increases crime. If by proof they mean an independent, 10-year longitudinal study, I concede. But the proof that already exists is pretty powerful. When the two Memphis researchers I wrote about compared the new crime hot spots to where Section 8 voucher holders had moved, they found a near-exact match. In city after city, police chiefs will tell you that taking the poorest residents out of the inner city has only moved the crime elsewhere.

The solution is not to burrow in and defend housing reform as it exists. Nor is it to give up entirely on the effort and leave the poor to fend for themselves. The answer is to face the new urban demographics and find ways to help people where they now live.

Joshua Green, in his article about Al Franken’s run for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota (“He’s Not Joking,” May Atlantic), suggests that the Democrats could win a “veto-proof majority in the Senate.” I believe he meant to say, “a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.” A filibuster-proof majority requires 60 votes, whereas a veto-proof majority requires 67 votes. I don’t think that even the most-optimistic Democrats realistically think that the Democrats can wind up with 67 Senate seats.

Michael J. Skarpelos
San Jose, Calif.

Joshua Green replies:

Thank you to Michael Skarpelos for the correction.