“Evicting the Poor”
The latest Style Weekly features a back page article by a couple who reside in Byrd Park, Adria Scharf and Thad Williamson. Adria Scharf is executive director of the Richmond Peace Education Center. Thad Williamson is an assistant professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond. Although the article focuses on Gilpin Court, it addresses public housing issues that are certainly relevant to the Byrd Park, Randolph, and Maymont neighborhoods.
Here is an excerpt from the piece, titled, “Evicting the Poor”:
Simply put, deconcentrating poverty isn’t the same thing as ending poverty. You cannot end poverty by reshuffling low-income households around like pieces on a chess board. The way to end poverty is to expand the economic opportunities — jobs, training and education — available to poor people.
If a redevelopment plan truly expands the economic opportunities available to public-housing residents then it might make for a morally justifiable policy. But removing people from their homes without their consent and without a clear plan about where they should go does little to end poverty. It’s possible to make Gilpin Court a nicer place without actually helping the people who live there.
That’s why it’s worrisome that the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority has not guaranteed one-for-one unit replacement as part of its ambitious plans to redevelop the area. The authority’s plan, unveiled last winter, calls for transforming the area into a mixed-income neighborhood to be renamed North Jackson Ward. While the plan calls for increasing the number of housing units in the neighborhood, at most 30 percent would be set aside for public-housing residents. That means a maximum of 600 public housing units will be part of the new development, compared with 983 units today — and the housing authority plans to rescreen current residents, which advocates argue will serve to prevent many households from returning.
Where will the other people go?
To read the article by Williamson and Scharf in its entirety, follow this link to Style Weekly. If you see Adria and Thad around the neighborhood with their daughter Sahara, introduce yourself and chat them up about their latest published work. If there are other projects by Byrd Park residents that should be shared here, please get in touch using the Contact Us feature on this site.
Deconcentrating some poverty would certainly help the public schools. We’ve got a middle school and a high school in the East End that draw from 4 of the city’s 6 large housing projects. This impacts the individual schools in particular ways, but also works to chase the middle class out of the public schools.
In addition, violent crime is a part of high-density public housing. Every year, half or more of the murders in the East End take place in largest public housing projects.
Finally, there are but few nice neighborhoods adjacent to public housing. While there are well-maintained residential pockets just south of Fairfield, the area around Mosby, Gilpin, and Creighton are blasted vacant fields and abandoned houses.
Deconcentrating poverty won’t end poverty, but it would certainly go along way towards allowing the neighborhoods and schools develop into safer, cleaner versions of themselves that foster more opportunity for the residents that remain.
Perhaps there is somewhere in Byrd Park that 300 units could be built?
I am always torn about public housing. I don’t like the idea of kicking people out of their homes… but at the same time those aren’t their homes(ie, they don’t own them). I like public housing as a short-term recovery solution but people really need to own to have stability. Any renter in the country can be evicted if the owners want to do something different(as long as their lease is up or allows it).
The problem is that there isn’t anyplace affordable for people to buy. The only solution that makes some sense to me is converting some of the public housing into cooperative housing and letting the residents own it. I know it’s been done elsewhere but I imagine it would be a lot of work.
Another thing to consider in this conversation is that someone told me that in Canada they take your kids away from you if you go into public housing. While this seemed VERY traumatic to me I also see that it would be a big motivation to get yourself on your feet and it also keeps kids from growing up in housing projects and might help end the cycle of poverty. Made me think.
Daniel, I really don’t think it’s the case that in Canada they take your kids away if you’re in public housing. Cooperative housing if done the right way is not a bad idea. In the case at hand, public housing is the only thing keeping many households away from homelessness and until there is a realistic alternative up and running it should be defended.
John, I’m not sure if your comments are directed at the piece, but the article explicitly says yes, we should do something about Gilpin Court. Moreover, I agree there can be benefits to deconcentration. However, net poverty reduction in any substantial measure is not one of them–unless a deconcentration and redevelopment effort is tied to efforts to direct more resources, opportunities, and jobs towards low-income public housing residents. There is plenty of academic research on this point–see congressional testimony here by one of the leading experts in this area, Ed Goetz. His conclusions are that 1) deconcentrating Hope VI style does improve neighborhoods to at least a modest degree, though this is mostly by demographic turnover and 2) it doesn’t have much positive effect on the residents themselves–no impact on employment, income, school achievement.
http://www.house.gov/apps/list/hearing/financialsvcs_dem/goetz.pdf
The residents in Gilpin Court, or most of them, are not opposing re-development per se. They are opposing re-development that takes place in a manner that makes a significant portion of current residents worse off. They want a commitment that any re-development ensures they are no worse off than they are now. In short, don’t “make the city nicer” at our expense. I think that is a valid claim.
As to where new units might go if they decide to redevelop and do 1 for 1 replacement, that’s a great question. I take the implication of your question to be that that Byrd Park people don’t really want 300 new units nearby. That is probably true, but what if the plan were 30 new units in 10 different areas of the city that have average or below-average poverty rates? I suspect that won’t happen either but that’s what I’d suggest as the ideal aim.
Moreover, if RRHA does not do one-for-one replacement, most of the dislocated families who get vouchers will end up in other high-poverty neighborhoods, probably not that far from Gilpin Court. So even if you thought deconcentrating poverty brought important benefits, you should support for 1 for 1 replacement, because that’s the only way public housing residents are likely to be significantly dispersed to other parts of the city. Otherwise all you’ve done is make Gilpin Court nicer, while making some residents worse off and increasing poverty in neighborhoods that are already high-poverty.
I don’t know that I buy that. Perhaps this fills some of the vacant houses, but wouldn’t be a bad thing. Either way, the blocks and neighborhoods would still be more economically diverse than the public housing projects.
