Last week 27-year-old Travis A. Ball allegedly shot and killed Virginia State Police Special Agent Michael T. Walter in an apparently unprovoked attack in the Mosby Court public housing project. The murder was the seventh homicide and one of about 20 shootings to take place in the troubled housing project so far this year.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch has done commendable work fleshing out the circumstances of the murder and the background of the alleged killer, but a bigger story remains to be told. The crime gives us a window into the pathology of 21st-century American poverty. Through the story of Travis Ball we can gain insight not only into the social breakdown of inner-city African-Americans in public housing but the spreading social dysfunction among the poor of all races and ethnic groups.
The tip-off appears in Robert Zullo’s article in the T-D today: In his arrest warrant, Ball had listed as his address a home on the 1900 block of Redd Street in Mosby Court. But he had been banned from the property in 2016, and his name was registered on a 4,000-person list of people ineligible to live there. Shortly after that ban, according to a second T-D article, an emergency protective order was issued for the mother of one of Ball’s children. Court records show that Ball had engaged in several acts of domestic violence. The T-D articles indicate that he had two children with one woman, and hint that he may have fathered a child with a different woman.
Think about this: Mosby Court maintains a list of some 4,000 individuals who are banned from living in housing project of only 458 units. That is an astonishing number. The T-D reporting does not give us a profile of these people, but I would be willing to wager that the list is comprised overwhelmingly of men, like Ball, and that the vast majority have been blackballed for violent behavior on the project premises.
The problem is that the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority (RHHA) has no effective means of enforcing the list.
“The manpower that’s required, it’s hard to knock on doors on a daily basis,” said RRHA CEO T.K. Somanath. “Neighbors sometimes let us know, and we have our property management [and] maintenance folks inspecting these properties periodically. There are ways to find out if people are not abiding by the lease [which] causes these violations, and we take action.”
The housing authority disbanded its own seven-member police force in 2014 due to budget pressures and the conviction that residents would be better served if the agency deployed its resources consistent with its core mission of providing housing services. It is not clear from the article whether or not the RHHA police were used to enforce the banishment list. Whatever the case, there is no effective enforcement mechanism now.
I am entering the realm of conjecture here, and I advance the following observations not as fact but as operating hypotheses to be confirmed or rejected through follow-up reporting. The RHHA, according to its website, manages and maintains 12 housing developments for low-income families, seven developments for the low-income elderly and the disabled. The low-income housing, I suspect, are dominated by households of single mothers with one or more children. The number of households with married spouses and children approaches zero.
I conjecture the existence of a large floating population of under-employed, unmarried men in low-income communities — be they like Mosby Court or a rural trailer park — who lead a largely parasitical existence. They attach themselves to women as sexual partners, moving into their apartments, eating their food, and contributing only sporadically to the maintenance of the household. These relationships are typically unstable, fraught with domestic violence and child abuse. Men move from woman to woman, impregnating them with no concern for the welfare of the children. Sometimes they establish meaningful relationships with their biological children; often they do not. Nonpayment of child support is endemic. Often, women don’t even know for certain who the fathers are.
I further conjecture that the existence of this population of unattached males explains another widespread and unexplained phenomenon: that of childhood hunger. Low-income families have no trouble obtaining food stamps. Why are children going hungry? Why must school districts maintain breakfast and lunch programs? Why do charities provide children with backpacks of food to take home during weekends? Is it possible that many household food budgets are being stretched by the necessity to feed an adult male whose presence is entirely “off the books”?
The prevalence of unattached, freeloading and often violent males, I submit, is one of the great unacknowledged scourges of poverty in the United States today. Though poor themselves, many of these males are predators and they add immeasurably to the horror of poverty. They prey among the weak in their midst, inflicting routine domestic violence that never makes it into the newspapers (unless a murder occurs). They commandeer the limited resources of the women they live with, often resulting in the abuse and neglect of the women’s children — especially if the children are not their own.
It is not politically correct to portray 21-century American poverty in this way. Progressives are committed to the idea that the pathologies of poverty are the result of endemic injustices such as racism, income inequality, poor schools, and insufficient economic opportunity. Read the academic literature and the politicians’ press releases and you see nothing about the growing population of rootless, predatory males. Unless we acknowledge the realities of poverty, how can we ever hope to combat it?
Let me be 100% clear. Although I am extrapolating from an inner-city housing project, this problem is not unique to African-Americans. Rootless males are prevalent among poor whites, Hispanics and American Indians. (See my post about Jesse Lee Herald, a 27-year-old white man in Shenandoah County who had fathered seven children by six different women.)
This is one of the great untold stories of the United States today. But because of our politically blinkered thinking, we cannot see it.
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