Chaos, Community and Opportunity

Not every project was like Cabrini-Green. Dixie Homes was a complex of two- and three-story brick buildings on grassy plots. It was, by all accounts, claustrophobic, sometimes badly maintained, and occasionally violent. But to its residents, it was, above all, a community. Every former resident I spoke to mentioned one thing: the annual Easter-egg hunt. Demonizing the high-rises has blinded some city officials to what was good and necessary about the projects, and what they ultimately have to find a way to replace: the sense of belonging, the informal economy, the easy access to social services. And for better or worse, the fact that the police had the address.

For a long time, the buzzword (phrase?) in the affordable housing community has been “moving to opportunity” — the notion that affordable housing has to be located where the jobs are. For even longer, perhaps since the spectacular results of the Gautreaux study dropped in 1991, the idea has been to “de-concentrate” poverty. I worked for a year for a non-profit affordable housing developer that was at pains to build its low-income communities in the suburbs so that the children had access to better schools and the parents had access to better jobs. Never mind that these projects were way off the bus line, and if you didn’t have a car, you were S.O.L. — the theory didn’t really interact well with the praxis.

So it was with some despair that I perused the article in The Atlantic that the above excerpt comes from — basically saying that the demolition of housing projects in mid-sized cities across the country had caused spikes in crime as the dealers and criminals followed the law-abiding people out of the ‘hood into, well, not the ‘burbs, but, as it turns out, into more diffuse, prettier ghettoes. I hear it anecdotally all the time — from a fellow co-worker at the developer describing the cesspool of crime and dysfunction at his community, or from friends back home in Northwest Indiana who complain that the element that used to live in Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor has diffused into our formerly bourghetto communities and made them more dangerous.

The researchers in the piece argue that the dispersal of low-income people under the HOPE VI program happened too rapidly, and that the allure of revitalized downtowns devoid of projects was too much for city officials — they moved too fast and failed to take into account what people needed in order to thrive in their new settings in ways they hadn’t in their old. Yea….this is still going on. And although it’s largely a matter of social services and effective policing, it’s also a matter of finding innovative — and effective — ways of breaking the cycle of poverty, such as Ruby Payne’s Bridges Out of Poverty framework (which I will probably discuss in a future post). The point, though, is to not take reports such as this and use them to scapegoat the poor or argue for the return of projects, but to improve upon the failures of the past, lest they bring down another generation.