The Voucher Promise

"Section 8" and the Fate of an American Neighborhood

Eva Rosen

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691189505
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie urbaine

"A must-read for anyone interested in solutions to America's housing crisis."—Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
An in-depth look at America's largest rental assistance program and how it shapes the lives of residents in one low-income Baltimore neighborhood Housing vouchers are a cornerstone of US federal housing policy, offering aid to more than two million households. Vouchers are meant to provide the poor with increased choice in the private rental marketplace, enabling access to safe neighborhoods with good schools and higher-paying jobs. But do they? The Voucher Promise examines the Housing Choice Voucher Program, colloquially known as "Section 8, " and how it shapes the lives of families living in a Baltimore neighborhood called Park Heights. Eva Rosen tells stories about the daily lives of homeowners, voucher holders, renters who receive no housing assistance, and the landlords who provide housing. While vouchers are a powerful tool with great promise, she demonstrates how the housing policy can replicate the very inequalities it has the power to solve.Rosen spent more than a year living in Park Heights, sitting on front stoops, getting to know families, accompanying them on housing searches, speaking to landlords, and learning about the neighborhood's history. Voucher holders disproportionately end up in this area despite rampant unemployment, drugs, crime, and abandoned housing. Exploring why they are unable to relocate to other neighborhoods, Rosen illustrates the challenges in obtaining vouchers and the difficulties faced by recipients in using them when and where they want to. Yet, despite the program's real shortcomings, she argues that vouchers offer basic stability for families and should remain integral to solutions for the nation's housing crisis.Delving into the connections between safe, affordable housing and social mobility, The Voucher Promise investigates the profound benefits and formidable obstacles involved in housing America's poor.

Chapter 1

PARK HEIGHTS: “A GHOST TOWN”

“Terrance?” Mr. Green incredulously repeated his given name back to me as I had just addressed him. “Young lady, is that what you’re going to call me? Terrance is my son. You may call me Mr.,” instructed Terrance Green, who alternately called me “Young Lady” or “Miss Eve.” On a drizzly, cool June midday, I found myself alone in his dark basement. “The lights is on the wall, over on the left,” Mr. Green called down to me, leaving aside the lesson in etiquette for now. “You find ’em?” At his age, the octogenarian didn’t take the basement steps much anymore, but he had cajoled me into going down to see his handiwork, while he stayed seated in his arm chair, his legs clad in green knee-high socks, propped up on the ottoman. “You gotta see how I set it up down there,” he’d said with pride, nearly pleading with me to go take a look. I fumbled around a bit, finally finding the switch. The lights flickered on and toward the back of the room a row of lights illuminated a dusty, fully stocked bar, with three stools carefully lined up in front of the gleaming Formica countertop.

On the faux-wood-paneled walls were photos of a life Mr. Green and I had spent the morning discussing. He had told me about his childhood in North Carolina, his first days in Baltimore as a young typesetter at the “Afro,” the Baltimore Afro-American Newspaper, and buying his first home—this one—with his wife who was eight months pregnant at the time. They were one of the first African American families on the block. Mr. Green still lives in the same house, and his middle-aged son now lives down the street.

For Terrance Green, buying a home in Park Heights represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Having grown up in a small town in North Carolina, coming to Baltimore had been life-altering for him. “In a small southern town you could count the black men on your hand finished high school. But I did much better than most black fellows that come from that part of the country, ’cause I worked a skill. When I was twelve years old, the man that owned the newspaper liked me and I would work after school. He gave me a job, and I learned a trade.”

Mr. Green came to Baltimore in 1960 to work at the Afro, where he worked until they stopped using the antiquated typesetting method of “stereotype.” At that point he moved to the mailroom, and then stayed on as a security guard until retiring at the age of seventy-six. When he first arrived, Mr. Green lived in the YMCA on Druid Hill Avenue. Once he had saved a little money, he was able to bring his wife up from North Carolina, and they moved into the Georgia Apartments in Park Heights. Soon enough, his regular paycheck at the Afro allowed the couple to consider buying a home.