John, all I can say is that the best research in this area supports what I am saying (including case studies of what’s happened in Richmond previously)–see quotes below.
RRHA does own a lot of vacant single-family home properties (well over 100 according to a recent search I did on this) that could be part of a solution. RRHA should develop a clear plan for where people are going to go before demolition starts–to fail to do that is just irresponsible. If they come up with a good plan that provides residents with alternatives that really are an improvement on the current situation, many will probably opt to leave and the issue will be largely resolved. Just giving them a voucher telling them to go away doesn’t cut it, however.
To quote from the Goetz testimony linked above:
“Displaced public housing residents typically move to other housing opportunities nearby their old neighborhoods. Very few move to the suburbs; only 14% in the five cities of the Urban Institute’s Panel Study, less than two percent of more than 3000 families displaced by public housing redevelopment in Chicago, and just over 10% in Minneapolis. Over half of the Minneapolis families moved within a three-mile radius of their original homes. Nearly all households who moved as a result of the Comer v. Cisneros deconcentration plan remained in Buffalo, moving an average of 1.5 miles from their previous residence. Though the distance is longer in some places (an average of over five miles in Chicago according to one study), families tend to remain within communities with which they are familiar, and in which they maintain social or historical ties.
HOPE VI residents tend to move to other disadvantaged or segregated neighborhoods.
The expectation that relocation will benefit residents is based on a fundamental expectation that residents’ new neighborhoods will be a significant improvement over their previous ones. In practice, however, the difference between pre- and post-relocation neighborhoods is typically not so dramatic. This is so for one of two reasons. First, while HOPE VI residents tend to move to neighborhoods with poverty rates lower than in originating neighborhoods, poverty rates in the new neighborhoods are typically higher than average. Data from the HOPE VI Panel Study, for example, found that 40 percent of displaced residents who did not return to the redeveloped HOPE VI sites lived in high-poverty census tracts (those with poverty rates over 30 percent). The average poverty level for HOPE VI relocatees in the Panel Study was greater than 20%. Similar findings
10 are echoed in studies of Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Richmond, VA. In addition, the Minneapolis study shows that many receiving neighborhoods, though lower in poverty compared to the original neighborhoods, are becoming poorer over time. Research shows that HOPE VI households tend to move to other racially segregated neighborhoods as well. In summary, although HOPE VI families move out of some of the very worst neighborhoods in the cities in which they live, the neighborhoods to which they relocate are themselves disadvantaged. The new neighborhoods tend to have higher poverty rates than the city as a whole, lower incomes, and more segregation – all problems that are getting worse over time. There is some evidence that subsequent moves of displaced families (moves after the original relocation move) are towards neighborhoods with even higher poverty rates, lower incomes, and greater segregation than the relocation neighborhoods.”
There might be some very marginal gain for an individual moving from an area that’s 80% poverty to 45 or 50% poverty, but most research indicates 40% is a tipping point/threshold, esp. for schools. Re-shuffling people around from extremely high to very high poverty areas does not constitute an anti-poverty strategy for the city.
If attacking poverty is the goal–and usually it isn’t in these redevelopments–then targeted economic development, on a large scale, is what will be needed. What’s disturbing to me is we have heard so little about that from the new mayoral administration so far, though I still am hopeful/expectant they are going to roll something out significant before long.
I see the impact of the high density public housing on the East End and try to imagine how this get resolved. It seems like *any* change is movement and positive.
I guess I’m having something of a knee-jerk reaction to the call for one-to-one replacement, which seems so far to only have served as a means for fighting to delay or stop the redevelopment of Gilpin (and by extension the housing in the rest of the city).
“The way to end poverty is to expand the economic opportunities — jobs, training and education — available to poor people.” Let’s see…Jobs are difficult for anybody to find, poor or not poor; Training? like being an apprentice electrician or learning to drive a truck? Training probably would cost more time commitment than money, but yes…some money. As for education, for poor or not poor, there are public schools. I’ve never been torn about public housing: I resent money being taken from me to pay for it.
“As for education, for poor or not poor, there are public schools…”
If the poor kids’ schools were as good as the middle class kids’ schools, that’d be swell, but that’s simply not true here or most places. Nor is Gilpin Court the ideal study environment when the kid gets home. Let’s say the poor deserve to be poor because they won’t make the right “commitments” or whatever. Is it the kids’ fault too? Good work, Thad. I appreciate all you have to say, and the time and thought you’ve clearly devoted to the issue.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime#
pretty interesting, if disheartenhing, take on what happened in Memphis in the wake of Hope VI
John, as I said before and we said in the article, no one is against change in this case. But it’s simply not true that any kind of change whatsoever will result in a net improvement in the lives of these residents. Re-development can be done in a way that kicks people to the curb or it can be done the right way. The right way is more difficult to do. Gilpin Court, according to RRHA itself, is not going to be demolished for at least another 3 years, and the whole thing will take 8-10 years to complete. There is plenty of time to get it right.
I was saying that any change is a net improvement for the neighborhoods.
The correlation between crime of all sorts and voucher housing has been long known if not publicized.
My view is that helping people is the priority; helping “neighborhoods” is a means to that end. Many times the two goals go hand in hand but sometimes they conflict. Running off undesirable people “helps neighborhoods” but doesn’t help people. Don’t get me wrong, I believe as strongly as anyone that neighborhood context is important, but when you’re introducing large scale policy changes it’s important to get really clear about what you’re doing and why.
Public housing as practiced represents one on the most heartless social experiments ever inflicted on the poor. Considering that the overwhelming majority of residents are black it ought to be labeled as racist, though I sure the proponents don’t view it or themselves that way. Combined with the effects of social welfare programs, generations of children have been condemned to poverty, ignorance, abuse and a future without hope. The kindest thing you could do would be to tear them down.