The Projects

"The history of public housing amounts to a history of social engineers trying to unsort people who have sorted themselves a certain way for various reasons. The irony is that failing to understand those reasons has needlessly disrupted the advancement of millions of low-income people in the name of helping them." - Jason Riley, Wall Street Journal

"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." - Edward Glaeser, Professor Economics at Harvard University and co-author of Survival of the City The Future of Urban Life in an Age of Isolation

"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." - Steven Pearlstein, Pulitzer prize-winning columnist, Washington Post and author of Moral Capitalism: Why Fairness Won't Make Us Poor

"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." - Karen B. Anacker Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and author of Housing in the United States: The Basics

"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." - Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow of the Manhattan Institute and the New York Times best-selling author of The War on Cops