'False narratives': How a new study of Milwaukee and other cities punctures the myth of housing vouchers correlating with crime
In a society dominated by narratives of meritocracy and “bootstrap pulling,” the perception of families and individuals receiving government assistance has generally leaned negative.
That’s especially true of participants in the Housing Choice Voucher program once known as Section 8, where fears of criminality and economic damage are often attached to the participants’ presence.
However, UCLA Professor Michael Stoll found that when Black voucher recipients move to majority white suburbs, crime rates did not drastically increase.
As Milwaukee — and public housing authorities across the country — convert location-based vouchers to portable tenant-based vouchers, gaining this acceptance in those communities, considered “high opportunity” zones, will be more important than ever.
Stoll’s October study offers public housing authorities and fair housing agencies another tool to encourage the acceptance of voucher recipients in areas outside the central city. However, some remain skeptical this new evidence can supersede the current fear-driven climate.
Study conclusively debunks narratives around race, rental assistance and crime
Stoll’s study posed a simple question: “Do Black Voucher Recipients’ Moves to the Suburbs Increase Crime Rates?”
The answer, according to his research, is no.
“Fears of increased crime resulting from increased presence of HCVRs are (not) well supported by the studies’ results, and should allay any concerns about unintended crime costs of the HCV program,” wrote Stoll, a public policy professor.
Stoll came to his conclusion after analyzing Census Bureau demographics, voucher data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and public safety data from the Uniform Crime Report statistics and FBI statistics for the country’s 100 largest metros, including Milwaukee.
The study examined crime rates in those metros after housing choice voucher recipients moved into the metro’s suburban areas.
Stoll determined that as the presence of Black voucher holders in majority white suburbs increased, property and violent crime rates decreased, although not by statistically significant levels. He also found that regardless of where Black and/or Latino vouchers moved — whether to majority white, mixed or majority non-white suburban areas — those new areas saw no increase in violent or property crime rates.
Only the move of white voucher holders into racially mixed or majority non-white suburban areas was correlated with an increase in crime rates; Stoll said he believed the results were not cause-and-effect related and reflected ongoing trends that predated the voucher holders’ moves to those neighborhoods.
Kori Schneider Peragine, senior administrator of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council, said she is heartened but not surprised the results run counter to what she often hears in her role at the council.
“There have been false narratives to property values decreasing in proximity to Black residents and that goes back to the 19th century,” she said. “All of this, this idea was centered around, ‘we cannot let Black and white people live together.’ I feel like these notions keep getting recycled in a new way.”
A 2007 report on the housing choice voucher program revealed that residents of Pennsylvania’s Montgomery County who were surveyed made “claims such as ‘HCVP is responsible for the increase in crime’ and ‘the influx of HCVP tenants is ruining our neighborhoods’ were made on the basis of strongly held beliefs, but on sometimes limited hard data.” For example, residents of Norristown Borough believed voucher holders were responsible for 50-60% of police calls, when in actuality, they were responsible for 9-14% of those calls.
The same fears of voucher holders often spillover into discussions of building affordably priced housing, where the implication is the same — lower-income residents who move into an affluent suburb will cause an increase in crime and lower property values.
Peragine said she saw that firsthand. “The most visceral experience I’ve had of NIMBYISM was the New Berlin example in 2010,” Peragine recalled. “Here was a developer just looking to put in workforce housing and community just went crazy, and they were saying, ‘we don’t want to be another Cabrini-Green,’ and mentioning all these kinds of failed public housing projects.”
Read about it here:U.S. accuses New Berlin of racial bias in housing decision
Historically, the country's first housing projects did not cater to any specific racial or ethnic group. However, the government eventually began steering white residents into programs designed to help them purchase single-family homes even as they continued clustering Black and Latino residents into under-resourced and poorly maintained tenement-style housing projects. This type of disinvestment in housing projects such as Chicago’s Cabrini-Green illustrated the impact of that disinvestment: deteriorating facilities and the proliferation of drugs and violent crime.
Stoll said because the failure of those housing projects was framed in a way to blame the residents, some assume those residents will “bring” to the suburbs the very environment they are trying to leave behind.
“There’s usually claims that these newcomers are causing all the problems they are seeing in those neighborhoods,” he said, even when statistics show the crime rate has not changed or has dropped.
As the 2007 report noted, “In many people’s minds, crime and assisted housing are inextricably linked, and the HCVP is no exception.”
Lingering fear-driven narratives hurt voucher holders
Despite the research — and rules that require background checks for applicants’ entire households and make individuals with certain criminal convictions ineligible for the program — the perception of how voucher holders will impact a neighborhood is often negative.
Those perceptions have real consequences.
“All it takes for people’s fears to be confirmed is just one incident, whether that incident is an increase in crime or not,” he said. “This is what papers call ‘perceived criminality’ and there is an association of criminality with race.”
“Once you have media accounts talking about residents’ fears of newcomers and the potential crime that might be generated as a result, this is going to affect people’s openness to receiving these housing choice recipients into neighborhoods,” Stoll explained. “It can influence neighbors’ resistance to landlords’ willingness to rent (and) landlords’ willingness to rent.”
Peragine regularly works with voucher holders, many of whom have difficulty finding landlords to accept their vouchers in or bordering Milwaukee County suburbs.
But Peragine said most landlords who perceive voucher holders as a threat to safety and property values discriminate with more subtlety.
“I feel like for the most part, we’re dealing with larger management companies who know not to say that,” she explained.
Especially because, in Milwaukee County, which includes the city and its surrounding suburbs, it is illegal to discriminate against someone with a housing choice voucher.
But Stoll said, without enforcement, that law does little to change the clustering of voucher holders into lower-income, racially segregated neighborhoods.
“If enforcement has real teeth, you do see evidence that landlords are less likely to discriminate,” he said. “The question is to what extent are they enforced?”
Many housing advocates say such laws are not enforced enough to deter discrimination or change perceptions.
“In terms of our work that we do around landlord outreach, I’m not sure if a study is going to persuade anyone,” Peragine admitted.
“I would say the reality of our program is the families we are working with who have vouchers are striving to move to safe neighborhoods where their children are safe to play outside (or) in the park — they are trying to leave high-crime areas.”
Both Stoll and Peragine acknowledge there can be many reasons landlords avoid participating in the voucher program: the scrutiny of regular inspections and bureaucracy of working with the public housing authority can be inconveniencing and expensive.
But they both agree the fears of voucher holders from landlords and residents are often motivated by a strong racial and class component.
“It’s frustrating that this kind of research has to continue, that those narrative have to continue, and we (need) social science to repudiate that crap,” Peragine said. “It’s indicative of how entrenched racism is. But I’m glad he did the research because it’s just one more definitive way to say there’s no linkage here.”
Need help fighting housing discrimination? Here are a few resources
The Metropolitan Milwaukee Fair Housing Council can be reached at 414-278-1240 and the statewide intake complaint line is 877-647-3247. More information about the agency's Opportunity MKE program, including its map of areas, is available here.
The Milwaukee field office for the Department of Housing and Urban Development can be reached at 414 297-3214 and explains its complaint process here.
The National Fair Housing Alliance can be reached at 202-898-1661 or nfha@nationalfairhousing.org and the agency has a complaint form available here.
Talis Shelbourne is an investigative solutions reporter covering the issues of affordable housing, environment and equity issues. Have a tip? You can reach Talis at (414) 403-6651 or tshelbourn@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @talisseer and message her on Facebook at @talisseer.
Need resources? Check out the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Resource Guide.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Study finds Black voucher recipients don't increase crime in the suburbs
