By Jake Blumgart, American Prospect
February 8, 2016
Housing voucher recipients can move to better neighborhoods only if states and localities break down suburban barriers.
For Lorraine Washington, a housing choice voucher, colloquially known as Section 8, represents escape and opportunity. Before her recent move enabled by the subsidy, she lived in the Blumberg Apartments, a public housing complex in one of the most impoverished corners of Philadelphia. Then the Philadelphia Housing Authority slated her building for demolition and offered its residents a choice: They could move to a new public housing unit in the city or accept a Section 8 voucher-which can, in theory, be used anywhere they might want to go.
“You should see the mob of people out here at night, drug dealers everywhere,” Washington said before her move. “It was terrible to come around here and try to walk around at night. I’m used to being very clean, not this trash all over the place and people disrespecting you. I have had a lot of problems around here, with people I don’t even know. Me and my daughter don’t go out very much.”
Washington (not her real name, which we’ve changed out of concern for her safety) took her Section 8 voucher to Delaware County, just west of Philadelphia-a cross-jurisdictional move termed “porting” in housing lingo. She’s found a place in Folcroft, one of a patchwork of small municipalities just over the city line that have received generations of migrants from the city. These neighborhoods were part of the nation’s first wave of mass suburbanization in the early 20th century, predating the broader postwar boom, and have an infrastructure to match: 100-year-old sewer systems, still-functioning trolley lines, and a housing stock of brick row houses and stone twins.
