The truth about Section 8 recipients.

My heroin addict neighbor was evicted a few weeks ago, but the guy that used to flop at his house has come back twice. One night he tried to break into another neighbor's house. A week later, he tried to break into the empty house he used to stay in. I had to call the cops on him. They took him back to the county hospital. Life is so peaceful with these guys gone. No one can understand how hellish it is to live next door to a Section 8 house if they haven't experienced it themselves. Here is an excerpt from a City Journal article about Section 8 tenants.

Voucher recipients are drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the city’s most disorganized families and individuals, so it’s hardly surprising that many do not conduct themselves as model tenants. “Section 8 tenants are much more difficult to deal with,” says Mark Engel, president of Langsam Property Services Corporation, which rents out 1,700 Section 8 apartments in five- and six-story apartment buildings throughout the Bronx. “The families are fragmented. There are no husbands, and so there’s not as much control over the children. So there are more damages—graffiti, breaking appliances, leaving garbage out in the hallways, breaking the entranceway door.” Another Bronx landlord, who leases 700 apartments to Section 8 tenants, agrees. “A lot of those most eligible for the subsidy,” he says, “are the least appreciative and the least sensitive to their obligations as tenants—either to owners or their neighbors.” They can create truly bad environments. “I’m dealing right now with a tenant, a 29-year-old single mother with five kids and one on the way,” he offers by way of example. “There’s loud music, teenagers congregating in the hall. The apartment’s in chaotic shape—hygiene bad, housekeeping a disaster

Here is another quote, pretty much mirroring my experience.

our neighborhood was overrun by Section 8 housing when the housing market dropped after 9/11 and . . . landlords [started] seeking easy rent paid directly to them from the government. Most of the houses that are currently being rented in our neighborhood are on a Section 8 voucher system. Tenants who profess to be single mothers in reality have live in boyfriends AKA fathers and continue to have more children. I am very concerned for my property values, no one will even want to buy my home for what the other properties in the Antelope Valley are going for due to this stigma our city has allowed. How can we get them to clean up the trash overflowing in the front yard, turn off the loud music after 10 PM, as well we have seen them drinking and smoking pot in their front yard, and children running in the streets after 11 PM or 12 PM! We cannot stay up until 1 or 2 AM listening to their music since we have jobs and have to pay our rent and utilities, why do they not have to work? The neighbors have all but given up on the police, after calling many times they last stated to one of our neighbors they would not come out to our neighborhood any longer unless it is an emergency. We are middle-class hard-working first-time home buyers who purchased our house 18 years ago in 1989 and never have seen such a deterioration of property since the Section 8 have moved into our neighborhood. Lancaster residents need to be asking is there any law or ordinance on the books that states how many rentals of this kind can be on one block? Is there any recourse for us homeowners who have paid top dollar for our houses? I feel cheated by our government leaders and overrun by corruption.


Many times I think about recommending an apartment in my neighborhood to a co-worker. I feel sorry for some of my co-workers and would like them to live in a quieter and safer neighborhood. Many of them live in housing projects. But then I remind myself of the awful stories they tell about their relatives and I realize, while I love these people, I would not want to be subjected to the criminal behavior of their family members.