here's the failing NY Times bitching about Sleepy Ben:
Antigovernment ideologues resent the Department of Housing and Urban Development even when they know nothing about it.
Ben Carson seemed to suggest that segregation was a natural element of civic life.
Last year, Mr. Carson accused HUD of “social engineering” for requiring state and local governments that receive federal housing money to stop dumping subsidized housing in poor neighborhoods and instead locate some of that housing in healthier neighborhoods where residents would have access to transportation, jobs and decent schools. His comment betrayed a distressing ignorance of HUD’s mission, the laws under which it is supposed to operate and, more broadly, the history of housing segregation in the United States.
A prominent Harvard study last year found that young children whose families had been given housing vouchers to move to better neighborhoods were more likely to attend college — and to attend better colleges — than other children, and had significantly higher incomes as adults. This form of economic integration could be crucial to breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty.
That point is beginning to hit home with both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. The House speaker, Paul Ryan, in an antipoverty plan he released in June, called on the government to make housing assistance vouchers portable so that recipients could move “up the economic ladder” by moving to places with better education and job opportunities.
