Displacing People isn't Going to End Poverty

The Federal and city governments across the country have been moving people out of public housing for decades in the belief that moving them to better neighborhoods will improve their lives. Just last year, Edward Goetz and Karen Chapple evaluated the social science research since 1995 on this topic. What did they find?

• Families moved from high-poverty areas felt an increased sense of safety and of satisfaction with their new environment. Adults and female youths had mental health benefits, while male youth had adverse effects.
  
• These households, however, did not experience benefits in employment, health, or social integration.
  
• These families experienced increased social isolation. They had little social interaction with higher-income neighbors.
• These families also lost the social networks that helped them survive on a daily basis. As John Betancur demonstrated in an article published this month, lower-income groups rely on neighborhood-based fabrics of support "far more than do the higher income" and, thus, displacement "can seriously disrupt or destroy their systems of support, exchange and reciprocity or social fabrics." The loss of these networks make it more difficult to find jobs, childcare, etc.
  
• Many of these families ended up in other high-poverty, racially segregated areas due to the lack of affordable housing, lack of housing for the "hard to house" population, discrimination by landlords, and other reasons.
• Distressingly, many are forced to leave when they, in fact, remained attached to their particular development as their home and community. A study of a project in Portland found that two-thirds of the residents did not want to move and later mourned the loss of their neighbors and their housing development. This is similar to what I discussed in my last posting.
  

The authors found that "mere mobility is not the answer to problems of chronic joblessness and poverty." Displacement seem to primarily dismantle neighborhoods. What to do about this? Don't displace people. If you want to improve low-income peoples' lives, according to Goertz and Chapple, more effectively manage and maintain public housing, help residents feel more secure (such as through community policing), and provide resources that have a proven track record, such as community development financial institutions and workforce development.

But is trying to reduce poverty really the reason why governments are moving people out of public housing?