Like Mr. Green, many of Park Heights’ older black homeowners came to Baltimore as young adults during the Great Migration, when massive numbers of African American men, women, and families moved from the south to take jobs in the expanding manufacturing industry. Once gainfully employed, buying a home was a step closer to the stable, middle-class life they dreamed of.

The Greens paid $10,000 for their home in 1962—Mr. Green’s mother-in-law loaned them money for the down payment—which, he remarked, was “a hell of a lot of money then.” The neighborhood had a different flavor at that time, as he remembers well: “Oh my goodness, Park Heights in 1960 was all Jewish. When I bought this house, then everybody, everybody, in this whole area was white. There were no black people nowhere.”

For many decades, black residents in cities across the country were confined to mostly poor, mostly black neighborhoods.¹ After the Great Depression, federally backed mortgages made it easy for whites, but nearly impossible for blacks, to buy homes. Banks refused to lend to blacks in the “redlined” black neighborhoods where they were allowed to live, and white neighborhood associations used restrictive covenants to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods. Blacks were prohibited, whether by covenant or by custom, from most other nonblack neighborhoods. Due to this long history of racially discriminatory housing practices, African American families were not allowed to move just anywhere in Baltimore.

This changed in the 1960s as real estate agents “busted” into heretofore white neighborhoods like Park Heights, showing homes to black families like the Greens for the first time, and stoking fears of racial turnover. White families sold their homes at low prices and fled, giving black families access to neighborhoods they had never before been allowed to live in. This inclusion, though, was “predatory,” in that blacks often had to pay more for their homes than they were worth.² But even at inflated prices, many black families bought homes, and as whites fled, entire blocks flipped one by one. When I asked Mr. Green about why things changed in the neighborhood so quickly, he said matter-of-factly: “Let me explain that to you, sweetheart. Any time a black person in those days would buy a house, all the Jewish people would leave.” In Park Heights, most of the whites were Jewish, and so these two things were synonymous.

Patty Carlyle, a seventy-six-year-old homeowner who lives just a few blocks from Mr. Green’s house, came to the neighborhood under exactly these circumstances. She moved to Park Heights in 1972 from Mosher Street near Pennsylvania Ave—a historic black neighborhood in Baltimore. She was then recently widowed and had three young children, but she had a good-paying steady job as a nurse. “I wanted something of my own,” she explained to me. When she approached a real estate agency, they told her about the new opportunities in Park Heights and steered her there. Patty was proud of her purchase. She wanted to own a single-family home, and she wanted it to be quiet and family-oriented, which it was at the time. When Patty moved to Park Heights in 1972, it was well into its transformation to a black majority neighborhood; seven of the families who currently live on her block had moved in just before she arrived.

By 1970, Park Heights’ white population had dropped from 95 percent to 18 percent. Ten years later in 1980, it was down to 5 percent. The mass exit of white homeowners in similarly transitioning neighborhoods across the country is called white flight. Such rapid racial upheaval was a complex product of racial fears and prejudices, a changing economy, as well as a set of concerted housing policies and real estate efforts.

FIGURE 2: Racial Composition in Park Heights, 1960–2010. Source: United States Census (1960–2010).

Mr. Green doesn’t harbor animosity toward the white families who left. “They did what they felt they had to,” he told me. “And you know something, they weren’t wrong. They knew things were changing. ’Cause now we all stuck here with homes that ain’t worth nothin’!” Blockbusting in places like Park Heights resulted in the transfer of substandard housing to black families who then assumed financial responsibility for an aging housing stock in a neighborhood that was already in decline.³ Beyond the economic repercussions, there were social consequences as well: Edward Orser, a historian who documented blockbusting in nearby Edmonson Village, observed the psychological and social mark left by the “trauma of racial change” on neighborhoods that experienced such rapid upheaval.⁴ Nearly half a century later, this is the kind of neighborhood to which many voucher holders have moved.

