Safety-net-as-opportunity

This month’s Atlantic has a story about housing and poverty, and to me it’s a case study in what’s wrong with the safety-net-as-opportunity narrative.

The article argues that Section 8 housing vouchers and the destruction of public housing are responsible for the uptick in crime in smaller-scale cities like Memphis, where much of the reporting was done. But the argument fails to pass the smell test because a)crime has largely been dropping like a stone for the last 15 years and b) it doesn’t compare statistics on Section 8 usage in larger cities, where crime hasn’t gone up. However, while it may not be structurally coherant, the argument does fit into the neoliberal narrative on anti-poverty policy, where good intentions produce bad results, and where it’d be nice to do something about poverty, but unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do. Sounds like it's ready to publish.

Putting crime aside, the article does tell an interesting story about how housing policy is changing. In the 1990s, housing policy focused on addressing concentrated poverty, which was considered to be more harmful and to offer less opportunity than diffuse poverty. Housing projects came down, Section 8 vouchers were given out, and people were supposedly on their way to greener pastures. However, most folks who moved out didn't do much better.

So has our housing policy really failed, as the article implies? I’d argue no, because the primary purpose of programs like Section 8 isn’t to make things better but to keep them from getting worse. Having a voucher helps ensure you won’t live in dilapidated housing or be forced onto the street. It is, in other words, a safety net program. To say that the program failed to achieve its goals is a distortion of what its primary goals are.

But this isn’t the author’s fault- both liberals and conservatives have sold housing policy as way to reduce poverty. Conservatives thought if you got rid of the projects, you’d get rid of poverty, while liberals thought if you let folks move out of the racism-created ghettos, you’d get rid of poverty. Turns out, it’s a bit more complicated than both of those stories.

Strangely, the article doesn't make it to this point, and I'd speculate it's because this safety-net-as-opportunity narrative contributes to individualistic thinking. Take the author's closing remarks:

The problems of poverty run so deep that we’re unlikely to know the answer for a generation. Social scientists tracking people who are trying to improve their lives often talk about a “weathering effect,” the wearing-down that happens as a lifetime of baggage accumulates. With poor people, the drag is strong, even if they haven’t lived in poverty for long. Kids who leave poor neighborhoods at a young age still have trouble keeping up with their peers, studies show. They catch up for a while and then, after a few years, slip back. Truly escaping poverty seems to require a will as strong as a spy’s: you have to disappear to a strange land, forget where you came from, and ignore the suspicions of everyone around you. Otherwise, you can easily find yourself right back where you started.

As usual, the causes of poverty are reduced to the individual. Poverty exists not for lack of get up and go, as popular opinion has it, but for the psychological effects of a poverty-stricken environment. So poverty is a viscous cycle, and there’s not much you can do about it.

But that’s RIDICULOUSLY STUPID. People move out of poverty ALL THE TIME. The economy gets better, our policies shaping opportunity get better, and people move out of poverty. It's lost on the author that all the policies mentioned aren't primarily meant to lift people out of poverty, and that other policy does it more effectively.

This type of defeatism isn't particular to the safety-net-as-opportunity frame. Individualistic narratives of all types produce it. And even though there's leftward movement in our politics, Americans still tend to see social policy through the lens of individualism, unless otherwise prompted. While it may take a more subtle, though equally insidious, form in the Atlantic, you can bet its nastier cousin has an even stronger hold on media that doesn’t aspire to middlebrow respectability. The challenge remains to elevate the discourse to the systemic level, and the safety-net-as-opportunity argument consistently fails to do this.