I Wonder Why

Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum both discuss the fact that this Section-8 business isn’t catching on. Josh asks:

Just for the sake of discussion, and I’d be particularly eager to hear from TPM’s right-leaning readers on this one, isn’t the idea of giving rent vouchers to refugees rather than stacking them up in mobile housing projects something that folks on both sides of the aisle should be able to agree on?

In truth it is a neat right leaning idea, but it exists only in the Cato Institute’s and Jack Kemp’s wet dreams. In Republicanland (although I’m pretty sure this would be a problem in many places) getting enough people to rent their empty apartments to displaced, unemployed African American strangers is not nearly as easy as giving those evacuess vouchers to pay for them. There are still people who go to great lengths to not rent to gainfully employed African Americans with good credit and references.

The LA Times discussed this issue today and reports something that is completely inexplicable — unless the reasons have nothing to do with money or expanding government programs over the long haul:

Two days after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced plans to issue emergency vouchers aimed at helping poor storm victims find new housing quickly by covering as much as $10,000 of their rent.

But the department suddenly backed away from the idea after White House aides met with senior HUD officials. Although emergency vouchers had been successfully used after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the administration focused instead on a plan for government-built trailer parks, an approach that even many Republicans say would concentrate poverty in the very fashion the government has long sought to avoid.

[…]

At least in the case of housing, critics say that the president’s unwillingness to rely on existing programs could raise costs. Instead of offering $10,000 vouchers, FEMA is paying an average of $16,000 for each trailer in the new parks it is contemplating. Even many Republicans wonder why the government would want to build trailer parks when many evacuees are now living in communities with plenty of vacant, privately owned apartments.

The article compares this situation to the admnistration’s reluctance to expand Medicaid, but it is not the same thing. This was an emergency voucher program that, unlike health care, would have cost a finite amount of money — a one shot deal. There is no rational reason not to put people in existing housing if it is going to cost less than putting them in Bushville trailer parks — unless they wouldn’t actually be able to put evacuees in that existing housing for other reasons. (And yes, Halliburton will make a killing.)

“Crime” (which along with “poor” are loaded racial terms in this context) is already becoming a prime concern:

After a crisis with indisputable elements of race and class _ searing images of mostly poor, mostly black New Orleans residents huddled on rooftops or waiting in lines for buses _ some Americans worry about strains in the nation’s social fabric.

Women were especially concerned. One of them is Sue Hubbard of Hueytown, Ala., 64 years old. She does not believe race played a deliberate part in who got out of New Orleans, but she is deeply worried about tensions inflamed by those who do.

“I just think it took everybody by surprise,” says Hubbard, who is white. “I don’t care if it would have been the president himself, they couldn’t have gotten there to those people. Some people _ not everybody _ are trying to make a racist thing out of it.”

The poll underscores the literal reach of Katrina as well: 55 percent of Americans say evacuees from Katrina have turned up in their cities or communities, raising concerns about living conditions for the refugees, vanishing jobs for locals and _ among 1 in 4 respondents _ increased crime.

Among respondents with incomes under $25,000 per year, 56 percent were concerned about living conditions for refugees in shelters; that was higher than among those who make more money. And the poll indicates people in the South, which has absorbed huge masses of evacuees, are most concerned about the costs to their local governments.

Ann McMullen, 52, of Killeen, Texas, who works as a school administrator at Fort Hood, says she worries about gang violence, simply because of the prodigious numbers of people flowing into Texas communities.

“They can’t even locate the sex offenders,” she says. “And every population has gang members. It’s theft, it’s murder, it’s more chaotic crimes in the community. Hopefully we’ll be able to put these people back to work.”

In order for the Section 8 plan to work on the scale necessary, they would have to put enormous pressure on landlords to accept something like 350,000 people with vouchers. I’m not sure even huge rental subsidies at twice the market rate would persuade people that it’s a good idea to take in a large number of black evacuees into their neighborhoods.

25% of the population already expressing their concerns about an influx of crime — at the moment of people’s greatest feelings of sympathy and generosity — makes it pretty clear that this is a lurking issue. And it is one that will likely pay dividends in the long run for the GOP. Before it was a television show, “Law and Order” was the slogan for the southern strategy.

Oh, and by the way, the Richard Nixon also had another electoral strategy that reverberates to this day and was heavily influenced by race — the suburban strategy.

Richard Nixon did not invent the politics of suburban segregation. Opposition to housing integration in suburban America was well entrenched prior to the 1970s. Yet President Nixon solidified public opposition to federal desegregation of the suburbs at a time when the nation was poised for change. He enunciated a policy declaring that the national government would not pressure the suburbs to accept subsidized low-income housing against their will. In so doing, he formally embraced a fundamental suburban belief: that government should not and could not force a community to accept economic – and by extension racial – integration. Nixon’s policy cemented [*479] the politics of suburban segregation that informally existed before his administration. He converted suburban political preferences into national public policy – a policy that remains largely intact to this day. No president between Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton revoked that policy, and Nixon’s federal court appointees perpetuated it through their judicial decisions (pp.3-4

Rick Perlstein’s new book discusses un great detail the wars over the Fair Housing Act — which were vicious and essentially broke the back of the civil rights consensus in the Democratic party. Voting, public access and employment were one thing. Forcing people to live side by side was another. And it wasn’t just a southern thing.

Housing remains one of the racial fault lines in this country. Many people who are not consciously racist (or classist) consider being forced to live among people not of their tribe to be a fundamental affront to their liberty — and an automatic threat to their equity.

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