what’s with all the violent crime?
June 18, 2008, 6:25 pm
if crime is going down in large cities (ny, la), why is it rising in so many midsize cities? according to the atlantic, it’s apparently b/c of “one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades” — shutting down the projects and dispersing poor (and black) people all over.
notes on this article:
1) this is a very uncomfortable subject that no one wants to talk about
2) there’s no real explanation in this story why the dispersal creates more crime (destabilizing effect? but maybe i didn’t read the story close enough).
3) one more reason why white people suck:
A few months ago, Harris went to a Sunday-afternoon picnic at Uptown Square, the development built on the site of the old Hurt Village project, to conduct a survey. The picnic’s theme was chili cook-off. The white people, mostly young couples, including little kids and pregnant wives, sat around on Eddie Bauer chairs with beer holders, chatting. The black people, mostly women with children, were standing awkwardly around the edges. Harris began asking some of the white people the questions on her survey: Do you lack health insurance? Have you ever not had enough money to buy medication? One said to her, “This is so sad. Does anyone ever answer ‘yes’ to these questions?”—Harris’s first clue that neighbors didn’t talk much across color lines.
I believe one of the main reasons given why the dispersal created crime was that it broke up support networks that people had in their preexisting communities, which I would guess makes the youth more restless.
There was an explanation, a really interesting one at that:
“His paper compares two scenarios: a city split into high-poverty and low-poverty areas, and a city dominated by median-poverty ones. The latter arrangement is likely to produce more bad neighborhoods and more total crime, he concludes, based on a computer model of how social dysfunction spreads.”
And then:
“Galster theorizes that every neighborhood has its tipping point—a threshold well below a 40 percent poverty rate—beyond which crime explodes and other severe social problems set in. Pushing a greater number of neighborhoods past that tipping point is likely to produce more total crime.”
So when the projects were demolished cities became more dominated by median-poverty neighborhoods, and thus their total crime increased.
ja, this was a really interesting article. i’m glad you saw it, too. i thought of you when i read it.
also shocking from the article: memphis is the geographic size of new york city. really?