Neal Boortz: Gotta say this about the Section 8 crowd

By Neal Boortz

For The AJC

This is not a column for those suffering from obsessive-compulsive sensitivity disorder or those who are prone to use the phrase “the less fortunate” in conversation.

Some things need to be said about the mob that showed up to glom some applications for Section 8 welfare housing in East Point this week, and I’m your guy — the (ahem) author of The New York Times best-seller “Somebody’s Gotta Say It.”

My experience with these Section 8 “clients” goes back to the mid-1970s when I had a law office at the First National Bank building in Decatur. It was my misfortune to occupy an office down the hall from the Decatur Housing Authority. Being a quick learner, I figured out I needed to be somewhere else on days the authority was accepting applications for Section 8 housing. The hallways would fill early with ... we’ll call them “applicants,” just to be nice.

After experiencing that unruly mob, I wasn’t stunned to learn of the behavior of the East Point Section 8 crowd.

I delight in irritating the left by dividing Americans into three basic groups: The producers, the looters and the moochers. What you saw this week was the moocher class accepting applications from the looters for benefits to be paid for by the producers. The looters will be all too happy to use the police power of government to seize wealth from the producers for the benefit of the moochers, if the moochers will remember the looters on voting day.

Did you get a good look at these people gathered for their chance at plunder? They had their tattoos, to be sure, and they had the cigarettes, the cell phones. They had the hairdos and the fancy nails — oh, and the babies. What is a Section 8 application party without the babies? (What is it about our society that we seem to find nothing wrong with a woman making the decision to have a baby she cannot afford to raise?) They had all the goodies but couldn’t seem to find the money for a place to live.

I’ve been warning newcomers to Atlanta for years — those newcomers fortunate enough to have found me on the radio, that is — that in their search for a place to live they need to find out where the Section 8 housing units are ... and move somewhere else. My warnings were legitimized by a confluence of different studies conducted in 2008 by a Memphis couple, Richard Janikowski and Phyllis Betts. Janikowski, a criminologist, was creating a map of crime patterns in Memphis while his wife, Betts, was studying Section 8 housing patterns as part of her research as a housing expert at the University of Memphis. Memphis, you see, was demolishing its welfare housing projects and moving the residents into Section 8 units around the city. The two soon recognized that their work was concentrated in the same neighborhoods. They merged their crime and Section 8 maps on a computer. You should not be surprised to learn that they overlapped perfectly. Section 8 housing meant crime, drugs and gangs. Just the culture you want spread into your neighborhood, right?

Do I have a solution? Actually, yes. On Monday morning check out my program notes at boortz.com. I call them “Nealz Nuze.” In the meantime, figure out where those people you saw in East Point on Wednesday are going — and head the other way.

Listen to Neal Boortz live from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. weekdays on AM 750 and NOW 95.5FM News/Talk WSB.

His column appears every Saturday. For more Boortz, go to boortz.com