Why Public Housing Failed in America

There’s no better example of the failure of public housing in America than the Puritt-Igoe and Cabrini-Green projects.

But why did public housing fail?

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[andreawaite]

This is why Habitat for Humanity is so much more successful. The recipients have to be involved. They have skin in the game. They walk away with something they actually own, and had to work to get. And they are helped by volunteers who willingly invest in these families, not by impersonal government agencies funded by tax dollars.

[christaverduren]

Having lived in 2 low income housing projects in NY STATE - NOT the city (one in the 80s and 90s, the other 2005-2010) as well as helping my mother who TRIED to advocate for the people who lived in them, I've seen this first hand! My divorced mother of three teens took so much pride in the townhome we had. A lovely garden, decorated inside in typical 80s country style (think cute geese lol) we never had roach problems (we did get sprayed every month). But outside our home, it got worse as the years went by. We were in a suburb so less of the city issues but that changed over the years as families in the city wanted to get their kids out of the crime, murders, drugs, etc. Only thing was, the kids didn't want to leave that lifestyle, they didn't want to "gentrify" themselves in the suburbs.
We have two low income housing complexes in the suburb I live in now and 90% of the crime comes from them, the rest spills over into our area from the city. Very few local townsfolk cause any issues (home owners). The rental properties that go for 1, 000 or more a month for a small house are trashed quickly and become zombie homes, a true blight!
As Nick says, if you feel it's all owed you, then you simply take no care or pride in your dwelling. No matter where it is!
For the most part, if you give a person a car/bike/ horse lol whatnot, they don't take the best care of it, they didn't pay for it, even crazier if others pay for ins, gas, repairs, etc. But if you had to scrimp and save to get that car and you have to work your bum off for everything that comes with owning that car, you will for the most part, take care of that car like it's the precious commodity that it is!
Owning a home that if you punch out a wall, you flood the bathroom, you destroy something, welp, then you have to pay for it! If you have to pay for the heat and a/c and electric yourself, you tend to be more mindful of where the thermostat is set and if you leave the lights on.
When you have 3, 4, 5 generations that never had anything like that, and they don't know anyone like that, and all they know is what they have given to them, they simply have no way to learn.

[earGO]

People like you are the reason this great country have hope for a better future :)

[WhiteArrow]

Both the Left and Right get it terribly wrong when it comes to Housing policy.

[lifes]

This show is honest about human nature. Politicians tend to ignore human nature and only look at the paper

[confusedcynic]

Public housing is a failure because they don't hold people accountable period. Simple if you destroy a place, your on the street. That would be incentive to take care of things. But the bleeding hearts will say, its not the childrens fault. Compassion is fueling these tent cities and not prosecuteing crimes.

[handimanjay]

They did it to contain the poor to geographically controlled areas. They were built but had no plan for security and maintenance those funds were squandered by state and local governments that assembled huge overpaid administrative bureaucracies that funded administrative aspects and not the maintenance and security.

[canalsentir]

Hi from.Mexico, great synopsis on the faikures of public housing

[DCBChump]

When you own nothing, you have no respect for it.
And you will not be happy.

[ri-ojul]

That's a really crappy argument.
Like.... if you need to own something to take care of it... that's a you problem.

Plenty of places in the world where things remain clean and maintained because the members of society see it as their space and take care of it.

[selohcin]

I wonder if there will ever be a solution that works for this problem.

[Duraganthelion]

Then along comes a latte modern day Marxist fresh from college crying out "Uhh Akthuwally..." followed by a fifty-page repeated rant about how it's all capitalism's fault.

[robertblake]

Top down planning, the people who designed and planned these developments never lived in them, they were laid out by educated middle class people for lower class people with their disdain for basic decency. and morality, as noted the people who lived in them had nothing invested in them, saw them as just another perk and benny they were entitled to.

[whatsup]

I have a question. If private colleges encourage quality due to competition. Why indian private colleges fail miserably? Pls, explore this topic

[MS-]

One word, Demographics. That being said it’s so bad we need to bring them back.

[MarkKoerner-cc]

This is largely wrong. Stable, affordable housing can and has been created for people who will never own it. This is what rental housing is. The tenants have no sense of possession. The landlord owns it, and the landlord takes care of it, and everyone knows it. Why can't that work for government ownership? That's the question. The commentator hits upon something right, however. There is no clear responsibility because the standard model of public housing in this country is joint federal-local. The federal government supplies the money (and further subsidies) and local governments own and operate it. This clearly hasn't worked. The federal government does run a different kind of "public housing" effectively. These are public apartments tied to employment. See National Park Service housing, U.S. Army barracks, and the White House. These places don't get trashed. Perhaps the solution is to refuse to get different levels of government involved. Federal housing should be 100% federal. Then the federal agency is accountable. Another might be for Congress to weigh in with new rules making it easier--by statute--to evict criminals, etc. Another solution: move away from public housing and toward universal vouchers. That's what we do for food--i.e., food stamps. We don't create "public grocery stores." We give people vouchers so they can go to any grocery store they want.

[rlrr]

Why is your video so low in the search list? You can do seo to rank your video. Because your seo score is very low.

[mastersonogashira]

USSR didn’t have a housing crisis, yet they practiced public housing. The problem isn’t public house, it’s your system

[DaveJuan]

public housing was build originally for all the men that returned from WW 2 & Korea. You had to be working to get one of these apartments. Also they had Black developments & white developments; guess which one got funded.. then in the 50's and 60's white families exclusively got to buy homes in the suburbs to 10K... blacks where excluded... in effect, many white families were essentially given 500K to 1M in familial equity, while black were stuck in the Projects. Developers where given loan guarantees by the feds to build massive housing projects... (Like Levit Town) .that's how Trumps' dad got Rich. The government stopped doing this in 1998... due to the real estate lobby... housing prices have skyrocketed since.

[gibsonj]

I'm sorry, but you were just speaking over the heads of corrupt politicians and the left's ability to have a logical thought process.