Those failures have been in the news of late, what with the HBO series Show Me A Hero reminding viewers just how bad public housing in Yonkers was in the late 1980s, New York City’s Housing Authority publicly struggling to pay the bills, and the head of a Florida public housing authority being arrested for stealing federal funds.

But as Maddie Garrett’s experience shows, and as Goetz details in his book, public housing had—and still has—a lot of potential. It’s just that seemingly no one—not politicians, not Congress, not home builders—wants it to succeed.

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The first federal efforts to help build public housing began in the 1930s, during the worst of the Great Depression. Concerned about a shortage of affordable housing, the government loaned money to housing authorities, which then built units and repaid the loans with money earned from collecting rent. The program became more formal with the 1937 Housing Act, which sought to create jobs and build housing.

There was widespread opposition to the Housing Act from people who didn’t want to spend tax dollars on housing for the poor and from private developers who didn’t want to compete with the government on housing. “Can you afford to pay someone else’s rent?” billboards paid for by the real-estate lobby asked, according to Goetz.

An ambitious congressman from Austin named Lyndon B. Johnson was instrumental in getting that Housing Act passed, and he insisted that his district be one of the first sites for public-housing construction, alongside New Orleans and New York. To deal with local opposition, three buildings were constructed, Santa Rita Courts for Latino residents, Rosewood Courts for black residents, and Chalmers Courts for white residents. (Chalmers Courts was allocated the most units of the three.)

Johnson addressed these concerns in a 1938 radio address, “Tarnish on the Violent Crown,” in which he called for his fellow Austinites to support the construction of new homes for their fellow citizens living in squalor.

“People who now have to put up with conditions such as I have already described will be able to move into new, clean, and safe dwellings,” he said. “There won’t be Persian rugs on the floors. There won’t be Venetian blinds in the windows. But there will be light and water and air, and windows to let in sunshine, and strong walls to hold back the chill of winter.”

For a while, this worked. Tenants were carefully screened, and public-housing complexes, though largely segregated, were home to working-class residents of all races. But this all changed after World War II, when the federal government pushed for many people to buy their own homes by increasing the authorization for Federal Housing Authority loans, which were mostly available to white families. The job opportunities were mostly available for white workers, too. The combination meant that many working-class white families could afford to move out of the housing projects and buy their own homes. Those job (and housing) opportunities were closed off to minority residents, though, who were discriminated against in job applications and prevented from buying homes in certain areas. As the population of public-housing properties became more impoverished and blacker, white residents with jobs, even low-paying ones, hurried to move out of the projects.