Have housing projects ever worked out?

Yes, I know of housing projects that are nice places to live. The rules are severe and there is a “no second chance” attitude with regard to them. A community of low-income people does not have to be less than a pleasant community. Some of the nice housing projects here were done away with because the Federal government assisted the city financially in turning the area into mixed income rentals. The effect was that many of the low-income people could no longer afford to live there and they are now on the streets; the middle class people never showed up. When will cities learn to say no to Federal money.

From my experience the housing projects, as you call them (we call them low-income housing), work best when they are mixed in with middle and high income housing. When you build too many of them and they therefore become their own community then you can have problems.

In Philly, we tore down a bunch of high rises and replaced them with with subsidized houses. People seem to be doing well keeping the houses in good shape. The neighborhood isn’t a scary place any more.

Still, even the worst of the public housing towers kept thousands of people from having no place to call home—most for a good thirty or forty years. That’s a good thing.

One of the flaws of housing projects, is that coupled with the national highway project, they went through urban areas, destroying minority business districts. The expressways cut parts of the city off from other parts, and with the demise of businesses, middle class minorites moved out of urban areas, leaving a high concentration of the most poor and disadvantaged behind.

I’ve had a similar conversation twice in the last two weeks with my neighbor, who is a city planner. We were talking about St. Louis, and Pruitt-Igoe.

I suppose it depends on what you think the goal of public housing is supposed to be. Even a bad place to live might be better than no place to live, after all. You might find this book interesting. There is also this short article about the book.

They work at facilitating ghettoization.

@BarnacleBill To this day, nothing grows on the plot of Pruitt-Igoe.

Not really, Section 8 works better.

My partner’s mother lives in social housing, in the same house for the past 35 years, and it’s a lovely place to live. As ever, there are good and bad examples of most things.