Both the historical record and recent news suggest that this faith is misplaced. Here’s what the federally appointed monitor, Bart Schwartz, had to say earlier this year about just one of the New York public-housing properties that his team observed: “Our investigators on a routine and unannounced visit to the Polo Grounds houses discovered a large pipe cascading putrid liquid into the laundry room from the ceiling. A lone worker was trying to stem the tide with a mop. When questioned, he advised that this problem had existed for approximately two months unabated.”

To hear PHIMBY-ites talk, it’s almost as if public housing has never been tried in the United States. But it has been, mostly to disastrous effect. And the time is right, before a public-housing boomlet gains any further traction, to make clear that American public housing hasn’t just been poorly executed; it’s an idea with inherent conceptual and practical flaws. Those who suffer the most are those it’s intended to help: low-income tenants.

Of all the old ideas threatening to become new again, public housing would seem to be among the least likely. In the years after World War II, the federal government vowed to replace slums with safe, sanitary substitutes. But the sheen of that promise wore off long ago. The “projects” came to be associated—rightly—with high crime rates and physical conditions as bad as or worse than the slums they replaced. In 1991, a congressional report described much of public housing as “severely distressed”; the famous high-rise towers of Chicago and St. Louis were torn down long ago.

Meanwhile, the original premise of public housing—that the private market could not serve low-income communities properly—does not hold up under scrutiny. As early as 1907, a study by the U.S. Immigration Commission found that in low-income communities, “84 in every 100 homes were in either good or fair condition … The neglected appearance of the streets is the result of the indifference on the part of public authorities.” In 1909 the President’s Homes Commission found that even the poorest households, on average, spent just 21 percent of income on rent.

Housing for low-income communities consisted of small homes and buildings, close together—rowhouses in Philadelphia, three-decker homes in New England, walk-up apartments in New York. Rooming houses abounded. In the years since then, new housing of this nature has been zoned or otherwise regulated out of existence. But at the time, even Bauer, the public-housing advocate, acknowledged that “a strong program of (code) enforcement and rehabilitation might actually do the job of housing low-income families adequately.”

Neighborhoods were cleared to make way for public housing, and many of them contained multifamily buildings in which the owner occupied one unit and rented out the others. In 1950, housing census data for Detroit’s Black Bottom area (originally named by French explorers for the color of its topsoil), owner-presence rates ranged from 27 to 54 percent. Similar owner-presence rates could be found in those parts of Chicago and St. Louis swept away by housing authorities.