Social Science, Housing Policy, and the Harmful Effects of Poverty

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Notes

1 We do not herein include reference to HUD’s FHA program or to its formula-driven CDBG allocations. However, it is well documented that FHA’s post-war programs enabled and accelerated the exit of the (mostly white) middle class from city neighborhoods all over the country.

2 These same administrators also authorized the first major place-based rebuilding initiative, HOPE VI, which began operations at the same time as MTO.

3 See the Urban Institute report comparing the outcomes from these demonstrations (Turner & Rawlings, 2005).

4 MTO began enrolling families in five cities in 1994 and completed the last offers of vouchers in 1998. HOPE VI, a place-based program for rebuilding distressed public housing that began at about the same time, has lasted over a decade and cost billions of dollars. MTO’s funding lasted one year before Congress withdrew what would have been its second and last year of support because of the messiness—community resistance—that has stopped virtually every other effort to find ways to allow families to live in better off or racially integrated communities (Bonastia, 2000; Goering and Feins, 2003, on the troubles in Baltimore).

5 In a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, the retiring president of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, reminded us all that: “ … the right of center think tanks have been a stupendous success. They appear in the national media, liberal as well as conservative, well out of proportion to their numbers and output.” He noted that even their hegemony required decades in “the political wildernesses and another dozen years for their ideas to become policy” (DeMuth, 2007). It is the hegemony of the right, not the trumped-up hegemonic influence of some dispersal advocates that David should worry about, and we not waste time bickering with each other over bread crumbs of policy options left to the liberal left by those who have stacked every conceivable deck possible against change.

6 Fisher notes that it is the old, less well educated, and the poor who form the exception to the apparent rule that Americans now move less. He argues that “economic marginality” induces continuing high rates of residential turnover (p. 193).

7 Portland included in this policy a requirement that they evaluate how well their programs work, since they (like the rest of us) are unclear what mix of locally based intervention and investment can work best to avoid the displacement that results from private and public section revitalization.

8 The six issues listed in his order are: (1) eschewing unflattering research questions; (2) misconceiving freedom of choice; (3) imputing interests; (4) countenancing repression; (5) overselling evidence; and (6) slighting alternatives. Because they are a bit overlapping, we have focused on what we believe are his central concerns.

9 Susan Popkin’s series on HOPE VI findings is found at: http://www.urban.org/publications/411002.html.

10 These quotations are taken from an ongoing research project by Xav Briggs, Sue Popkin, and John Goering.

11 The Section 8 voucher that MTO treatment group families received only required that they stay for one year in a low-poverty area before they could move anywhere else they chose. Those in the Section 8 group received vouchers that could be used in any location from the start.

12 David further argues that: “The idea of ameliorating social problems where they exist is given so little consideration empirically by the DC that it can distort its normative vision.” Our normative sense was to learn if some wanted mobility and whether they would benefit, since there was alternative research occurring roughly concurrently helping to learn about in-place program effects.

13 Early single-site level results from MTO appeared to have more positive impacts than those detected in the interim evaluation. It was those early results that led some to argue that a “home run” had occurred. See Katz, Kling, and Liebman, 2000.

14 David accepts the fact that many reasons may have caused people to sign the petition including the need to express “justifiable outrage over the staggering degree of human suffering … and protest the decades of shameful government actions and inactions … ” (p. 112). We agree that such multiple motives do not constitute the foundation for some monolithic, unthinking dispersal gang.

15 We would like to express our thanks to Gretchen Weismann, Sue Popkin, and Margery Turner for their helpful comments on the draft of this short paper.