Is section 8 bad for communities or just white racist

armchair_warrior

who don't want minorities in their neighbourhoods?

This city in the high desert, at the far northern edge of the Los Angeles sprawl, is filled with cozy cul-de-sacs, stucco homes, green lawns and gleaming sedans.

And a three-room home rents for the same price as a small apartment in Los Angeles, 70 miles to the southwest. So it is hardly shocking that the number of renters here who use the federal Section 8 housing subsidy has more than doubled in the last decade, to roughly 3,500, at a time when housing values have crumbled at the exurban fringe, driving prices even lower.

The once booming town, like hundreds of others at the edge of major metropolitan areas across the country, is also facing stark changes in its demographic mix, going in a few decades from a small, overwhelmingly white city to a much larger, ethnically diverse one where whites make up a third of the population. Fault lines have opened, with some residents worrying that neighborhoods are inundated with crime, and others seeing racism.

Mayor R. Rex Parris has contended for years that the area has been treated as a “dumping ground” for the poor of Los Angeles County. Mr. Parris has repeatedly said that Lancaster should be “waging a war” against the Section 8 program, which provides housing vouchers to low-income families, because there are disproportionately more recipients living in the area than in the rest of the county. It is a “problem that is crushing our community,” he said.

Now, civil rights groups have filed a federal lawsuit accusing Lancaster and the neighboring city of Palmdale of unfairly singling out Latino and black residents who use Section 8 vouchers to help pay rent. The residents, they say, face unannounced visits from sheriff’s deputies and county housing agents, as well as aggressive surveillance from neighbors. The investigations, the lawsuit charges, are thinly veiled efforts to have the residents’ vouchers revoked.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/us/11housing.html?_r=1&hp&gwh=0002AF29E1262732ACA5EC1658CE5350