Less a history and more political commentary, Howard Husock's The Projects: A New History of Public Housing narrates the rise, fall and cyclical nature of development and destruction of public housing in the United States from the twentieth century to the present.

First, the author Howard Huscok is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for Public Policy Research, a 'center-right" think tank located in Washington, D. C. It was founded in 1943 by an industrialist, and it's frequent foci of advocacy is for private enterprise, limited government and democratic capitalism. Thanks to its economic reach, it has played a prominent role in politics without a lot of overlap with influential or highly placed governmental roles(ex. Dick Cheney as VP for Bush). (1) Husock's had a lengthy career in the media, governmental roles, and directors or high positions in institutes or think tanks and his writing has appeared in many major newspapers and magazines.

In The Projects Husock begins with the Museum of Modern Art's 1934 Housing Exhibition, where the main ideas were popularized leading to the passage of the Housing Act of 1937. From there Husock shifts each chapter to focus on a different moment or location, sometimes shifting mid chapter.

Despite looking at almost 100 years of history, the book is a slim 196 pages of actual text, the remaining thirty pages given over to notes, bibliography and the normal back matter. Most of the chapters read as short essays, with some linkage to prior moments, but surprisingly little detail about the actual work to establish and construct the projects. Most of the supporting evidence or details are instead given over to the neighborhoods and areas lost and demolished to construct the projects, 'why' they failed or memories and experiences of the residents. A typical arc is wonder at the new opportunity, declining standards and up keep a few generations later and rampant crime and decay leading to eventual demolition with a possible new model rebirth.

Husock, of course, offers his own ways to fix projects and his suggestions line up with the AEI's advocacy areas. Less governmental oversight, private ownership of projects and the more plausible integration in to the local community.

It's not necessarily a bad book, but it feels very misleading in its presentation. It is a clear political work, but is being marketed and described as a history. Read with skepticism, for those looking for more informative studies of American public housing, try Lawrence Vale's(2) Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities.

1. Peter Bondarenko. "American Enterprise Institute." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated 9/06/2025. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Amer...
2. Lawrence Vale is Associate Dean and Ford Professor of Urban
Design and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

While there is a plenty of room for critique of public housing, Howard Husock's The Projects seems almost to have been written in bad faith. The ideological slant of this book seems heavily mismatched to the prospective readership of a book on the history and impact of public housing.

An imperfect system that has been mired by issues over the years, this book fails to acknowledge that public housing is the one thing standing between us and corporate housing that overwhelming has resulted in such prominent housing insecurity in the US.

The parts of this book that focus on the beginnings of public housing are interesting, but I found the interpretation left something to be desired.

I love niche histories. Naturally, a history of American public housing? Sign me up. The history is definitely more complex than you think it is, messy and interwoven with classism and racism. This was a pretty interesting read.

This is an atrocious book written by an author with malicious intent.

Within just the introduction, I was already in disbelief at the number of factual and grammatical errors. For example, Husock claims that the New York City Housing Authority is the largest landlord in the country with 161k units owned. In reality, the largest landlord is the private equity group Blackstone with over 300k units owned. Of course, this fact does not align with Husock's clear ideological slant. The pro-corporate and conservative biases of the author are impossible to ignore. In the final chapter, he openly reveals his view that "failures [of public housing] can be seen as inherent in the idea of government ownership and management."

As many charlatans do, Husock weaponizes emotionally gripping anecdotes to support his ideological outlook. He simultaneously critiques public housing that was built in areas where cheap private housing was torn down as amounting to forcible relocation, yet critiques public housing built in previously undeveloped areas as "artificial." Husock conveniently fails to mention that the requirements to tear down one unit of private housing for every public housing unit built were put in place at the insistence of private builders. He goes so far as to associate the idea of public housing with Adolf Hitler entirely because one German city planner was included in a 1934 exhibition about public housing. Public housing's origins stretch far before this exhibition, and successful public housing projects have primarily been implemented by social democratic and socialist-led governments. Furthermore, Hitler's sole interest in public housing was to more efficiently segregate Germans along racial and ethnic lines. Ghettos in Warsaw and Lyov, for example, were deliberately build to separate Jews from the rest of the population and ensure horrific living conditions.

