In the worst days of Harlem, I lived on its western border. Bodies would drop on my street, bullets go through the window, the building next to me had been abandoned, crack was plaguing our families, and the police in our precinct were no damn good. But I was safe and had a wonderful experience. How could that be?
Home ownership, church, and intact families.
My block was unusual in that it had 4-story brownstones that were bought up in the 1950s and 1960s by its working-class residents. They defended the block against crime.
The rapist and my neighbors
One early morning, about 4 AM, a rapist and drug dealer from the housing projects around the corner was hiding across the street from my building. Rather stupidly, I leaned out and said, “There he is!” The police arrested him. But that didn’t solve the problem.
The city was besotted with a corrupt version of politics that decried individual responsibility and had an overwhelming emotional attachment to forgiving wrong-doers. So, the rapist drug-dealer (who had a pistol in his pocket when he was arrested) was out by 11am that morning and came looking for me. He came with a friend to my neighbors and asked, “Who is that White guy up there [on the top floor of the building]?”
It seemed like curtains for me. But my neighbors had a different answer, one that I can’t repeat here.
The homeowners, including my friend Don Victor, strongly told them to never come back. We never saw the two guys again.
Anti-racist training or homeownership?
Anti-racist training would have done nothing to solve our block’s problems, and I am offended deeply that some people who have never lived in the worst areas of the city can make such an easy, ineffective claim. However, I know that many in the anti-racist movement have deep hearts and believe, rightly, that we need action now. Racism is a bad problem, and we should all appreciate the history, knowledge and practical solutions that the anti-racist movement is bringing to the table. However, I want to call their attention to the huge practical fact: what solved our block’s problem of high crime rates and ineffective policing? At least part of the solution was home ownership. I imagine that much of the anti-racist movement will endorse this conclusion.
We have a policing problem because as long as crime rates in African American working class communities remain high, there are going to be police encounters that go bad. No amount of anti-racist training is going to change that fact. Indeed, an over-emphasis on anti-racist training is racist, because it abstractly offers solutions with no proven viability and takes away attention from real solutions. Harshly executed, it may actually cause more racism, according to a recent summary of sociological studies published by the American Sociological Association.
Further, no amount of police defunding is going to change this. It will just make it worse. Fewer police means that violent encounters will necessarily go ballistic quicker because there are not enough police to see other, less violent solutions. In fact, police will be so demoralized that they will not do policing at all in those cases. It will end up like my neighborhood: the good cops gone, a precinct that hardly comes out and spends most of its time in community activity called “corruption.” This is really personal: some ideologues want to come on my old block and attack its well-being. For the month ending on June 6th, the murder rate in the city just went up 133%!
Oh, Don Victor (from my old neighborhood), I apologize so much for the destruction that some of my colleagues are preparing to unleash on your family! I fear that the reactions and counter-reactions will leave you bereft of effective help in this crisis!
Crime and homeownership
The reasons for the high crime rates are complex. Some say not enough money; some say bad schools; some say the absence of Dads; some say a sense of disrespect. Let’s not discount these possibilities. However, one thing that usually is not talked about is the impact of the 2008 housing crisis.
African American home ownership peaked in 2004 at about 50% and then went down, rapidly after 2008. The NYC financial community really let down the nation by poorly policing the crooked bank-real estate Ponzi games.
Various empirical studies have shown that an increase in home ownership by 1% leads to over 1% decrease in violent and non-violent crime.
According to a widely cited 2009 study, “The Impact of Homeownership on Criminal Activity: Empirical Evidence from United States’ County Level Data” by Jinlan Ni and Christopher Decker, an increase of 1 percent in homeownership led to a fall of 1.253 percent and 1.513 percent in subsequent per-capita property crime in neighborhoods in 1991 and 1992, respectively. The same percent increase in homeownership led to drops of 1.043 percent and 1.123 percent in subsequent per-capita violent crime in 1991 and 1992, respectively
As home ownership dropped precipitously in African American communities after 2008, crime most likely increased by 1 percentage point per drop of 1 percentage point of home ownership. The homeownership by African American dropped to 42% by 2019. That is an 8 percentage drop and could well mean that crime went up accordingly by 8 percentage points!
Here are two facts to have riveted on your mind:
1. the drop in African American homeownership was 20%! Imagine what your community would feel like if 1 out of 5 families got dispossessed of their homes; and
2. social disorder and crime exponentially increased in working-class African American neighborhoods affected by a drop in homeownership. This leads to increased violent encounters with police and, inevitably even for good policing, to bad results in more cases. So, the community is not only dispossessed of a place to live but is facing the raw reality of its results.
Now, the relationship between crime and homeownership is a complex one. It’s true that neighborhoods with high homeownership rates tend to have lower rates of both violent and property crimes. But it’s not homeownership alone that tends to lower crime.
Residents who are involved in their neighborhoods, who are willing to form neighborhood watch groups and attend community meetings, are the key to a lower crime rate. And those types of residents are more common in neighborhoods in which more people own homes. In other words, community policing works best with homeowners as the foundation.
Homeownership as the big firetruck
The implication is that congregations with large numbers of financial people have a greater responsibility to come up with better analysis and solutions to the housing crisis among working-class people in the city. Being anti-racist will not put out the fires plaguing our communities. To put out the fires on our neighbors’ houses, we need to do something now. Figuring out ways to increase stable homeownership in African American communities is the big fire truck.
We need other firetrucks like growing churches, better schools, and bigger police resources to overwhelm potentially violent encounters and to do better community policing. We certainly need dialogue with the anti-racist movement and recognition that their help in prohibiting neck holds (except in extreme circumstances) will save lives.
And we need to have this dialogue with the theological and street wisdom of African American pastors, like the eight pastors with churches on and very near my old block. Some of them are both former police, and all have experience and knowledge with homeownership, family, school, and youth problems. In many African American neighborhoods, their houses are on fire. As good neighbors, we should be much more concerned about this! Don’t hand them anti-racist demagoguery, hand them a firetruck!
This is a big fire and won’t be put out immediately; all hands on deck! Anti-racists and anti-anti racists! Remember George Floyd! Don Victor, we are coming to help!
