Public Housing and Crime: An Insider's View

I grew up in public housing / section 8 housing. I'm white. I have seen it all. Our housing project was most certainly "slummy." About 20 percent of the residents cared about one another and the rest were either too desperate, angry, exhausted, or entrenched to give a damn. Even fewer cared about things like upkeep and cleanliness. I'm not sure I could accurately predict how many of the parents cared about their kids, but the reality is that the way the children were raised in the projects is not at all like the way children are raised by most middle-class or even working class non-project residents. In some cases the parents were just checked out, but in many other cases the parents were subject to the same pressures stated above -- too exhausted, angry, desperate, etc, to spend as much time with their children as they'd like. The time they did spend was not usually quality time. And children and young parents were indoctrinated into the same culture they saw. It was very much self-perpetuating. When I was growing up, welfare was still aid to families with dependent children and not the current temporary assistance to needy families. Parents weren't booted off public assistance with no child-care subsidies in a short two years the way they are now.

So take all of the things I mentioned above and then add to the mix parents having children at a young age and then being forced either back into the workforce or into a life of crime (or depending on the criminal acts of another) just to get by. And if they're in the workforce, they're not making enough for quality childcare or ANY childcare. So you take a child who has never really seen true parental involvement, whatsoever, and you remove the "village" that many of us suggest it "takes" to raise children and replace it with a cast of characters who are too trapped in their own personal hell to think about the example they are providing to those coming up, and what do you get?

Teenagers who are bitter, angry, lonely, isolated, envious, furious, and detached. Who take their impotent fury out on vulnerable white women who look like they have more privileges than these kids will ever know. God knows I don't think this kind of terrible violence is excusable. Nor do I think our current justice system is doing anyone any favors by letting the children who have committed these crimes get off without consequence. Perhaps there truly is nothing to do for this generation that is out there punching women, perhaps they are truly lost. Or perhaps there is a way to get through to them. Honestly, I don't know the answers, but I don't think the revolving door of juvie court is doing much but making it plainly clear there are no consequences.

Still, if we don't attempt to at least understand where this behavior is coming from, and attack the root of the problem, we can continue to cut the dandelion heads off again and again only to have more and more angry detached youth popping up with every subsequent generation. This is NOT going to get any better until we demand more for every human and stop talking about it like we're providing charity. Think about these people as human beings, who have complex psyches that have been badly deformed by what has happened to them. You do NOT have to sympathize with them, but you do have to understand why it's happening and do your part to nip it in the bud.

Whether it is mixed-income housing, or childcare reform so that the working poor can know their children are being cared for, or a more family friendly welfare program that substitutes life-skills and counseling for forced-work, I don't know these answers either.

Signed,

14 years on the Hill, now in Brookland