History Unplugged Podcast Depression-Era Planners Thought They’d End Poverty with Public Housing. Instead, They Created the Projects
Sep 4, 2025
Howard Husock, author of "The Projects: A New History of Public Housing," delves into the ambitious yet flawed vision behind New Deal-era public housing initiatives. He discusses how these well-intentioned projects, designed to eliminate poverty, instead devolved into dangerous slums. Husock reveals the oversight by planners like Eleanor Roosevelt and Robert Moses, and their failure to foresee the rise of crime and community decay. The conversation also critiques modern housing policies and advocates for inclusive urban planning to rectify past mistakes.
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Utopian Vision Behind Public Housing
- New Deal planners imagined public housing as utopian, pastoral campuses that would eliminate slums and lift residents into the middle class.
- They merged slum-clearance goals with modernist design, assuming government-owned housing would self-sustain through rents.
Golden Age Then Fiscal Turn
- Early public housing initially worked because new buildings attracted working families who could pay rents that covered maintenance costs.
- That changed as middle-class residents moved to suburbs and Congress capped rents at 25% of income in 1969, starving maintenance budgets.
Sell Sites And Fund Tenant Buyouts
- Phase out the worst public-housing sites and sell high-value parcels to reinvest proceeds into tenant buyouts and other supports.
- Offer buyouts to long-term residents to enable moves and reintegrate valuable sites into the private market.
