Developers + Political Buddies Build A Public Housing Pipeline To Jail

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'Hyper- policing'?

How to justify tearing down aging, but initially well-built, housing? Of course there are economic reasons for doing so. For example, there are developer profits from rebuilding to consider. And when the housing is public-owned and administered housing, with very little taxable income trickling to a population centre, consider the greater local tax benefits of building new luxury housing.

But when those benefits come at the expense of unhousing thousands of low and no-income citizens, advocating such underlying economic attractions might seem a little. . . churlish?

A more clever foundation for appropriating aging public housing might be accomplished by re-imagining it as a cess-pit of criminality. The inhabitants? Moral degenerates living as fat cats on the public dime while secretly enriching themselves by peddling illegal drugs amidst the heady violence of gang membership.

Guess what? For decades now, trashing public housing and its residents has been just the ticket for profitably demolishing and rebuilding truly affordable housing as an exercise in urban greed.

There are unfortunate consequences to this demonization of public housing and the people who live there. A new study outlines one chilling result: ‘public safety’ consequences from clamping down on the public housing depravity that in America has become a national truism.

The study points out that during the study period, the crime rates in NYCHA and non-NYCHA neighbourhoods were essentially the same. This was not the case with incarceration rates. The incarceration rate in NYCHA neighbourhoods was 4.6 times higher than in non-NYCHA neighbourhoods. We’ll leave the last word to the authors:

“This common misperception—that public housing developments are hotbeds of crime—has led to potentially misguided policy interventions, including the demolition of public housing to deconcentrate poverty and the hypersurveillance of such housing developments.”

Read more in NEWSTART: ‘Hyper-policing’ creates pipeline from public housing to prison in NYC – study

Full study results are published by PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences): Concentrated Incarceration And The Public-Housing-To-Prison Pipeline In New York City Neighborhoods