Coupla things....
...first it took “the agency” THREE YEARS to develop the plan? And cost a couple of million along the way?
Second....like the article says, we had these things in Baltimore and they were really, really awful. They were cesspools of crime, poverty, and despair. Yes I know the folks living there likely bought it on themselves but just walking by one of them was depressing. Baltimore’s were all right by Baltimore’s Little Italy, near downtown, just awful places.
Third, it probably doesn’t matter and I’ll sound like a liberal, but any innocent child raised in those places has overwhelming odds of not breaking that ghetto grip.
Now Baltimore did phase over to Section 8 housing and this is nobody’s dream of a solution either. Still and so, it’s waaaaaay better than those high rise ghettto housing nightmares.
I worked for Baltimore’s largest property management firm and we managed Section 8 housing. It weren’t pretty.....
....BUT....you did have the advantage of private property owners charged with watching the tenants. Section 8 tenants are a tough lot but the owners of the property were damn determined to keep the property as undamaged as possible and trouble-makers were booted out without much delay. If you didn’t pay your rent you didn’t stay much longer than two months.
Section 8 housing is also used by many, many elderly citizens and these were the folks often so horribly murdered, robbed and brutalized in those public housing nightmares.
Nothing’s perfect but Section 8 housing does provide some sense of normalcy for children raised in one. The highrises were little more than gathering vicious rats in very tall boxes.
Private landlords really hate Section 8 housing by the way but given the right profit incentive they’d do it. My company purchased apt bldgs when they were Section 8, cleared them out by attrition, then simply didn’t rent to section 8 tenants if at all possible.
How does section 8 get paid? Is it direct to the landlord or to the tenant?
Wondering why a section 8 renter would skip on their rent...
I have a friend who fixes up old homes and rents them out. He says he loves the section 8 people because the government now sends the rent checks directly to him. The renters can’t be late because they never see the money.