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How housing policy failed the people it was designed to help — and how to fix it
As the US struggles to provide affordable housing, millions of Americans live in deteriorating public housing projects, enduring the mistakes of past housing policy. In The Projects, Howard A. Husock explains how we got here, detailing the tragic rise and fall of public housing and the pitfalls of other subsidy programs. He takes us inside a progressive movement led by a group of New York City philanthropists, politicians, and business magnates who first championed public housing as a solution to urban blight. From First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to the controversial city planner Robert Moses, many well-known historical figures made a convincing case for affordable housing in America.
Despite the movement’s lofty ideals, the creation of the Projects led to the destruction of low-income communities across the country. From the Hill District in Pittsburgh to Black Bottom in Detroit, predominantly Black neighborhoods were judged only by the quality of their housing. Husock looks beyond these neighborhoods’ physical conditions to their uncounted riches, from local artists like August Wilson to vital community institutions. As he shares residents’ stories, he honors what they crafted through their own plans, rather than those of city planners.
Husock traces the history of public housing to contemporary debates on the government’s role in the housing market. Through interviews with residents, he reveals how public housing transformed the lives of Americans and the physical faces of cities and towns. He ultimately critiques "repair and reform" efforts, making policy recommendations that address the core failings of public housing for the people it was once designed to help. Mapping out a better path for policy-makers, he lays a new foundation for upward mobility in America.
"Today’s housing projects, the book documents, generate more squalor and crime than the slums ever did. Mr. Husock leaves policy reforms to others and ends the book instead by asking readers to ponder the scale of the failure."
"Howard Husock has written a sweeping and fascinating chronicle of public housing America. This is mostly a cautionary tale of housing projects born in modernist hubris, and destroyed in a storm of exploding concrete. Yet there are also examples that bring more hope, especially when public actors respect incentives and social connections that are far more important than bricks and mortar. As a public housing critic, Husock is a worthy successor of the great Jane Jacobs."
"Following in the footsteps of legendary housing-activist Jane Jacobs and Senator Patrick Moynihan, Husock brings the wisdom of the historian, the humanity of the sociologist and the journalist’s knack for deep reporting to the vexing story of public housing in America. Intellectually honest and refreshingly non-ideological, The Projects delivers fresh insight and original thinking."
"In The Projects, Husock tells the story of the evolution of U.S. public housing over the past nine decades. Particularly refreshing is his understanding of the defining housing exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in the nineteen-thirties which envisioned public housing as safe, sanitary, and possibly utopian, benefitting lower middle and low-income people. Husock argues that these visionaries ignored demolitions, widespread resident displacement, and residents’ existing relationships in these communities, limiting the advancement of minorities. This alternative history provides much food for thought."
"Public housing began as the dream of progressive elites ignorant of the neighborhoods they sought to replace and of the complex realities of housing markets and character formation. In a supreme irony, the demolition of existing neighborhoods that preceded the creation of public housing was followed by the demolition of the projects themselves. Richly researched and lucidly written, The Projects is a compelling case study in hubris whose lessons are urgently needed."
"Husock poses with renewed force important questions about the perverse incentives of guaranteed support, capped rent, and income limits. This is not an argument against government support of housing at large, but rather an examination of the manner in which this is done, and the incentives it provides, or more importantly, does not provide to economic mobility."