| Outcome | City | Suburb |
| Dropped out of school | 20% | 5% |
| Grades | 5.60 | 5.61 |
| College Track | 24 | 40%** |
| Attend College | 21% | 54%*** |
| Attend 4-year college | 4% | 27%** |
| Employed full-time(if not in college) | 41% | 75%*** |
| Pay under $3.50 per hour | 43% | 9%*** |
| Pay over $6.50 per hour | 5 | 21%*** |
| Job benefits | 23% | 55%*** |
| Skilled or semiskilled jobs | 36% | 55% |
| In school or working | 74% | 90%*** |
No reason to think the families were initially different, given the role of chance factors in family's assignment to city moving vs suburban moving. What's more, several relevant comparisons very similar:
.| female-headed | mothers finished high school | Mothers avg years of education | |
| City movers | 88% | 43% | 12.03 |
| Suburban movers | 86% | 47% | 12.09 |
1. Subsidies for the poor
a. Section 8 housing choice vouchers: $14.9 billion. (TANF, by comparison, about $17 billion in 2003)
b. Hope VI program: about $6 billion
2. Subsidies for the more affluent (sources: NY Times, November 6, 2005; San Francisco Chronice, October 30, 2005))
a. Mortgage interest deductions (what the federal Department of the Treasury calls "tax expenditures," meaning these are taxes that the government would receive were it not for these deductions: $72 billion. Taxpayers may deduct from their income for tax purposes the interest they pay on home mortgages up to $1.1 million (meaning a maximum subsidy of $18,480)
1) 30% of all taxpayer households benefit but a majority of homeowners do not qualify
2) 55% of the benefit (around $40 billion) goes to the top 12% of taxpayers, with earnings of $100,000 per year or more
3)22% (around $15 billion) goes to the top .15% of taxpayers, with earnings of $200,000+
b. Property tax deductions: $23 billion
1. Deconcentration: Is it about moving people out of high-poverty neighborhoods or about giving them a choice? How bad are these neighborhoods? Do most residents of concentrated public housing want to move to neighborhodds where there is not a concentration of poor minorities. Are those neighborhoods prepared to welcome them?
2. "Detroit scenario:" "a city overcome with neighborhoods of high poverty where the middle class has fled to relatively safe and secure havens of racial and class exclusivity. The city is wracked by high property tax rates on every-devaluing property, generating insufficient revenue to fund essential city services and the elevated levels of public and social services needed to support an impoverished populace. Its schools are underfunded and inadequate and its streets unsafe..."
3. Hope VI: Federal government may replace any housing project where the costs of demolition and redevelopment are within 90% of the costs of rehabilitation... if a Hope VI project proceeds, the result is to be a mixed income community, typically with far less units than the public housing it replaced.
1. William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged, January 1987... 40% poverty criterion
2. 1970-1990: number of people living in census tracts with concentrated poverty about doubled, from 4.1 million to 8 million (contrast minority and white poverty patterns)
3. Effects of concentrated poverty
a. Quality of services: schools, after school programs, childcare, medical care
b. Socialization of young people by adults
c. Peer influences, especially during adolescence
d. Social networks and jobs
e. Crime and violence
f. Physical distance from job and educational opportunities
4. How public housing contributed
a. "marriage" of public housing and Slum Clearance Act of 1949... expensive land and high rise housing
b. high degree of local autonomy... local public housing authorities, ability of communities to opt out (as many suburbs did), influence of local politics
c. Tenant selection: successive restrictions requiring poorer and poorer tenants, along with outmigration of those who could afford it
1. Steps in the process.
a. 1971: Congress authorized a demonstration project in tenant based assistance supposed to run ten years
b. 1974: Congress and Nixon administration created section 8... subsidies that could be applied to units rented at or below the "fair market rent," initally defined at the median rent in a given community (reduced to 45th percentile in 1984 and 40th in 1995).
c. Moving to Opportunity. Modeled on Gautreaux program but with receiving neighborhoods defined by class and not race... demonstration project in five largest cities, but never expanded... voluntary program
d. "HUD Reinvention Blueprint," beginning in 1995...after Republican congressional victories in 1994.
