By design, New York City public housing, like most public housing in the U.S., lacked the broad variety that characterizes vital city neighborhoods: the blocks of small stores, the first-floor shops with apartments above, the churches, pool halls, and small restaurants. Public housing did not just exclude such uses—it bulldozed them, to make way for its monolithic towers-in-the park designs, which left its residents isolated, typically on “campuses” off the city’s street grid entirely, cut off from city life and the small-scale employment of which a young Kazin took advantage. New York once called Gotham’s version of this system “NYCHA-Land”—as if it were part of a different city.
The idea of replacing the old, decrepit public housing with a model that blends into the city scape is the desire.
The article fails to mention economies of scale. The housing projects have badly parented kids and the city provides parenting services. The city cannot provide parenting services unless the dysfunctional families are all organized in one spot, else the lack of scale will bankrupt the city. (This has happened in New York). Cops, for example, are often called to sort out family and neighborhood problems. Real parents do this on a voluntary basis, cops charge the city humongous fees. If cops do it, scale is needed, we will always get little prisons.
Our current crop of 'This time is different' economists ignore scale effects, Kevin Drum is famous for being ill taught about the scale effect.
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