Do you have any studies you can point me to that shows that Section 8 housing is a net drag on the economy? I haven’t come across such but admittedly I don’t go looking for it either so I’m curious to better understand the themes of what makes it an unsuccessful program and ways to mitigate it. As far as I know, at least based on personal experience, poor people don’t stop being poor people if you take aid away vs give them opportunities to try to better themselves (or at least their child’s lives). And if you think Section 8 housing isn’t rough, all that I’ve seen is not in a state that I’d want to find myself in and I suspect that’s how people there feel too (based on stories I’ve heard told by people from that background).
Results indicate that voucher receipt causes a large increase in violent crime arrests for
male recipients. They do not, however, indicate that vouchers have an effect on women
or on other types of crime. Specifically, we find a statistically significant increase in
violent crime arrests for the overall population and male recipients alone. There are no
statistically significant effects for female recipients alone. This dichotomy in the effects
for male and female housing voucher recipients is consistent with previous research on
the effect of the MTO experiment on juvenile criminal outcomes (Kling et al., 2005,
Sciandra et al., 2013, Zuberi, 2012, and Clampet-Lundquist et al., 2011).
