Housing policies aren’t immune to the law of unintended consequences. And, as in other policy areas, these consequences don’t show up until years after a policy is implemented. And sometimes it isn’t obvious that the consequence follows the policy.
Hanna Rosin made this point in a 2008 Atlantic Monthly article about how programmatic changes in a popular federal housing program seem to correlate with a shift in violent crime from inner Memphis to its surrounding neighborhoods. The program subsidizes rents in privately owned apartments low- and moderate-income people find on their own. Memphis and other cities used it to relocate families from apartments in high-rise public housing projects into apartments in residential neighborhoods.
Researchers were amazed and deflated, Rosin wrote, when they overlaid a city map showing crime patterns on top of one showing the neighborhoods where people found apartments. The findings seem to question the wisdom of demolishing public housing and spreading the tenants to other locations.
“Physically redistributing the poor was probably necessary; generations of them were floundering in high-rise. But instead of coaching them and then carefully spreading them out among many more-affluent neighborhoods, most cities gave them vouchers and told them to move in a rush, with no support,” she wrote.