1) "vouchering out"... demolition of public housing buildings, with tenants given section 8 vouchers
2) Public Housing Reform Act of 1998 authorizing new mixed income developments whether in terms of new construction or takeover of existing units... scattered site programs
3) Hope VI... demolition and replacement, with as little as 40% of units reserved for poor... one for one replacement rule abolished... by 2000, HUD had moved to demolish 100,000 units of housing and replace 60,000 (but notice, not 60,000 units for the poor) either as scattered site or Hope VI
e. Desegregation lawsuits in 12 cities nationwide, including Gautreaux and Hollman... typically demolition has proceeded much more rapidly than development of replacement units. (Notice the interaction of housing reform and welfare reform.)
2. Resistance to deconcentration.
a. Scattered site housing generated opposition almost everywhere... extreme example: Yonkers, NY, where city spent more to stop new housing units than HUD to build them.
b. Legal defeats for HUD: e.g., proposal for HUD review of zoning ordinances (discuss) immediately killed in Congress... same thing with HUD policy of tying water and sewer grants to community's progress with affordable housing... Baltimore MTO program killed... Proposal for 500 units of scattered site housing in Dallas overturned by federal court of appeals on the grounds that it violated the constitutional rights of homeowners... No further monies for MTO after initial federal invwestment
3. Effects of deconcentration
a. How are communities from which poor are dispersed affected... little research, but some instances of intense gentrication (e.g., Cabrini Green in Chicago) ... theoretical possibility of "creaming" the most able from deteriorated neighborhoods
b. How are dispersed families affected? Where do people end up? Most often displaced families end up not very far from their old neighborhoods, except in programs like MTO or Gautreaux, where moving is involuntary... and in those cases, those who move are often significantly different than those who stay, so it's hard to evaluate. Satisfaction surveys show mixed results, with Gautreaux at one extreme (on the positive end)
c. How are the receiving communities affected? Goetz says this issue is "inadequately theorized and researched"... Tight housing markets have made recruitment of landlords difficult, and in most cases, not that many poor people have moved to any one neighborhood.
1. Twin Cities already had the Metropolitan Council, which had been promoting "fair share" distribution of low income housing since the 1970s... from 1975 to 1982, went from 82% of subsidized housing being in Minneapolis/St. Paul to 59% by 1983...
2. 1980s and Reagan administration: drastic reductions in HUD financing
3. More people of color moving to Twin Cities area
4. By 1995, out of 25 largest cities in the country, Twin Cities had the 6th worst level of wealth disparity between central cities and suburbs... minorities concentrated in central cities, poverty centered in minority neighborhoods... Phillips, Near North Side, Powderhorn, Central... 70% of school kids in Minneapolis were minority... huge publicity related to violent crime (murder rate in Minneapolis worse than in New York City that year)...
5. Met Council stopped reviewing grant proposals in relation to a community's fair share housing record... still official policy, but no enforcement... e.g., Maple Grove ran even Habitat for Humanity out of town and still got Met Council to fund $43 million sewer extension... in Eagan, city councilwoman who led successful resistance to a townhome development that was supposed to serve families with an average income of $20,000/year was elected mayor...
6. Suburban landlord acceptance of Section 8 housing subsidies dropped dramatically7... by 2000, only 7% of landlords in the Twin Cities suburbs accepted Section 8 subsidies
7. Very tight housing market, exploding rental rates and home costs... low-wage workers would have had to spend 50% of their income to afford the region's average two-bedroom apartment.
8. In 1995. Consent decree in Hollman vs. Cisneros, a lawsuit filed in 1992 by the Legal Aid Society of Minnesota (remnant of the War on Poverty) alleging that the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, HUD, and the city of Minneapolis discriminated in siting public housing primarily in near north neighborhoods that were already highly segregated by race and income (70% below poverty, 94% nonwhite)... by this time local officials, including the mayor, and HUD subscribed to concentration of poverty argument and therefore facilitated court settlement..provision for immediate demolition of Summer Fields and likely demolition of 4 more adjacent housing projects(notice the spatial concentration; similar to Chicago), in all totalling 900 units of housing on a 73 acre tract... displaced residents to be provided with relocation assistance and counseling through a Special Mobility Program... Besides the public housing on site (200 units or 25% of the new 800 units) another 770 units to be to be replaced, some elsewhere in the city of Minneapolis, the majority in suburban areas throughout the city, but wherever located, had to be community that was no more than 29% nonwhite