If you haven't read this Atlantiic article on the spike in crime in certain suburbs—and how they correlate to the redistribution of poor people via Section 8 Housing—it's one of the most important articles I've read in months. Maybe years.

If urban planners have decided that any given city's public housing projects breed crime, and should be dismantled or demolished, then it behooves them to figure out which members of "the projects" really want to escape the pathologies there, and give them the training, life skills, and support network they need to achieve a transformation, rather than simply depriving them of the only community they know.

As for those who plan to continue living crime-ridden, dysfunctional lives—or whose kids do—we might want to at least warn the police where they are being relocated to, so law enforcement officials can adapt—and plan around—the new patterns.

Otherwise, we're simply "busing" adults, believing that they will live according to middle-class values if they live next door to white people—just as black children were bound to learn more if they were sitting next to whilte students.

It's the power of white skin: superhuman, I tell you.

(X-posted at Little Miss Attila.)