Not so in New York City. Walk around virtually any neighborhood in New York, and you’ll see a handful of brick high-rise buildings, usually clustered around a small green space. Many are in need of dramatic investment: There’s Castle Hill Houses in the Bronx, which has 5,000 residents and needs $23 million of immediate repairs, according to The New York Times. Baruch Houses, the largest project in Manhattan, located on the Lower East Side, needs $241.9 million in repairs over the next five years.

Still, when Mayor Bill de Blasio today unveiled his plan for New York’s troubled housing authority, NYCHA, dismantling these aging towers was not a piece of it. The plan calls for charging more for parking, redeploying staff to other agencies to save costs and leasing land within the housing complexes to private developers to save money. As I’ve written before, studies have shown that residents of poor neighborhoods who are given the opportunity to move to higher-income areas or even mixed-income areas have better outcomes than those who remain in areas of concentrated poverty. HOPE VI might still be controversial among urban planners, but it’s hard to argue that decentralizing poverty from dilapidated high-rises was a bad idea. So why does New York City still have so many high-rise housing projects?

New York City Housing Authority

For one thing, NYCHA is a much bigger entity than any other public-housing authority in the country, which allowed it to escape some of the regulatory mandates in other cities, said Susan Popkin, a fellow with the Urban Institute who has written extensively on public housing. For another, just about everybody in New York lives in dense housing. So it’s hard to argue that poor people are being discriminated against by being relegated to high-rises. And some housing projects are located in some of the wealthiest areas in Manhattan, which gives public housing residents a chance to access some of the same services as wealthier New Yorkers, such as schools (assuming that wealthier New Yorkers send their kids to public schools).

“NYCHA just didn’t have the same level of isolation as other cities—they didn’t have a Cabrini Green,” Popkin told me.

New York did receive three HOPE VI grants and built high-density, mixed-income units with them. But compared to other cities, this money was a pittance, nowhere near enough to transform the city’s public housing. The $88 million New York received for the projects, was just a fraction of NYCHA’s budget. The Boston Housing Authority, by contrast, has received $157 million for HOPE VI projects. To put those numbers in context, today NYCHA’s budget is around $2.6 billion, the Boston Housing Authority’s budget is $300 million.