Public housing in the U.S. has been stunted since its inception due to severely restricted funding. The corrupt corporate politicians in America are to blame, as we continue to send unlimited funds to private military contractors and innumerable conflicts abroad rather than investing in the American people. Meanwhile, cities like Vienna and Copenhagen consistently rank among the happiest cities in the world, and both have extensively built and maintained public housing. 65% of Vienna's residents live in beautiful public housing units, and the average rent for these residents is between 500 and 600 euros.

Howard A. Husock does not acknowledge the real reasons for the housing affordability crisis in America as he works for the American Enterprise Institute, a corporate and conservative think tank attempting to eliminate all social programs by promoting the cult of private solutions. The American Enterprise Institute is well-known for indoctrinating Americans with the idea that private solutions are always favorable to solve problems of all sorts, despite the obvious failures of private ownership in the fields of housing, medicine, energy, and more.

Some of the AEI's greatest hits:
Pushing for the Iraq War!
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/03/28/aei-panel-claims-iraq-war-failures-and-lies-are-just-mythmaking-and-politicized-history/

Shilling for payday lenders!
https://theintercept.com/2015/10/20/right-wing-think-tank-shills-for-payday-lenders-on-new-york-fed-website/

Putting Harlan Crow, the Nazi who showered Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with luxurious gifts, on the board of trustees!
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-undisclosed-luxury-travel-gifts-crow
https://www.aei.org/about/board-of-trustees/

Critiquing the military-industrial complex budget as too low, and calling for increased funding for weapons systems built by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman (both of which fund AEI)!
https://jacobin.com/2023/05/military-industrial-complex-pentagon-budget-weapons-manufacturing-influence-revolving-door

My suggestions for the author: never write another book, and don't bother publishing this one.

The Projects have come to be known as the home for those in poverty, full of drugs and gangs. However, in this book, Husock discusses the idealistic start of federally-funded housing and the dream of it being a stepping stone for people to launch themselves into a more affluent and financially secure future. Unfortunately, these plans were flawed from the start, as the building of the Projects first meant clearing out the “slums” which included entire families, businesses, churches and social groups. The buildings weren’t well-made or well-maintained, and 50 years after they were built, many of them had already been torn down. What I liked about Husock’s approach to his writing was that he not only discussed the start of the projects, where they ended up and how they got there, but he didn’t lose track of the very real humans that had to navigate losing their homes in the slums and having to start over. Housing is, at its core, a very human-centric issue and we must not forget about the people that live, raise families and try to form a community in this environment.

Gotta say, I'm a sucker for a good book on public housing. During my many years studying urban planning I've always had a soft spot for housing...so why did I get a cert in historic preservation instead? No one knows.

In The Projects, Husock offers a sharp, often critical, reassessment of the history and legacy of public housing in the U.S. Husock argues that the public housing model was flawed from the beginning, built on ideals that often ignored the realities of human behavior and community dynamics.

He traces the arc from New Deal optimism to the eventual dysfunction of places like Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini-Green, painting a picture of how concentrated poverty and government bureaucracy failed the very people these policies were meant to help (supposedly).

What makes this book compelling is Husock's way of bringing historical case studies to life. He tells stories of residents, reformers, and architects, showing both the hope and the heartbreak baked into these massive urban experiments. He’s clearly skeptical of large scale government housing (and so am I), but whether or not you agree with his conclusions, the questions he raises are important.

That said, the ideological tone might not be for everyone. Husock leans heavily on a market-oriented critique, and at times it feels like structural factors (like racism and economic inequality) get less attention than they deserve.

Still, this is a thought provoking, well researched read for anyone interested in urban planning, housing, or social policy. It doesn’t just revisit the history of “the projects”, it challenges us to rethink what good policy should look like going forward.

With this book, Husock makes an explicit case for allowing the poorest Americans to rot away in slums or on the streets as punishment for their failure to make the choices Husock believes can lead to upward mobility. Dripping with contempt and racism directed at poor people, he obscures the role that developers, bankers, and business elites played in shaping urban policy and lays the blame at the feet of a handful of reformers and bureaucrats. Full of contradictions, Husock's account is aimed at one goal: undermining the idea that, in the richest country in the history of the world, shelter can and should be available to all people.

