Everyone was ready for a grand signing ceremony to mark the historic moment when President Donald Trump put his name on the bipartisan bill, the 21st Century Road to Housing Act. It was to be a celebration of unity, a brief respite from the nation’s bitter divisions, Shangri-la in the capital city. Then, suddenly, the president decided not to sign it.
All I can say is: Thank you, Mr. President!
Apart from eliminating some burdensome federal regulations previously enacted by these morons (repealing almost anything passed by any Congress ever, for any reason, is a good idea) the main outcome of the law will be to destroy neighborhoods, while unjustly enriching well-heeled landlords of decrepit apartment buildings.
Specifically, the act expands Section 8 housing, a government program to move violent, gun-happy, drug-dealing welfare recipients from inner-city public housing units into previously safe neighborhoods. The theory is that if only criminals lived in nice middle-class areas, they’d get jobs and become productive members of society!
Prevented by their own ideology from criticizing welfare dependency, single motherhood, drug use, or criminality, liberals blame dysfunctional behavior on… zip codes. Instead of addressing why people might not want to live in places where they get mugged, Congress decided to move the bad neighborhoods to them. Work ethic, orderliness, respect for the law—irrelevant! It’s location, location, location.
In a completely unexpected development, wherever Section 8 appears, crime skyrockets. The newcomers don’t get jobs, but they do get to live in nicer places and have access to a relatively more prosperous set of victims.
If you built a wall around voucher-enabled housing in any town, you’d cut violent crime by 50 percent. It’s like injecting a virus into a community.
Ferguson, Missouri is an illustration of what happens when Section 8 housing comes to your town. Once a nice middle-class suburb for people fleeing crime in St. Louis, things changed after residents of inner-city projects began being funneled into “Housing Choice” apartments there.
The town’s most famous resident, Michael Brown, lived in Section 8 housing—and wasn’t it ennobling to see all his neighbors tell the God’s honest truth about how Officer Darren Wilson shot Brown in self-defense and didn’t make up a cock-and-bull story about Brown crying out, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”? (None of that happened. Even Obama’s Justice Department found they were lying.)
The New York Times seems to think that the high crime rate in Brown’s neighborhood was the result of some malevolent plot by white people to enforce segregation. As the Times reporter put it: “Can the barriers that keep blacks out of prosperous, mostly white communities be toppled? Data suggests that they often cannot.” Because, the paper sadly noted, “when you’re black and poor, freedom has its limits.”
Except Ferguson WAS a “prosperous, mostly white community.” Far from being “kept out,” poor black people were given government vouchers to move in.
And yet, for reasons entirely mysterious to the Times, crime exploded. It’s almost as if the crime rate was a result of the criminality of the people who were moved there.
The truth comes out in posts on an “Apartment Rating” website from residents of the exact Section 8 building where Brown lived, the Northwinds. For years, the complaints centered on inattentive landlords and shoddy maintenance. But as the landlord switched to mostly Section 8 housing, the comments were all about crime.
E.g.:
“It is not safe here! Shootings every weekend.”
“The crime is really bad. We have neighbors that stand around all day and sell dope.”
“I was not there 2 weeks and my car got broken in to . . . My home was next.”
“I had my home invaded 4 times in the past 16 months.”
“At least 50 units have been broken into this year.”
Section 8’s sole achievement has been to create one-building crime waves in formerly safe areas. So naturally, instead of ending this federally-funded Destroyer of Neighborhoods, Congress’s housing bill expands it.
Don’t think for a minute, oh, the poor landlords. These are rich people being bailed out of bad real estate investments. With federal vouchers, they’re suddenly able to charge a thousand bucks in rent for apartments that would get $300 in a market setting. The voucher recipients don’t care. They’re not paying. We are. (Jared Kushner’s family has made millions in Section 8 housing.)
Slumlords offload crappy apartments at extravagant rents, and the people who pay the price are working and middle-class Americans, whose kids are offered up to the criminals moving in next door. Don’t worry—Section 8 won’t be coming to Chappaqua anytime soon. “Every town needs a ghetto” is for other people.
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For the cherry on top, the program can’t be criticized because it involves race.
I know the GOP is running scared over the “affordability” crisis, but wrecking middle-class neighborhoods while showering taxpayer money on multimillionaire landlords may not be the populist solution they think it is.
This catastrophic bill becomes law on Friday if Trump doesn’t veto it first. He should hold a grand signing ceremony so we can gaze admiringly at him as he uses a Sharpie to scrawl, “VETOED!” all over it.
