We had a friend visit from Seattle a couple of weeks ago and he mentioned that in Seattle, homeless people were camping out on the sidewalks in front of multi-million dollar apartment buildings. That led to a discussion about “slums and crime.”
There is a saying that “slums are nurseries of crime.” The theory being that physically run-down neighborhoods have often had much higher crime rates that neighborhoods where more affluent people have had newer and more upscale housing.
But maybe the question should be, do bad physical surroundings promote bad behavior or does bad behavior cause physical surroundings to deteriorate and prevent people from earning higher incomes that would enable them to live in better surroundings?
A lot of the government’s policy, for many years, has been based on the view that physical surroundings promote crime and other activities detrimental to society and to the individuals who engage in these activities. There have been massive and costly government programs to demolish slums or “blighted” areas and to relocate individuals from those areas into either newly built government housing projects or to scatter individuals and families from bad neighborhoods into good neighborhoods.
The demolition of any neighborhood will of course destroy not only the physical structures of that neighborhood but also the human relationships that make it a viable community as its inhabitants are scattered to the winds.
A study of people who had been displaced from a close-knit community in Boston found about half of them disturbed or depressed. While many of them found better housing elsewhere, 86 percent of them paid higher rents than before they had been forced out of their former neighborhoods.
The rationale for transferring people and resources is that what ends up being built is more valuable than what was torn down.
Time and again, moving slum dwellers into brand new public housing projects has only created new centers of crime in those projects.
Whether moving people into government housing projects, giving them vouchers to subsidize their living in middle-class neighborhoods, or moving large numbers of them from one city to another, it appears that changing people’s location doesn’t change their behavior.
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