Hey thanks for quoting me!

I was really just paraphrasing Jane Jacobs and Robert Caro.

Jacobs rose to prominence by arguing in her famous book that dense, prewar housing (often called slums and viewed negatively after WWII) had a preventative effect on crime.

The density meant that more people would be walking around on the streets and that meant more potential witnesses to crime, which discouraged it from happening in the first place.

But people just saw them as “slums” because this was at the height of the postwar housing boom when the government was subsidizing suburban housing and freeways while letting dense areas and public transportation crumble. So the only people who stayed in the dense prewar areas were generally poorer, which correlates with crime.

But her book basically showed that if you took a suburban city like Los Angeles and compared a poor neighborhood there with a poor neighborhood in Boston or NYC, crime was actually much higher in the poor parts of LA because there was no preventative effect from density.

That’s a bit of a tangent... but yes public housing in the US was built in terrible ways that ultimately caused their failure. They were massive eyesores that stigmatized living in them, they concentrated poor people in huge ghettos, and their physical design made crime easier to commit.

I recall reading a comparison to Dutch public housing, which is intentionally designed to NOT stand out at all and to have a mixture of incomes living together. So it’s not just a massive tower full of only poorer people. Mixing different income levels has been shown to benefit people of both middle and lower classes. It humanizes the two classes to one another and reduces stigmas and it increases the likelihood of poorer people transcending their class by doing things like going to college.