Are Illegal Boarding Houses the Root of Savannah Crime?

Located in Savannah's Midtown... the Metropolitan Savannah Neighborhood has some of the highest crime statistics in the city.
Over a five day span in August, police made arrests and issued 15 citations for prostitution, drug possession, and much more.
So what's the root of all these problems? Well, some point to illegal rooming houses.
News Three's Community Reporter Alice Massimi was in the neighborhood today and talked with its president about the dangerous path this community is on.

Gwendolyn Fortson Waring calls this neighborhood home.
She lives here, works here and goes to church here... and sees more and more crime damaging the community.
“The issues are drug problems. We have serious substance abuse, prostitution they are completely related,” says Waring.
The police department knows all about it ... assigning more officers to the area but somehow the problems remain.
“Unfortunately it’s also a place where people congregate to use drugs and for prostitution.” Waring is talking about illegal rooming houses that savannah spokesman Bret Bell says have also caught the attention of police.
“They are illegal they are off the books, they don't comply with the law. The tenants don't have rights under the law so those tenant houses tend to have criminality issues so they tend to attract people that don't want to be recognized by they law” points out Bell.
In short Bell says they're dangerous places to live and with roughly eighty of them operating illegally, Bell says the city is working one by one to bring them in compliance or shut them down. “The problems aren't the properties themselves but the people they attract and that's why we have an issue with them and why police are focused on them right now.”
Waring says it's a step in the right direction but it's not the answer.
“We've got to deal with the substance abuse problem because you can't build enough jails to put the drug boys in.”
But that's a very tall order and police can't do everything.
So, in the meantime, Waring says they're trying to work with judges to come up with strategies because many of the offenders are repeats.