Important History That Should Spark Needed Discussion. First up, I fully admit I am *far* from a public housing expert of any kind. I read books like this to learn about issues, not because I already know about them. The closest first hand knowledge I have of any of this is growing up in Exurban Atlanta and being generally aware of the Atlanta news... right as the Atlanta Projects were coming down and being rethought in the late 90s/ early 2000s around the time of the Olympic Games in Atlanta. And even then, even while working with a community service oriented collegiate honor society throughout my college years in this period, while we worked a lot with various "community revitalization" efforts, we never really worked in the Projects. Maybe some other Atlanta chapters did (Georgia Tech, Morehouse, Spelman, etc), but my school just in the suburbs (Kennesaw State) didn't.

All of that tangential personal history dealt with, the actual text here is great for sparking discussion on a few different, yet mostly related, topics... but the text here is also written almost as a textbook. It *feels* like something you would actually take a class on with this as the text and expect to be quizzed and tested about the various people and dates and movements and philosophies and such, yet it isn't as dry and formal as an actual academic paper tends to be. It is one of those University Press (NYU, in this case) titles that seems truly destined to be *most* read as a textbook, very nearly explicitly designed for exactly that... and yet it *should* be read by a much wider audience, particularly among the "leader" / "influencer" / "organizer" set, because it really does have some interesting things to say about the entire history up to 2023 or so - and, somewhat, of the potential future - of public housing in the United States.

Among the discussions relevant here are the Nazi-based origins of public housing as we now know it in the 2020s - literally, the leaders who first proposed the national laws that led to the Projects openly praised Adolf Hitler and many of his acolytes of the late 1920s/ early 1930s - when their antisemitism and violence was already clear, but well before their "final solution" began. How can we openly embrace the freedom and diversity we claim to hold so dear in the US in the 2020s while also advocating for ideas that are in places almost word for word out of Hitler's own mouth?

Another discussion point that Husock actually does a truly phenomenal job of exploring, even if a touch tangentially, is reparations. No, not for slavery - by and large, clear records of that don't exist and the people directly affected by it are long dead. HOWEVER, the black communities whose property was effectively stolen -via so-called "eminent domain", where the government can dictate the price it will pay you for your land - ... this happened in the 1930s and later. We have actual property records of those who owned that land at that time. While many of the owners themselves are now dead, as many of them would have been born around the turn of the 20th century, some of the later ones - the projects built more in the "golden era", as Husock describes it, of the 1950s and early 1960s... some of those original owners *may* still be alive. In either case, it is very likely that direct legal heirs of many of these people - their kids, grandkids, or even great-grandkids - are very much alive today and could be more adequately compensated for what was taken from their near ancestor. In theory, this could be seen as a just remediation for sins that while in the past, are still recent enough to bear accurate justification. Obviously, this would have to be more completely thought through and debated by those with far more knowledge of the specifics than I have, and likely far greater philosophers and ethicists than I will ever begin to approach claiming to be, but I do believe that Husock lays the basic groundwork for such conversations quite well in this text, and it should be read for this if for no other reason.

The final major discussion that Husock leads to here in the text is actually the very original discussion - what, if anything, should be done regarding public housing: Who should fund it, who should manage it, who should benefit from it, *is it possible* to truly benefit from it, under what conditions can it be successful, what is "successful public housing", etc?

Husock makes clear that in certain times and places - even in this Millennium - public housing *has* worked and *can* work - but he also makes equally clear that the realities of public housing have rarely lived up to the ideals and goals of its proponents.

Read this book. Even if you yourself happen to be a public housing expert, you're still likely to learn at leasta few things here. Write your own review of this book. And, perhaps more importantly, write to your governmental "leaders" at every level from your local City Councilman (as Housing Authorities are run by local leaders) all the way through your Congressman and even the President (as Federal policy is set in DC) and let them know your thoughts after reading it. Maybe, just maybe, we can actually get these discussions had in the manner than they are due.

Oh, and the star deduction? The bibliography clocked in at just 11% or so, which is short of even my recently relaxed standard of 15%.

Very much recommended.

I loved this multifaceted historical examination of public housing. It was fascinating to see how well intentioned people got policy so wrong. A valuable lesson for progressives who often let theory get in the way of reality. I particularly enjoyed the examination of cultural communities that emerged in these much maligned buildings/neighborhoods. A useful reminder that the lives of people should never be judged exclusively by their address.

Hi, I’m really sorry but I left a review on the wrong book by accident. I’ve requested for this to be deleted by support as I can’t do so myself.
I’m really looking forward to reading this book though!
Sorry again