US public housing was never the major source of housing for the poor that it was in many European societies. Even at its height in the postwar period, fewer than 5 percent of Americans lived in federally funded subsidized housing projects. The “the projects”— carries associations of ghettoizavery term popularly used to refer to such housing—tion and social pathology, and is often used to stand for the presumed failures of liberalism as manifested in federal anti-poverty programs.

Nonetheless, in the 1930s, public housing was conceived with high hopes that it would be a stepping stone to independent private homeownership for the majority of its tenants.

The story of its failure is also the story of urban social policy more broadly which was utilized in the service of protecting private investment and was shaped in concert with the market interests of real-estate agents and developers. Moreover, most federal housing policies tended to favor programs that encouraged private home-ownership, like lowinterest guaranteed mortgages.

The first public housing projects, located in cities such as Atlanta, GA, New York City, NY and Chicago, IL were low-rise constructions from which the poorest and those believed to be socially “deviant,” like single mothers, were initially barred. In the post-Second World War era, with an increase in land values in inner cities and a massive northern migration of blacks, public housing design moved towards the construction of high-rise “superblocks.” These seemed costefficient and politically expedient for the maintenance of racially segregated neighborhoods. Even then, however, the design of high-rise public housing was accompanied by a spirit of utopian optimism, influenced by such modernist architects and urban planners as Le Corbusier, who believed that highrise buildings, designed by professional planners and managed by a state conceptualized as benign and rational, were the prototypical homes of the future. Such futuristic ideals quickly soured in developments like Robert Taylor Homes in south Chicago which, from the beginning, were poorly maintained and lacked such amenities as communal facilities and safe play spaces for children. They were used by city governments as places where the poorest African Americans could be “contained,” isolated from white working-class and middle-class neighborhoods. Unlike the earliest years of public housing, any pretense of screening tenants fell by the wayside and it quickly became the housing of last resort now sheltering mostly single mothers and their children living on benefits.

The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, MO came to represent the failure of modernist high-rise public housing. Built in the mid-1950s, it was demolished a mere twenty years later after being deemed an ungovernable tangle of pathology In his ethnographic study of life in Pruitt-Igoe, sociologist Lee Rainwater referred to it as “a federally built and supported slum.” In 1965 HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) was established as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty and took over public housing. Federal housing programs moved away from supporting new construction to emphasizing subsidized rents for the poor in buildings managed by private landlords (for example, Section 8 certificates). In 1989, when Jack Kemp was appointed HUD secretary by then President George Bush, many city housing authorities had fallen into receivership or had come close to bankruptcy overwhelmed by inadequate funding from the federal government for maintenance and repair of their aging public-housing projects. Kemp encouraged the expansion of Tenant (or Resident) Management Organizations, the oldest of which dated back to the mid-1970s, to take over the operation of their projects from government agencies deemed incompetent and overly bureaucratic. While a few Tenant Management Organizations became nationally known for the improvements they were able to make in their communities and for their charismatic leaders, this model proved very difficult to put into practice on a large scale. Few of these organizations were actually able to become completely independent of their local housing authorities. In the late 1990s, several of even the most famous tenant-management projects, including Bromley-Heath in Boston and Cochran Gardens in St. Louis, were removed from tenant control and returned to being managed by their local housing authorities amidst charges of financial improprieties and claims that the tenantmanagement board failed to enforce new strict HUD regulations regarding tenant conduct.

In 1993, HOPE VI was adopted by HUD for the rehabilitation of public housing.

HOPE VI provides some federal funding for capital improvements and encourages city housing authorities to renovate their developments using a combination of public and private sources. Properties rehabilitated under the HOPE VI program are also required to maintain a balance of low-income, working-class and even middle-class tenants.

Although several housing developments are currently undergoing substantive remodeling, it is unclear what the future of these mixed-income communities will be.