No one is building new projects, but the old ones that remain keep residents trapped in poverty.
Eli Steele’s 2020 documentary, “What Killed Michael Brown?,” offered a superb critique of liberal social policies emanating from the New Deal and Great Society. One of those counterproductive policies was slum clearance, which paved the way for public housing.
Drawing on the research of housing expert Howard Husock, the film explains how poor but healthy black neighborhoods in cities such as St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit and Washington were eradicated, along with thousands of black-owned businesses, and replaced with housing projects that later became such social disasters that they had to be demolished using explosives.
In a new book, “The Projects: A New History of Public Housing,” Mr. Husock explains that while we no longer build housing projects, the ones that remain continue to thwart the socioeconomic progress of residents. “Even as demolitions and smaller, differentiated types of replacements and variations have thinned the ranks of the projects, there remain 886,000 public housing ‘units’ that are home to 1.6 million Americans,” he writes. “Such households are among the nation’s poorest. Some 25 percent of households have less than $5,000 in annual income, and just 6% earn more than $20,000.”
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
______________________
Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images