Re: Housing Matters

Jack Kemp Dies

Posted by Felix Miller in Administrator's Notes on May 3rd, 2009

Former HUD Secretary under George H.W. Bush, Jack Kemp, has died of cancer.

In my time at the Chattanooga Housing Authority, we didn’t see a lot of effects of Jack Kemp’s initiatives, mostly focused on revitalizing urban areas through renovation and creating enterprise zones. On a more muted level, he insisted on calling the tenants of subsidized housing “residents” rather than “tenants.” He seemed to have real compassion for poor people, although he had strongly conservative views on spending and taxation.

More at Times Free Press.

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Reprise: Atlantic story on crime and HCV

Posted by Felix Miller in Housing commentary on May 3rd, 2009

Last summer there was a spate of commentary on an article in the July Atlantic magazine on crime rates in cities affected by relocation of Public Housing residents to private housing, subsidized by the Housing Choice Voucher Program.

Issuance of HCVs to PH residents having to relocate due to demo is cited in the article by a Memphis, TN criminologist and his housing expert wife:

The article focuses largely on the surge of violence in Memphis, Tenn., and the findings of two married University of Memphis researchers — Richard Janikowski, a criminologist who had been tracking emerging crime patterns in the city, and his wife, Phyllis Betts, a housing expert who had been evaluating where residents went after the city demolished its public-housing projects.

I hear much from my conservative friends on this topic - they of course still call the HCV program “Section 8,” a term indelibly marked as pejorative by such usage.

I think crime is influenced by so many elusively intangible factors that blaming subsidized housing is a convenient dodge.

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