Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Mrsmartman, you're conflating all sorts of stuff.
Yeah, the U.S. has been horrible with public housing. Yeah, cities should have never demolished public housing; in fact they shouldn't have allowed the housing to get that bad in the first place.
But that doesn't mean that tower-in-the-park was generally good for cities. It's a generally anti-urban, pedestrian hostile planning style.
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4 Public Housing Lessons the U.S. Could Learn From the Rest of the World
BY JAKE BLUMGART | AUGUST 26, 2014
Public housing in the United States is associated with failure and misery. The very words conjure up visions of
concrete tower blocks, drug-related violence and concentrated poverty. But contrary to popular belief, public housing in the U.S. has not been an utter disaster:
“In most cities at most times, public housing provides a better alternative than private-sector housing in poor neighborhoods,” Edward Goetz writes in his 2013 book,
New Deal Ruins.
Many of public housing’s failures can be traced to the American political and economic context, especially easy to see when compared with the success of similar policies around the world. When the U.S. government became active in the housing market in the 1930s, Congressional conservatives in alliance with the real estate industry ensured that the Wagner Public Housing Act of 1937 restricted public housing to the service of the poor living in already impoverished areas (ensuring a weak political base), tightly limited funding per unit, and gave local governments near complete control over whether to accept federal funds for housing, where to place the sites, and how to administer them.
It is the straightjackets on public housing, paired with the intense residential segregation, that so badly disadvantaged these policies in the U.S.
That there is nothing inherently doomed in the concept of public housing can be seen in a variety of international cities that have implemented sweepingly ambitious public housing programs. The details vary, of course, and they seem to largely be based within small city-states, where land is at a premium, or in areas with a strong social democratic tradition. Based on those success stories, here are the basic ingredients for a successful public housing program.
Read more:
https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/bet...ccess-us-world