How public housing projects made life worse for the urban poor

Good intentions tend to carry far more weight than they should in some spheres. Public housing is unquestionably one of them. 

While the arguments in Howard Husock’s The Projects: A New History of Public Housing as to what’s gone wrong in this realm are sometimes familiar, they have never been assembled so cogently as here. Trying to make things better is no excuse for making them far worse. 

Popular and expert opinion on how American experiments with public housing have played out has not been entirely inflexible. There is, happily, no real remaining constituency for demolishing urban neighborhoods to build Corbusian tower blocks. The flaws of blank-slate planning of public housing are broadly acknowledged, to a point.

The Projects: A New History of Public