The history of America’s public housing tells of a widespread assault on civil society that severely harmed our fellow citizens.
The mystery of social media algorithms spews videos and reels hyping dysfunction in a (seemingly) not-small segment of Black America, a locus of brawls and gunfire and shoplifting and racism and squalor and norm-breaking (in church, at graduation ceremonies, on mass transit, in stadiums—any public gathering place suffices). Unfair? Maybe. But the result is a plausible, general perception, of a community—or at least an ample slice of it—that is expletive-laden, female-dominated, violence-marinated, angry, victimhood-claiming, and conspiracy-theorizing. And hateful of White America.
True, each such video is just one anecdote, often lacking context. But as they accumulate, and they do, along with newspaper headlines, there is the impulse—influenced by exhaustion, by bestartlement over crime stats and multi-generational dependency and “ghetto culture,” by fear that our societal breakdown is no longer slow-walking but running, by reparation demands, by the rejection of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “colorblind” philosophy—to reach hard conclusions. The signs of dysfunction also awaken the impulse to curse the colossal failures of government programming, to seek blame for our national race-relation meltdown, and to call out a sanctimonious elite who seem deeply invested in paradigms of pigmentation and guilt and victimhood, and who willfully sabotaged the not-so-long-ago emerging climate of improving brotherhood and harmony.
Or am I dreaming? That was happening, wasn’t it, not so long ago?
What has brought us to this—and if the “this” posited above is defective, then the this that accurately captures the calamity of poor, Black America in 2026, where the nuclear family has been obliterated, where children have been abandoned by educators, where worship has ossified, where life’s backdrop is teenage funerals and poverty and addiction and abortion and incarceration? Where lies the blame?
Howard Husock, the esteemed American Enterprise Institute scholar and expert on things urban, wrote his powerful 2025 book, The Projects: A New History of Public Housing, to do just that: provide a new history. But in delivering this maddening story—so well written, engaging, and necessary for a society that has forgotten (or maybe never really knew) how willful progressive forces plotted and executed what all-too-quickly became the hellhole reality of towering public housing complexes, hulking failures of government programming, that color or even define so many American cities—Husock also connects the dots over many decades, and provides ample evidence as to how Black America transformed, non-consensually, from a mid-century, white-proximate demographic of intact families and employed dads and solid academic test scores and stable neighborhoods (no matter the rickety houses on Grandma’s street or the shabby walk-up apartments across from the overgrown park with the busted streetlights) to a calamity of collapse and brokenness within a generation.
Should it surprise that when Uncle Sam targets and guts imperfect-yet-viable, making-it communities, all in the name of new-housing panacea, with the promise of a Brave New Urban, that the outcome will be cruel? Surely this was the inspiration for Ronald Reagan’s cautionary joke: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Let us concede: America’s yesteryear Black neighborhoods, maybe they weren’t so pretty (so weren’t a lot of white/ethnic ones, many of which also proved doomed) and were located on the tracks’ infamous other side. But “slums”? Beauty isn’t the only thing in the beholder’s eye—especially the peeper of a determined bureaucrat empowered by a federal tear-down mandate, who coldly judged the broken stoops and peeling paint of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Cincinnati’s Kenyon-Barr, and countless other neighborhoods as deprivation that demanded remediation via bulldozer.
The etymology is interesting, that public-housing complexes are common-parlanced as “projects,” because that is what they were and are at their essence—projects. They are the stuff of schemes and visions, of contrived opportunities and acceptable collateral damage (omelets / broken eggs), of graduate-degreed fever-dreaming progressives, of creative-destruction evangelists, who yearned to paint over the existing layout of many an actual community—things of cross streets and sidewalks and characters and busybodies, of housing that even the working poor could own and call home and claim equity (the financial kind), of commerce that included barber shops and meat markets and candy stores and bowling alleys and assembly halls for fraternal organizations and churches for various denominations and maybe even a cemetery that proved ecumenical. These communities were Our Town, the rough-around-the-edges edition, but of real, functioning, maybe even thriving civil society. But: They were in the way. There were Big Plans to be implemented.
Speaking of painting, the genesis of the American movement to reconfigure big city housing—and soon enough small town and rural housing too, and heck, the entire enchilada of urban design—came in 1934 at, of all places, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which in the Depression’s depths hosted a “Modern Housing Exhibition.”
The Picassos and Cubism and Dadas were on another floor. This unusual museum exhibition, writes Husock, had little to do with art, but a lot to do with “modern.” It “was the spearhead of a crusade; it made the economic, political, and even visual case that the federal government should finance the construction of housing for working families of modest means—not as an emergency measure but as part of the ongoing responsibilities of government.”
Why? A book accompanying the exhibition proved an exemplar of an empowered and eager progressivism, describing itself as:
a statement of the far reaching and varied social, financial, technological, administrative, legislative and political factors which have led to the present situation. It discusses the radical changes which must be made in our social philosophy and public policy in order to improve the housing condition of the masses of the American people.
But was it housing—or was it something else—that tempted the progressive social engineer? Something else gets the nod: The mission, writes Husock, was not truly “the mere provision of utilitarian housing.” Instead, the aspiration was “about building a new type of urban landscape, a city of tomorrow . . . organized by government and designed by architects.”
