I've read your comments and very much like what you are doing to help others like me now. I'm new here and looking for a permanent place to live. I am 61yrs.old,found a job,finally and now looking for a place to live, low-income or HUD. I applied for Section 8 last year, still on their waiting list.If you can help me, very much would appreciate it. Thank You! looking forward to hear from you

housing ....they moved the crime from the inner cities to suburban communities of town and cities of less than 100,000 ....in short they merely spread the misery to the entire nation ....yippee shop-airmax.com

So what was the effect of tearing down these high rise slums and the increase of sec * housing ....they moved the crime from the inner cities to suburban communities of town and cities of less than 100,000 ....in short they merely spread the misery to the entire nation ....yippee

Ruckus: see the comment in the "Fragile Urban Families" article from commenter Brenda Maxton. She answers that question.

This is so blanantly conservative.

How is it that the men described in this article are not good enough to marry but good enough to reproduce with?

What are these women thinking?

Ended "welfare as we know it?"

Is this a joke?

The author trumpets a great victory: the reduction of "welfare" recipients from 5 million to 2 million households.

At the same time the number of households receiving "house welfare" increased to 7.2 million. This is hardly a decrease. In fact it looks like the problem is worse than ever.

And the number of food stamp recipients exploded to the 42 million today.

Congratulations and thanks to Ms. Glover. The problem with most American programs is the misunderstanding that throwing enough money at a problem will fix it. Ms Glover understands that someone has to get their hands dirty if anything is going to get fixed.

I am certain her task seemed overwhelming at first, and probably still does, but clearly progress is being made.

This type of program is where we should be focused. As a conservative white male, I am completely behind investing in this program. If we are ever to change the racial divide in our country, we have to convince all our citizens that there is opportunity for all of them and help them find how to achieve it.

It's long past time that we acknowledged the role that 'cultural' attitudes play in keeping people poor. We've always feared to judge the poor.

This sounds like a wonderful program they are running in Atlanta. We can only hope publicity like this article inspires others to duplicate some of the successful elements of this program.
Maxine Waters and many other members of the black caucus are a disgrace. Encouraging government dependancy has done far more harm to black people than all the efforts of the KKK combined.

". . . the black condition and what public policy might do to improve it"

Unfortunately, public policy over the past 45 years has done little that improved "the black condition" and a whole lot that damaged it.

It is among the greatest failures of government that when black people were in desperate need of--and were demanding--liberty and free markets, they instead received condescension and welfare.

Were the counterproductive Great Society programs simply innocent naivete on the part of government? Or were they just a cynical attempt to buy votes and grab power? Or did policymakers actually secretly believe that black people were innately inferior, could never compete successfully for jobs or education, and had to remain indefinitely as wards of the state?

Renee Glover should be running HUD, Welfare, and any other public assistance programs for the entire country.
She has done wonders for the City of Atlanta, and no she's not popular amongst the race baiters like Maxine Waters. However Glover has lifted more poeple and families OUT of poverty than Waters, Sharpton and Jackson combined.
If not for Glover's vision and hard work, the Georgia aquarium would not be where it is today...that area used to be Techwood Homes one of the worst crime ridden areas.

"As Nathan Glazer recently observed in The American Interest, “the installation of the first black President in American history . . . coincided with the almost complete disappearance from American public life of discussion of the black condition and what public policy might do to improve it.”

No surprise, since people are terrified that any discussion would lead to charges of racism. Thanks to the mainstream media, for making it an impossible topic to discuss, and for turning race hucksters like Al Sharpton into spokesman for African Americans.

Great article - forwarding it to our city council, county supervisors!

Howard,

Thank you for an excellent article. As a concerned citizen and as a real estate developer, I find Renee Glover's work inspiring. Although I don't believe we can ever completely eradicate poverty, I do believe we can stop incubating it. If her work continues to receive public and private support, I believe it will result in a better life for hundreds of thousands in the next few generations.

Dear Mr Husock:
I am one of the Principal Investigators on the GSU public housing study you mentioned in this article. I find it perplexing that you would mention our study in such a context without even contacting us. We actually just presented our preliminary six-month post-move follow-up survey results to the AHA senior staff, including Ms. Glover. We felt that it was a very constructive dialogue as I think did they.

While six months post-move we generally find that the residents relocated with voucher subsidies are satisfied with their new homes and neighborhoods, there are some very important caveats -- Caveats that your coverage of the Atlanta Model do not capture. For example, residents who are relocated with vouchers are not moving to low poverty neighborhoods. Instead they are moving to neighborhoods that are just as racially segregated as the public housing ones they left. These neighborhoods do have less poverty than public housing but not that much less. They also have less crime. However, one of our substantive questions is "what does it specifically mean in terms of access to upward mobility opportunities to move from a neighborhood with an average of 44 percent poverty to one with an average of 32 percent? How can you separate out such structural constraints from individual behavor? What aren't pundits like you paying attention to these very important questions? I'm not trying to diminish what the AHA has accomplished, but if you situate their successes within these broader questions, it is a more realistic and accurate framework.

At the same time, the resident perceptions of their new neighborhoods are very important. The fact that they are satisfied and the families (not the senior) perceive less fear of crime is important. We do not know what this will mean in terms of upward mobility, but at the very least it is some improvement over public housing. However, they all miss the community they had in public housing. They don't want to go back to "the projects" but the social support organization that existing within public housing is lost. We're not the only researchers who have found this.

We plan to interview residents again at 24 months post move. Our study has been funded by the National Science Foundation as well as the National Institutes for Health.

My hope is that perhaps in your future articles you'll pay more attention to our study -- instead of mentioning our study without even contacting us.

Sincerely,
Deirdre Oakley