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Last month, in The Atlantic, Hannah Rosin published a provocative and disturbing article suggesting that Hope VI housing vouchers -- which let poor families move from concentrated epicenters of poverty to better neighborhoods -- were behind the increase in crime in Memphis. The response was predictable. "[Liberals] have exported serious crime to previously blissful suburbs," sneered Powerline.But Greg Anrig and Harold Pollack -- both social and urban policy experts -- have evaluated the data and can't quite find the evidence for Rosin's conclusion. Rather, what they find is that she seems to have overread a provocative map -- which was her only evidence in the article -- showing that the migration patterns of the families on Hope VI vouchers fit precisely over a map showing Memphis's rise in crime:
But this apparent "smoking gun" is really just smoke. There is nothing amazing or surprising going on here. Section 8 voucher holders typically migrate to lower-cost housing, which tends to be concentrated in poor neighborhoods where crime is a serious concern. As University of Texas public policy professor Paul Jargowsky, one of the nation's leading experts on concentrated poverty and crime, says: "If you look at cities throughout the country from 1990 to 2000, you see a consistent pattern of increases in poverty in the inner-ring suburbs, while the central cities had declines. Since poverty and crime are correlated, you would expect that inner-ring suburban crime went up and central city crime went down -- but that's only a statistical artifact of changing neighborhood composition rather than a causal effect of poverty on crime. The correlation of crime and poverty, old news to be sure, is the only thing demonstrated by the map in the article. Nobody likes maps more than me, but sometimes they just confuse correlation and causality."Meanwhile, the economy almost certainly bears a large share of the blame for the increase in crime. When poverty goes up, so too does criminality. And between 1997 and 2004, Memphis saw a 14 percent increase in the share of schoolkids living in poverty. Meanwhile, the percentage of neighborhoods classified as having low male employment doubled. "During this time of nationally declining poverty rates, conditions in Memphis markedly worsened." Of course, a story suggesting that the Memphis economy worsened and crime shot up isn't exactly Atlantic feature material. Rosin's article has the virtue of being far more interesting. Its just not clear that it's true.
