Posted on 01/26/2015 10:15:40 AM PST by reaganaut1
Local governments are increasingly promoting mixed-income housing as a tool for fighting poverty, on the assumption that economic integration gives low-income children a better chance at overcoming poverty. New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio, for instance, has set a target of building 200,000 affordable housing units in the city, and he wants them to be distributed throughout mixed-income and more affluent neighborhoods. “Our goal is really to foster more economically diverse neighborhoods,” Alicia Glen, Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development, told the New York Times.
These programs rest on the assumption that mixed-income communities benefit low-income residents. Poorer children might profit from access to better neighborhood schools and facilities; the aspirations of their better-off, more future-oriented peers might rub off on them. Such a housing policy seems especially attractive when you consider that a child born into a low-income neighborhood has a 64 percent chance of moving down the socioeconomic ladder over the course of his life. Low-income neighborhoods suffer from higher crime rates, lower educational attainment, and poorer health; recent research even found a connection between growing up in a poor neighborhood and PTSD.
But a new paper in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry suggests that mixed-income housing has its own problems, too. A team of researchers at Duke University found that low-income boys in mixed-income communities are more likely than their peers in uniformly poor neighborhoods to engage in anti-social behavior such as fighting, lying, and stealing. The greater the economic inequality in the neighborhood, the worse the low-income boys in this study fared.
(Excerpt) Read more at newrepublic.com ...
Once they are grown perhaps.
your right! I missed that this was actually arguing against mixed income housing. I just didn’t read in far enough.
thanks
I like that someone actually did a study to see if what everybody thinks is true is actually true: in this case, “everybody knows” that kids in ghettos do worse than kids in mixed income neighborhoods. No one questions this “fact”, it just seems like it is true, so it is. But, before you spend a ton of money, and trash good neighborhoods in the process, at least do a study to see if what you think is true is actually true.
Of course! To steal, there needs to be something to steal.
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