Public housing didn’t fail in the US. But it was sabotaged. A brief history of how America’s public housing experiment was designed to fail

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“The projects”
I’ll NVR forget the old starret city in Brooklyn. Literally a war zone

Jimmy Carter had made some law, that when you build new residential communities builders had to include a section minimum 10 public housing units or something like that. Can’t recall but I’m close . (My dad was in that line of bus)

So much for De-segregation. Keep voting democrat minorities.
You get what you vote for.
Elections have consequences.

The stereotypical image of public housing in America is one of deteriorating buildings, urban blight, and dysfunctional housing authorities in seemingly never-ending crises. Residents routinely deal with bad living conditions, including heat failures, pest infestations, mold, and leaks. And public housing projects are often found in areas with concentrated poverty and in underserved, racially segregated neighborhoods.

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By and large, America’s experiment with public housing has been viewed as a failure — so much so that housing authorities have offloaded some of their responsibilities to the private sector.

But the demise of public housing was not an inevitable outcome. As my colleague Rachel Cohen has pointed out, other countries have successfully pulled it off. Governments around the world have shown that they can operate mixed-income housing developments that have reliable maintenance and upkeep and that public housing doesn’t have to segregate poor people away from the middle class.

So why did public housing in the United States age so poorly?

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A bold experiment that was designed to fail
The federal government’s plans to build public housing started in the 1930s, as part of the New Deal, in an effort to create jobs during the Great Depression and address the country’s housing shortage.

But efforts to undermine public housing are about as old as the efforts to build it. From the outset, opposition was fierce. Many Americans didn’t like the idea of the government using their tax dollars to subsidize poor people’s housing, and real estate developers were concerned about having to compete with the government.

MORE:

https://www.vox.com/policy/390082/public-housing-america-policy-failure-poverty


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