Let's blame the poor people

While I have briefly mentioned the portion of the Safe Neighborhood Act that required public housing residents to undergo background checks regularly, I believe it requires more thoughtful consideration.

A portion of the initiative summary for proposition 6 states that “anyone caught buying or selling drugs, who is involved in gang activity, or illegally in possession of firearms will lose their public housing benefit.” Additionally, “it requires an annual criminal background check as a condition of housing.

benefits” (http://www.safeneighborhoodsact.com/InitiativeSummary/tabid/55/Default.aspx).
While the thought of anyone loosing their home has a bold and dangerous consequence, the fact that all in public housing residents may be subject to criminal investigation is troublesome. So basically, the government will provide $10 million every year to agencies responsible for proper occupancy requirements, and in return, these government agencies are required to produce background checks for occupants.

The first problem with this is that it purposefully attacks lower income families. Poorer families will be individually targeted over wealthier families who are not in need of government housing assistance. While poverty often does house a number of social issues, such as crimes, this proposition will disproportionately target an already vulnerable part of society.

This discriminatory act purposefully aims to find and try poorer criminals in such a manner that assumes that poorer people are more dangerous to society than all other economic backgrounds. Annual background checks is a formal way of discrimination that will inevitably result in a disproportionately larger number of poorer people alienated.

Additionally, what background checks such as these will do is expand the homeless population which does not exactly contribute to safer neighborhoods in California. Background checks will punish the families of those who engage in unlawful crimes by removing them from government units and thus, increasing the number of homeless in the streets.

The homeless rate in California is already a significantly large one. According to an article in The Review of Economics and Statistics, in 1997 the country’s homeless population fell somewhere between .15% and .3%, while California had approximately 361,000 or 1.1% of the total population.

Homelessness in California already has a significant problem with this issue, especially in the larger urban cities of the state. Background checking would force some families out of their homes if they did not meet the requirements of the checks. Poorer families would be displaced and possibly as a result, homeless. This results as a punishment not only for the persons who commit crimes, but also punishes their families who become victims of these checks.

Crime is an issue, however, purposefully as a way of preventing crime or reducing it is unfair to poorer public housing residence. It concludes that their need for assistance means that they are more violent and dangerous than others. Creating more homelessness is not a way of solving the issues facing California and clearly disenfranchises a group from laws that are supposed to protect everyone equally.


Homeless in America, Homeless in California
John M. Quigley, Steven Raphael and Eugene Smolensky
The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 83, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), pp. 37-51

Southpark Crew sings California Love (their remix)