[zipper]

A good background story on section 8 housing vs. crime in Memphis. You'll appreciate it, coming from an unlikely source:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime

Lately, though, a new and unexpected pattern has emerged, taking criminologists by surprise. While crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20percent a year. In 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group surveying cities from coast to coast, concluded in a report called “A Gathering Storm” that this might represent “the front end … of an epidemic of violence not seen for years.”

[Clemenza]

That's the best thing that has been published in the Atlantic Monthly in years. I have seen that phenomenon up close in South Florida and across the river in Pennsylvania.

The pilot program in Chicago was successful in that it restricted relocation of poor families to those who worked for a living and lacked criminal records. A wholesale relocation of the underclass, however, only succeeds in destroying stable communities.

Through the Section 8 program, Uncle Sam is the new "blockbuster."