A recent article in The Atlantic magazine suggests that the emptying out of large public housing projects and the de-concentration of poverty (pdf) have spread crime and destabilized neighborhoods in a number of cities, including Chicago (pdf). Where public housing residents moved is where crime rates surged, according to the article:
Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed—and deflated—to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a “hard thing to say or write.” Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country. Eventually, they thought, they’d find other researchers who connected the dots the way they had, and then maybe they could get city leaders, and even national leaders, to listen.
I read that article a few weeks ago, but I’m not sure that there’s a direct correlation regarding what’s going on in the more blighted areas of Chicago right now. First we had many of the senior gang leaders put away for long sentences, but without clear successors to their roles, leading to a breakdown of communication with some of the gang mediators in many areas. Following that we had the purging of many upper echelon police commanders with the hiring of the new Police Supt. – but he doesn’t appear to have the same level of respect that the former Sup’t did. Granted, there was too much corruption and malfeasance in the dept. to keep ignoring at will, but the hiring of an outsider with scant experience in local policing may not have been the wisest move by our Olympics – mad Mayor.
Demolishing the projects was still a good idea. Sure, crime was neatly compact and isolated in those high-rises, but they were a travesty against humanity, and should not have been subsidized by taxpayers.