THE ROAD TO HELL

Falling crime rates have been one of the great American success stories of the past 15 years. New York and Los Angeles, once the twin capitals of violent crime, have calmed down significantly, as have most other big cities. Criminologists still debate why: the crack war petered out, new policing tactics worked, the economy improved for a long spell. Whatever the alchemy, crime in New York, for instance, is now so low that local prison guards are worried about unemployment.

Lately, though, a new and unexpected pattern has emerged, taking criminologists by surprise. While crime rates in large cities stayed flat, homicide rates in many midsize cities (with populations of between 500,000 and 1 million) began increasing, sometimes by as much as 20percent a year. In 2006, the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group surveying cities from coast to coast, concluded in a report called "A Gathering Storm" that this might represent "the front end … of an epidemic of violence not seen for years."

But mostly they puzzled over the bleak new landscape. According to FBI data, America's most dangerous spots are now places where Martin Scorsese would never think of staging a shoot-out?-Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Reading, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee.

Janikowski might not have managed to pinpoint the cause of this pattern if he hadn't been married to Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the University of Memphis.

Betts remembers her discomfort as she looked at the map. The couple had been musing about the connection for months, but they were amazed?-and deflated?-to see how perfectly the two data sets fit together. She knew right away that this would be a "hard thing to say or write." Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they'd been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they'd never expected. But the connection was too obvious to ignore, and Betts and Janikowski figured that the same thing must be happening all around the country.

In the afternoon, I visited an older resident from Dixie Homes who lives across the way from Shaw. Her apartment was dark, blinds drawn, and everyone was watching Maury Povich. A few minutes after I arrived, we heard a pounding at the door, and a neighbor rushed in, shouting.

"They just jumped my grandson! That's my grandson!"

This was 64-year-old Nadine Clark, who'd left Dixie before it got knocked down. Clark was wearing her navy peacoat, but she had forgotten to put in her teeth. From her pocket she pulled a .38-caliber pistol, which was the only thing that glinted in the room besides the TV.

"There's 10 of them! And I'm gonna go **** them up! That's my grandson! They took him away in an ambulance!"

Nobody in the house got excited. They kept their eyes on Maury Povich, where the audience was booing a kid who looked just like the thug who'd shot up his girlfriend's car. "She'll calm down," someone said, and after a few minutes, Clark left.

In her research, Suresh noticed a recurring pattern, one that emerged first in the late 1990s, then again around 2002. A particularly violent neighborhood would suddenly go cold, and crime would heat up in several new neighborhoods. In each case, Suresh has now confirmed, the first hot spots were the neighborhoods around huge housing projects, and the later ones were places where people had moved when the projects were torn down. From that, she drew the obvious conclusion: "Crime is going along with them."

"People were really excited about it because it seemed to offer something new," Popkin said. "But in my view, it was radically oversold."

Ed Goetz, a housing expert at the University of Minnesota, is creating a database of the follow-up research at different sites across the country, "to make sense of these very limited positive outcomes." On the whole, he says, people don't consistently report any health, education, or employment benefits. They are certainly no closer to leaving poverty. They tend to "feel better about their environments," meaning they see less graffiti on the walls and fewer dealers on the streets. But just as strongly, they feel "a sense of isolation in their new communities." His most surprising finding, he says, "is that they miss the old community. For all of its faults, there was a tight network that existed. So what I'm trying to figure out is: Was this a bad theory of poverty? We were intending to help people climb out of poverty, but that hasn't happened at all. Have we underestimated the role of support networks and overestimated the role of place?"

It's difficult to contemplate solutions to this problem when so few politicians, civil servants, and academics seem willing to talk about it?-or even to admit that it exists. Janikowski and Betts are in an awkward position. They are both white academics in a city with many African American political leaders. Neither of them is a Memphis native. And they know that their research will fuel the usual NIMBY paranoia about poor people destroying the suburbs. "We don't want Memphis to be seen as the armpit of the nation," Betts said. "And we don't want to be the ones responsible for framing these issues in the wrong way."

Earlier this year, Betts presented her findings to city leaders, including Robert Lipscomb, the head of the Memphis Housing Authority. From what Lipscomb said to me, he's still not moved. "You've already marginalized people and told them they have to move out," he told me irritably, just as he's told Betts. "Now you're saying they moved somewhere else and created all these problems? That's a really, really unfair assessment. You're putting a big burden on people who have been too burdened already, and to me that's, quote-unquote, criminal."

But Betts doesn't think this message, alone, will stick, and she gets frustrated when she sees sensitivity about race or class blocking debate. "You can't begin to problem-solve until you lay it out," she said. "Most of us are not living in these high-crime neighborhoods. And I'm out there listening to the people who are not committing the crimes, who expected something better."