Why is Crime Up? (UPDATED)

Someone did a study in Memphis, and the findings could reverberate everywhere.  Unfortunately, it'll make liberals uncomfortable, so don't expect them to be widely published:

• Memphis has always been associated with some amount of violence. But why has Elvis’s hometown turned into America’s new South Bronx? Barnes thinks he knows one big part of the answer, as does the city’s chief of police. A handful of local criminologists and social scientists think they can explain it, too. But it’s a dismal answer, one that city leaders have made clear they don’t want to hear. It’s an answer that offers up racial stereotypes to fearful whites in a city trying to move beyond racial tensions. Ultimately, it reaches beyond crime and implicates one of the most ambitious antipoverty programs of recent decades. 

Have you guessed what it is yet?

• Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn’t been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Betts and Janikowski have two dogs, three cats, and no kids; they both tend to bring their work home with them. Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government’s most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city’s public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal “Section8” rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community.
  If police departments are usually stingy with their information, housing departments are even more so. Getting addresses of Section 8 holders is difficult, because the departments want to protect the residents’ privacy. Betts, however, helps the city track where the former residents of public housing have moved. Over time, she and Janikowski realized that they were doing their fieldwork in the same neighborhoods.

Yup. Tearing down the projects and Section 8 vouchers.

Go read the entire article.  It puts actual observations of a cop and a social worker (husband and wife) together in a way we haven't seen before.  And it makes 100% sense, which means liberals will ignore it.

UPDATE: Evidently, liberals have ignored it since the article is from 2008 and we haven't seen hide nor hair of it in that time.  Unfortunately, conservatives have ignored it, too, most likely knowing that they'd get tarred with the "racism" charge once again for pointing out something that's true.