Sorry you didn’t understand what I wrote.

It is not based on my data. The information cited is based on Census data analyzed by the Pew Research Center.

Regarding you assertion that I do not understand reality because of a lack of experience with the lives of low-income people I am not sure how well you actually know me or my work in this area dating back to the early 1970s. But you will be happy to hear I just spent a week away from the computer with low-income residents of poor neighborhoods in South Texas just last week.

You seem to feel there is some bad effect of entitlements on the poor. You will be glad to learn that TANF has not been an entitlement since the Clinton Administration. Housing assistance has never been an entitlement. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are the major entitlements, along with Food Stamps (which in Texas has a three year maximum benefit period).

Doesn’t seem to me like these entitlements have exactly had a corrosive effect upon folks..

If you would like to learn more about public assistance programs for the poor in Texas I would suggest you visit the web pages of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, http{//www.cpp.org ).

Regarding income underreporting and the poor, I am aware of a large amount of research that has taken place in an attempt to test the highly controversial claims of Charles Alan Murray to which you refer. Namely that the poor underreport their income and this leads to systemic bias in studies of the poor. My sense is that such conclusions are not generally supported by the overwhelming majority of the research. In any case I don’t think the research would support your sweeping statement that income underreporting reduces a widespread problem.

I would refer you to a paper by two researchers who have studied the question, Marlene Kim from the Department. Of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at Rutgers University and Catherine J. Weinberger from the Department of Economics and Institute for Social, Behavioral and Economic Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Their paper titled, “The Working Poor–A Statistical Artifact?” can be accessed at: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~weinberg/poor.pdf

The paper is summarized as follows…

“For many Americans, there is something immoral about the very existence of the working poor. Because most people believe that hard work should be rewarded with earnings that bring one above the poverty level, the existence of 9 million Americans who work but remain poor seems wrong. So wrong, in fact, that some scholars have suggested that estimates of the size of the working poor population are greatly exaggerated.

“For example, Murray (1987) describes case studies of families who have current incomes below the official poverty threshold, but are not poor. Bradley Schiller (1994) believes that the Current Population Survey (CPS), the data set usually used to estimate the working poor population, overestimates the number of the working poor because of the way the survey is conducted. Rather than reporting current earnings, surveyed individuals must recall earnings over the past fifteen months. This is likely to produce a fair bit of error. Despite claims that the measurement error that results overestimates the size of the working poor population, no one has investigated whether this indeed occurs.”

“We use a unique data set to examine the effect of measurement error on estimates of the working poor population. Because the data set includes each individual’s self-reported earnings in the CPS as well as the earnings reported by their employers to the Social Security Administration (SSA), the exact error in CPS earnings can be estimated for each person in the sample. We find that, surprisingly, measurement error does not bias estimates of the working poor population. Although some of those who have low reported earnings underreport their earnings, an equally large number of low earners overreport their earnings. By fortunate coincidence, these two sources of measurement error cancel each other out. The number of people who fall below the poverty line is exactly the same whether one uses self-reported or employer-reported earnings.”

People end up in public housing for a lot of good reasons. For the elderly and infirm, public housing provides a well deserved safety net that our society ought to provide. What you choose not to recognize is that there are some folks who are not elderly, or infirm, but have just made (and continue to make?) bad life choices that involve drugs, crime and are, in general, not the best neighbors. These people come in all colors – white, black, yellow, red, you name it. That’s not being racist. If real policies existed that kept these bad actors out of PH that would be great – but that never happens in real life.

Finally, how you figure it makes sense to put 569 (or 1500, depending) of our most vulnerable families on a barrier island next to the Gulf of Mexico, where there are no jobs, only limited services and where they are subject to mandatory evacuations at a moments notice is beyond me. Placing all of Galveston County’s public housing on Galveston Island was a bad idea 50 years ago, and the idiots like you (and our mayor) who are hell-bent to repeat that mistake care more about ‘in your face’ politics than the very families that public housing was meant to help.

This is race baiting….

If you want a civil rights violation then I suggest you tell your readers how the Board of Commissioners of the Galveston housing Authority and the Mayor announced a policy that no public housing would be built on the West End “Period!”…. This policy announcement was made without an anysis of Impediments, without a public debate/vote by the Board of GHA, without a period of public comment. Tell me if I am wrong – is not denieing a specific geographical area to be considered for public housing, without due process, to a protected class of persons a violation of their civil rights? Add to that the fact that this tract is the wealthiest and whitest census tract on the island…. And who is promoting this policy? The very people who are shoving the Conciliation Agreement down the throats of Galveston “Do what we say or we will not give you disaster relief funds to rebuild your infrastructure”. What person in their right mind places the poor on a barrier island with a historically higher rate of unemployment than the mainland? There is no prejudice in Galveston that does not exist anywhere else. It is simply that here Galvestonians who make moeny off of poverty have turned it into an artform.

I would love to have PH rebuilt on the island. The “residents” that want to go back to where they were before, in their own segregated crime hotspots could then return and again become the problem of Galveston. It’s only fair that Galveston deal with it’s issues, rather than shipping them where they are not happy, and where they are not wanted. These people have no respect for themselves, let alone anyone they come in contact with. I have lived in Texas City for 50 years, and it has never been so ghetto.
I am not saying that there were not good people in Galveston Public Housing, but the ones that cause the crime increase give the rest a bad name. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.
Much of the problem lies with the mentality of generational entitlement. That they are somehow *owed* a place to live, and to have food and cash provided to them while they take active steps to increase the entitlement amounts and will not do anything that will even temporarily decrease them, even if the end outcome is a better life.

It seems unlikely to me that, as you suggest, title insurance companies have to do more “due diligence” in Texas. Having spent a fair amount of time in offices of county clerks in Texas, and having colleagues in other states who have done the same, I don’t think the filing systems in Texas are any worse that other states in this region. So, it seems unlikely to me that is the source of these costs. I certainly don’t think the underwriting standards in Texas are inherently any different. I simply cannot see where more “due diligence” would account for this.

As far as the $10 fee that the title insurance industry defeated that would have allowed lower income families to get help affording housing by endowing a state housing trust fund, I think you must have missed my point. I wrote, “it seems to me that the Texas tile insurance industry does not want to share any part of these unusually high fees they are collecting.” Texas closing costs are $874 more than the average of the states. I probably should have simply stated that it looks downright greedy for the industry to be charging consumers so much extra while fighting so hard to not return $10 for a public purpose.

The Texas Legislature clearly failed in not exercising adequate oversight over the industry. Texas has a huge need for decent, affordable housing for the poor. For the Texas Legislature to permit the industry to overcharge consumers, while at the same time slashing state support for housing for the poor in half (as it did this session) is bad public policy.

$874 in extra fees is pretty significant. Seems like $10 of that should have been used to help the poor.

Thanks for your comment. I hope we find out what is behind all this.