It was with considerable surprise that I saw in the local newspaper’s weekend edition a comprehensive package of stories dealing with some of the very same issues raised in a post here early last week.
We speak of the city’s abundance of public housing, the transient nature of students in the school district that takes in the city and several surrounding municipalities, and the increasing rate of overall crime in the area.
We will accept the numbers as reported by the newspaper. Those numbers don’t include the surrounding political subdivisions, but in the city proper there were 18,141 residents recorded in the 2020 census. A recent count found that as of Nov. 30 about 3,500 of them were either in public housing or Section 8 housing. This is by definition, low-income housing and it’s a dramatically high percentage.
The school district numbers indicate that over the past three years 2,181 students have enrolled and 854 have left. Nearly 400 came from Philadelphia. Again, staggeringly high numbers.
The report mentions others coming from New York, New Jersey, Florida and Virginia, among a list of places.
There was a total denial from a public housing official regarding use of billboards or printed handouts to recruit tenants from elsewhere for our local facilities.
Fair enough.
But has anyone else ever heard of word-of-mouth advertising? Can we rule out that anytime over, say, the past decade, friends and family have told potential tenants of the sweet deal in Johnstown and those told have checked it out by coming here.
Perhaps they are encouraged to do so from some people involved with public housing; again nothing in writing. Perhaps the Philadelphia operations that deal with low-income people there share, or have shared, the advice, trying to pass the buck here.
There must be some reason for why we get so many people from Philadelphia and similar locations. As someone who grew up here and attended that very same Greater Johnstown School District, graduating in 1973, I didn’t know a single soul who had relocated here from Philadelphia.
That’s in 12 years (13 counting kindergarten). Not one kid from Philadelphia!
I can’t imagine Johnstown is on the minds of many people in Philadelphia, unless the schools are teaching about our natural disaster history with floods. Regardless, that isn’t likely to stimulate the urge to relocate here.
I can tell you that, while I was working for the 2000 census, I had a mother in one of the suburbs tell me she’d relocated here from Philadelphia to get her kids away from the crime there.
But that was 21 years ago.
As for crime locally, the numbers in the story package indicated police calls had increased in recent years both overall and for public housing. But no separate breakdown was available for Section 8 housing.
There was the closest thing to a total denial issued regarding rumors of migrant families being relocated here. A 99-percent occupancy rate was claimed for public housing here, with the addendum that there was virtually no room at the inn and there had been no communication from the Feds regarding making room.
After consuming this expansive package of stories, we’re left with a similar conclusion to that reached in our initial post. Johnstown has changed and is changing, but not for the better as measured by crime and poverty.
Sam Ross Jr's site 