Crime and other urban woes will follow Affordable Housing to your town
The social engineers in New Jersey are celebrating today because they have succeeded in passing a major overhaul of our state's affordable housing mandates. A series of State Supreme Court rulings (known collectively as the Mount Laurel decisions) established a constitutional right to "affordable housing" in every one of our 566 municipalities. This new legislation goes even further by mandating the construction of housing for "very low income" people as well ("very low income" is defined as less than 30 percent of the median household income in the town).

To pay for it all they have levied a tax of 2.5% on all new construction (including renovations). The money from this tax will go into a fund to subsidize the construction of affordable housing. By far the most contentious revision to the current housing rules involves the abolition of Regional Contribution Agreements. RCAs allowed one town to pay for the construction of affordable housing in a neighboring town. Hence a suburb could pay to contruct apartments in a nearby city. The socialist utopians don't want poor people concentrated in cities so they have now changed the law. Every town must absorb its "fair share" of low income residents.

Despite what the socialists might wish to mandate there is still the small matter of actually constructing this affordable housing. The rules specify that a certain percentage of any new housing must be "affordable". But first there has to be a developer willing to construct new housing. When California enacted a similar mandate they noticed a curious and completely unintended effect. The stock of affordable housing actually went down and the overall price of market-rate housing went up.

So much for their goal of creating more affordable housing. Market forces, and the natural desire of homebuilders to maximize their profit, will serve to decrease the overall supply of housing. That might be good news for those of us who are contemplating selling our homes and moving out of state but it certainly does not improve the lot of the poor people who are just looking for a place to live.

There is also another, much more dire unintended consequence that arises when low income housing is moved out of the inner cities and into the suburbs. It's one of those issues that makes social scientists uneasy and it plays into the fears suburbanites have about a sudden influx of minority residents. That issue is violent crime. Just when many cities are reporting decreases in violent crime and drug dealing there comes a new and disturbing study out of Memphis, Tennessee. The police there noticed a sudden and dangerous uptick in their crime statistics. A criminologist named Richard Janikowski began to plot the reports of violent crime on a map of Memphis and the surrounding suburbs. He immediately noticed a strange pattern. Crime was down in the inner city, but it was surging upward at an alarming rate along two corridors north and west of the city as well as one route heading southeast.

The impart of this new pattern might have been lost except that Mr. Janikowski is married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Ms. Betts has devoted her career to studying the migration of "Section8" residents from the cities to the suburbs. Part of her research involved creating a map of where the inner city residents had moved to in the suburbs. Since they each had a map what they did next was no surprise. They overlaid the two maps.

The connection is too obvious to ignore, and too depressing to contemplate. The creation of subsidized housing in the suburbs brought violent crime along for the ride. Reading the entire article on the decline of Memphis induces a veritable well of despair in your gut. At first the new affordable housing was bright and shiny and full of promise. Over the course of a matter of months it was transformed into a recreation of the abandoned inner city. Neighborhood boys vandalized the properties. Drug dealers and gang recruiters took up residence in hallways and playgrounds. Thieves made off with cars and burglarized vacant apartments. Gun violence erupted at the local schools.

It is very likely that this pattern will be repeated here in New Jersey. The suburbs of cities like Newark, Trenton, Camden, Paterson, and Atlantic City will come to resemble the suburbs of Memphis. The social ills of the inner cities will spill over and consume towns like Caldwell,, Princeton, Little Falls, and Cape May. It may not be something that the socialist utopians want to hear but the evidence is plainly there. Crime is already rising in Montclair and Parsippany, two suburban towns which have embraced the construction of affordable housing.

Activists for low income residents will most likely accuse me of pandering to NIMBY fears of poor people destroying suburbia. They'll try to frame the issue as one of "social justice" where everyone has a God-given right to live in the town of their choice. But what good is that right without the support network to go along with it? Suburban police departments are not equipped to deal with carjackings, drive-by shootings, open air drug markets, and gang activity. They're unprepared for an influx of sophisticated criminals who can cause trouble in one town and then go hide out in the homes of cousins and assorted family members scattered around 10 different other towns. In addition, health and welfare services do not automatically appear anew in each town as it constructs affordable housing. The troubled lives of many of the low income residents will not magically improve simply because they have moved from a city to suburbia. They will need clinics and counseling and job training at a time when local governments can ill afford to provide those kinds of services.

The do-gooders have been blinded by their own utopian fantasies. They cannot fathom a scenario where their great social experiment in population redistribution does not succeed. They had better be right. But if history is any guide, New Jersey is going to become one giant slum.

Posted at 16:59 by Chris   [/rants]   | | | Email | del.icio.us | Digg | Stumble It! | Reddit | Link