Actually, a motivating spirit for the exhibition and the forces it would unleash was a 1927 book, The City of Tomorrow, by Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, a Swiss-French architect known as “Le Corbusier,” whose vision—which detested streets—was the creation of “superblocks,” long now a reality for many American cities. Superblocks
were set projects with no cross streets for stores, cars, or small homes. Le Corbusier had already designed such a city in his 1922 plan for the Ville Contemporaine, which was to comprise sixty-story apartment buildings, all identical, surrounded by a zigzag of smaller buildings and a park. Le Corbusier asserted that whole urban scene “is one of wasted opportunities and inefficiency.” He proposes an alternative course, “which is a bold and drastic reconstruction of the entire machine.” Central to his vision was that of “skyscrapers set at immense distances from one another and surrounded by large open spaces or parks.”
Where to build this new city? The canvases for Le Corbusier and his acolytes were to be empty sites—or, sites that were to be emptied because they were decreed slums. Harvard professor James Ford was one of the moment’s leading, persuasive apostles of slum eradication, and Husock quotes him amply: “Wrote Ford, ‘The slum is a menace which cannot be overcome by piece meal modernization loans or random demolitions with the owner's consent. . . . No solution will be found short of a comprehensive and intelligent policy actuated by one or more units of government, apply financed, which makes the neighborhood rather than the buildings the basis of operations.’”
What was to be the collateral damage of implementing utopia? “As for the shops,” writes Husock, “the churches and synagogues, the small businesses, street life, and so much more which slums were replete, Ford was silent.”
Within three years of the Depression-era museum exhibition, its patrons and the forces of “slum elimination” it effectively unleashed had successfully lobbied Congress to pass the National Housing Act and create the United States Housing Authority, tools embraced by big city mayors and in particular First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was a major champion of slum clearance.
There was a thrill about this coalition of government officials and modernist architects and urban planners, now empowered “to create a new and better kind of city, one that would lift its residence in campus-style oases of towers set in parks,” the price being “slum clearance,” which in reality was the large-scale “demolition of existing residential neighborhoods.” All these elements of bold action and grandiose dreams, writes Husock, “were presented in the exhibitions book length catalog—which previewed the arguments that would not long carry the day in Washington.”
How this original 1930s dream of “housing for working families” developed into 1960s dangerous housing—indeed, poorly made and terribly planned housing—that imprisoned single moms and father-absent kids, so many of them Black Americans, is explained in ample detail by Husock. The Projects is a thorough recounting of good intentions paving the road to hell, alongside which was constructed a vertical habitat that feigned a stretch to heaven while never arriving there. Husock’s account of what became of stable neighborhoods of black owner-occupied housing, like Lower Hill in Pittsburgh, Black Bottom in Detroit, and Gainsboro in Roanoke, is depressing, and in part answers the 2026 question—what caused all this?
Maybe the most telling story is from St. Louis, with tattered but perfectly functioning black neighborhoods—Desoto-Carr and Mill Valley—that “Would make way for the quintessential modern housing project, the thirty-three eleven-story towers set on fifty-seven acres known as Pruitt-Igoe. Designed by the modernist architect Minoru Yamakasi, it was praised by Architectural Forum as a successful example of “slum surgery” and praised, when it opened in 1954, as the “best high apartment of the year.”
Soon enough Pruitt-Igoe buildings became their own slums: dangerous, vermin-ridden, crime-ridden, broken. Within twenty years they in turn had to be demolished. The once-glorified replacement community, a brick-and-steel manifestation of progressivism, joined the original, viable one in oblivion. The mix of misguided policies, typical government maintenance that bred disrepair, the lack of sufficient rental income, and consequential factors such as the location of interstate highways and availability of private suburban homes—factors applicable to many cities and towns (American has over three thousand municipal housing authorities)—are the reason “the projects” is a negative term. All this is ably explained by Husock:
These were families who were building wealth through ownership of homes and land. Clearance meant not only that their homes were taken at whatever compensation level was deemed appropriate at the time but also that future appreciation of the land was denied the owners. Those who, in later years, would be concerned about the gap in wealth between white and Black Americans should not fail to note this loss of Black-owned property.
While reading The Projects you wonder, more and more with every page: What would America be like today if that Museum of Modern Art exhibition, and all that it spawned, never happened? What if Lower Hill were still a neighborhood in Pittsburgh? What if the progressive social engineers had fixated on something other than these “beehives of ambition and activity,” as Husock wisely observes? What if Black America had not seen homes and equity and first rung on the prosperity ladder destroyed—would we be witnessing today’s painful pathologies and brokenness?
I think not. Conservatives like to grimace (and should) about Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” spending and welfare creation, fingering it as the root cause for Black America’s ills. But if Black America’s neighborhoods and homes and civil society had not been the stuff of progressive experimentation and destruction in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, there would have been no implosion of the black family, and no broader malady requiring Uncle Sam’s welfare—which remedied no pathologies, and likely intensified them—come the 1960s.
Husock’s history is brightened in the home stretch by ideas as to how public housing—through programs that link housing to work—does not have to be a life sentence of economic poverty. Like the great, recently departed civil rights activist, Robert Woodson—who eschewed black victimhood and who believed that beaten-up communities are indeed resilient, and through local leaders are capable of rising off the mat and achieving revitalization—Husock warns current and future policy makers against waxing utopian, reminding them that “it is crucial to keep in mind that poor neighborhoods can be good neighborhoods.”
The Projects: A New History of Public Housing is an important cause-and-effect account—and indictment—of a prolonged and often-overlooked chapter of American life, and a most valuable lesson in the consequences of abusing civil society, whether by will or by blindness. Howard Husock has done America yet another great service in understanding and elucidating domestic policy.
