Dan Stockman has a story in today’s Journal Gazette regarding section 8 housing in Fort Wayne.

Enter Section 8, now known as the Housing Choice Voucher Program, a federal program started on a pilot basis in the 1970s as a way to end the concentrations of poverty.

[...]

Thirty years later – despite the chance to live anywhere in the city – a map of where Section 8 vouchers are being used in Fort Wayne shows they are largely concentrated on the southeast side.

Not hardly. Gary Probst has built several section 8 units in Aboite Township. Two are located at the edge of the county near Illinois Road (HWY 14) and Hamilton Road. Neither have the expected services available.

You cannot catch a bus and you cannot walk to a convenience store or grocery without risking your life walking alongside Illinois road. I constantly see woman walking down Illinois road with bags of groceries from Meijer or Scotts.

If people living in the projects were bedeviled by crime, deteriorating conditions, bad schools, few resources and urban blight, a voucher that would let them escape to neighborhoods with less crime and fewer problems might also help them escape poverty altogether. Those with vouchers would pay 30 percent of their income toward rent, the government would pay the rest.

Bedeviled by crime? Consider this. In February/March of 2008, the Allen County Sheriff Department made close to 3 dozen runs to these two housing units. Hamilton Pointe sits a couple of hundred yards from Woodside Middle School and is in the section 8 program. Right around the corner facing Illinois Road is Chestnut Hills Apartments, another section 8 unit. Drive by it sometime. Last time I looked, in front of one apartment was a bench car seat and other assorted debris surrounding a make-shift BBQ grill made from a 55 gallon oil drum.

The poor who move from high-poverty neighborhoods to those with little poverty report a much higher quality of life, said George Galster, a professor at Wayne State University in Detroit and an expert in neighborhood dynamics. “There’s less stress, less exposure to violence, they’re more likely to finish high school, more likely to go to college, less likely to be convicted of a crime and all the other predictable outcomes you would expect.”

Yet we continue with the construction of section 8 housing in locations where there are no essential services available. There’s nothing for the kids to do either. Idle hands… More importantly, there is zero in the way of employment opportunities. We might as well drop them in the middle of the desert somewhere.

Section 8 is merely a housing welfare program under which recipients pay 30 percent of their income and yes, that can be zero, toward an apartment or house. The federal government picks up the rest of the tab.

Section 8 subsidy levels are set for each city and county in the country, with the amount determining where the recipient can live. And get this, that even includes Nantucket Island where HUD hands out close to $1,800 a month to select welfare recipients. That’s more rent than 95 percent of what American renters pay.

“In virtually all American states, with the exception of Massachusetts, the landlord can legally choose not to participate in Section 8, no questions asked,” he said. “That’s the downfall of the program right now.”

It’s not a downfall and frankly I don’t blame them. If it’s my property I sure as hell don’t want the federal government telling me who I can rent to and how much I can charge.

That also leads to situations like the one in Fort Wayne – areas with weak rental markets recruit Section 8 tenants because they provide a steady rental income. Fort Wayne’s southeast side is glutted with rental homes and not enough renters, making voucher holders a prize catch.

Consider this snippet from a story involving section 8 housing in Memphis, Tennessee from The Atlantic.

.. as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal “Section 8” rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.

If police departments are usually stingy with their information, housing departments are even more so. Getting addresses of Section 8 holders is difficult, because the departments want to protect the residents’ privacy. Betts, however, helps the city track where the former residents of public housing have moved. Over time, she and Janikowski realized that they were doing their fieldwork in the same neighborhoods.

About six months ago, they decided to put a hunch to the test. Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts’s map of Section8 rentals. Where Janikowski saw a bunny rabbit, Betts saw a sideways horseshoe (“He has a better imagination,” she said). Otherwise, the match was near-perfect. On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots.

Yet here in Fort Wayne we don’t quite get it.

Maynard Scales is the executive director of the Fort Wayne Housing Authority.

When a client receives a voucher, Scales said, the client is briefed on how the program works. And during that briefing, the agency does everything but steer the client to neighborhoods that might improve his or her life.

“In the briefing, we say, ‘You can choose wherever you want, however, did you consider neighborhoods close to the schools your kids go to? Ones that are close to your job?’ … We’re saying that here, jobs, bus lines, schools and shopping are close by,” Scales said. “Are we influencing them? Yes, we are. Are we steering them? No, we are not.”

I know someone that moved into Hamilton Pointe Apartments unaware that it is was a section 8 unit. In fact, they had asked prior to renting, and were lied to by the managers who stated it was not a section 8 complex. They experienced a living nightmare that included everything from the Sheriff Department beating on the neighbor’s door in the wee hours of the night to serve a warrant, to another neighbor offering to sell their kids drugs, not to mention numerous fights on the school buses. They ended up pulling their kids off the buses and driving them to school. Fortunately for them, they were between homes and didn’t stay long.

I don’t have an answer, but crime follows section 8. In the last 16 days the Allen County Sheriff’s Department has responded to 10 calls to Chestnut Hills and Hamilton Pointe Apartments:

A 911 hangup. The person at that residence had a carry permit, and a history of domestic violence involving being armed.

Another involved 2 male subjects purportedly involved in recent thefts.

A male attempting to forcibly enter an apartment that had a protective order against him.

The apartment manager at one of the complexes harassing one of the tenants

A female that was possibly mentally ill that claimed there is a male there with a gun to her head..

Sorry Maynard, it’s not working, at least not Southwest. No buses, no shopping, no jobs. However if they like field corn and soybeans, it’s ripe for the picking.

We’re just moving the problem from one part of the city to another.

AWB

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