It was New York’s Little Flower, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who first decided that the city’s slums had to go, that all of his citizens — including “the other half,” as Jacob Riis unforgettably described the city’s poor — were entitled to clean, modern and affordable housing.

La Guardia’s gaze turned immediately to the derelict waterfront and its cold-water flats, “rotten, antiquated ratholes” that had been hastily constructed in the 19th century to accommodate the surge of European immigrants who worked predominantly on the docks, which were then bustling. The city’s first projects, on the Lower East Side, along the Harlem River and in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, were erected as part of Depression-era work relief programs.

New York’s first project to be underwritten by the United States Housing Authority, the Red Hook Houses, was built on a large patch of cheap land just blocks from what was once one of the city’s busiest port. A modest six stories tall, they were hailed in 1940 as a model of public housing, “a Versailles for the Millions,” in the words of the architecture critic Lewis Mumford. The description could not have seemed more dissonant in the aftermath of the storm, when its residents endured three weeks of Third World squalor.

Gradually, the projects grew taller and drifted farther from the city’s center, in large part thanks to Moses, who, like many urban planners of his era, believed that high-rises represented the most land-efficient and cost-effective way to house the maximum number of people.

In Coney Island, as in the Rockaways, Moses looked at a struggling seaside resort and saw an opportunity for large-scale public housing. There too, his grand improvement plans probably only accelerated the neighborhood’s decline. “From the 1940s on it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says Charles Denson, the author of “Coney Island: Lost and Found.”

By the middle of the 1960s, Moses’ power was waning, and his approach to public housing — the imposition of large projects on unstable neighborhoods — had been judged a failure, both from a moral and an urban-planning perspective. But the need for low-income housing hadn’t abated, and the only areas where it was politically feasible to build it were places where projects already existed. And so more towers went up, in both the Rockaways and Coney Island.

Mayor John V. Lindsay, who took office in 1965, was determined to break this cycle, to put low-income projects in middle-class neighborhoods. He tried, memorably, in 1971 in Forest Hills, Queens, figuring that the community’s predominantly liberal Jewish population would not object to the arrival of three 24-story towers. He was wrong. The construction site was soon overrun with angry protesters.