It uses two females -- the young one who got her GED, and says “I know I have to venture out in the world,” she said, running through her options: Go back to school? Get a job? Get married? Have a baby? “I want more. I’m so ready to have my own. I just don’t know how to get it.” (Hint: how about working for a living?)
Then there's the older woman: "11 years crack-free and, at 47, eager to take advantage of every free program that comes her way—a leadership class, Windows Vista training, a citizen police course, a writing workshop." (Hint: How about working for a living?)
Of course, the article doesn't suggest that maybe, just maybe -- these two women should try getting an actual job, but that this experiment is has become "baffling and disappointing" and "When the projects came down, the residents lost their public-support system—health clinics, child care, job training. Memphis’s infant-mortality rate is rising, for example, and Betts is convinced that has something to do with poor people’s having lost easy access to prenatal care. The services remained downtown while the clients scattered all over the city, many of them with no convenient transportation."
So, after all, the problem is the government's fault -- besides move these people out of rat-infested "projects," they should have followed them with all those services they were accustomed to....with no accountability or responsiblity required from the recipients, as usual.
One conclusion the former residents of housing projects draw in the article is that the “project” seems to follow them.
The researchers seem unwilling to explore what that means.
One thing it means is that there is more to changing social pathologies (crime, illegitimacy, drug use, illiteracy) than simply changing the environment. There is no “geographical cure.” Or, as someone once said, “wherever you go, there you are.”
People make bad choices not because they are poor, but because for whatever reason they don’t have the ability to make better choices. Moving those people to “nicer” homes doesn’t improve their ability to make better choices.
We have all driven down a nice street of townhomes and been able immediately to pick out the Section 8 house. The idea behind this Section 8 utopia was that poor people would see how other non-poor people lived and then naturally want to and be able to emulate them.
Just doesn’t happen.
If it doesn’t happen, then what if anything can Section 8 accomplish except to bring down neighborhoods and destroy communities that, though poor, were functioning at some level?
I lived in a big city once where there was a push to extend the subway to a poor part of town. The idea, of course, was then that poor people could have access to the nice part of town and, again, then naturally want to and be able to figure out how they could make their situation nicer too, including by getting jobs, etc.
The first weekend the new line opened up there was a murder in the parking lot of a very nice high-rise apartment building. When the perps were caught, they told police that one had said, “Hey, let’s go ride that new subway (without paying, of course) over to the rich side of town and steal a car.” Which had turned into a murder, but never mind.