THE RECEIVING NEIGHBORHOOD

Policymakers and researchers hoped that providing assisted renters with the choice to use their voucher in a wide variety of homes and neighborhoods would help solve the problems of concentrated poverty. Rather than being stuck in the disadvantaged blighted neighborhoods of public housing, abandoned by banks and supermarkets and businesses, they thought that voucher holders would take their vouchers and move to lower-poverty neighborhoods with more jobs, better schools, and safer streets.

For a good many reasons—the availability of qualified homes, social networks, transportation, information, and landlord factors—things did not turn out this way. Where, then, did families move? And what was waiting for them when they got there? The policy logic behind moving low-income renters out of the towers of public housing and into dispersed, voucher-based housing rests on a whole school of thought that suggests that where you live matters, that the neighborhood environment shapes your opportunities in life. If voucher holders moved to Park Heights, what, and who, was there to receive them?

In Baltimore, a city with an unusually high number of renters who receive housing assistance, many voucher holders have moved to Park Heights, a previously white, middle-class neighborhood. Between 1965 and 1975, the entire population of the neighborhood flipped as the predominantly Jewish population moved north of Northern Parkway, a main center-periphery dividing line in the city.

Today, the neighborhood remains predominantly black. Park Heights has moderate levels of poverty, around 31 percent, typical of the kinds of neighborhoods to which voucher holders move across the country.⁵ Despite its poverty rate, Park Heights has a significant population of homeowners, many of whom were the pioneering working-class black families who bought homes in the neighborhood in the late 1960s and 1970s.⁶ As voucher holders move in, homeowners feel there is a lot at stake for them: their reactions range from indifferent to hostile.

During my time in Park Heights, I spent many months getting to know longtime residents. I wanted to get a sense of who they were and what their neighborhood meant to them. One of those residents was Bob Marshall, who lived about ten blocks from Mr. Green’s quiet homeowner street. Now sixty-two, Bob and his wife have lived in the neighborhood for over twenty-five years. A half-lifetime of manual labor shows itself in Bob’s athletic body, only now beginning to soften with age. Bob never saw a dentist as a child, and his jaw, now entirely toothless, has the slack of a much older man who hasn’t put in his dentures.

Bob worked many jobs, including working for an oil company, landscaping, and truck-driving. But he never could save enough to buy a house. So, when he and his wife inherited a home in Park Heights from her aunt, it was like a dream come true: “Everybody’s dream is to own your own home. And that was mines. I wanted the porch where I could sit out on, and everything. It was a nice neighborhood at that time.” The neighborhood was showing minimal signs of decline when the Marshall family moved in in the mid-1980s. Although the house needed some work, Bob was up for the task: “You know, no matter where you live you gotta pay. I thought maybe it would be more better for us to go here and try to fix what we have, rather than try to pay somebody else. I mean you know, being that I was handy with my hands, I thought that I could do it well enough that we could live here and finish paying it off.”

And pay it off they did. Bob and his wife and their two kids lived happily in the neighborhood for several years before he remembers the change that began to creep in. On a rainy morning, Bob described to me how he remembered the neighborhood:

You know when I think about the neighborhood I don’t think about cloudy days like today, I think about nice sunny days with the trees out … there was a few more back then, that people done cut down since then. It was quiet and it was peaceful. It was like, you wanted to come home from work and put your feet up. During warm weather you could sit out there on the porch till late at night, and not be bothered or anything, and relax you know, gather your thoughts.

This wasn’t the scene Bob and I saw as we sat talking that day. On the end of his block there was a sandy-colored pit bull chained to the side of the house, huddled under the overhang of the porch to stay dry. Every few minutes it barked hoarsely, croaking with thirst and neglect. Bob just shook his head in dismay. To the right were two vacant homes, and in between them, a house in reasonable shape, with toys strewn about the lawn.

“Those people is Section 8,” Bob told me.

“Oh really? How do you know?” I asked.

“Well they got little kids, for one.” Many residents equate large families with voucher holders. “Plus, they got a black Lexus. No working person can afford a car like that,” he scoffed. In my conversations with them, the homeowners of Park Heights frequently complained about v...