The fate of public housing in America — its rise, much of it in the form of towers like Cabrini-Green, and its fall as those towers came down — is the story of urban poverty as an unsteady political priority. In his first year as president, in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt created the federal Housing Division, as part of the Public Works Administration. The P.W.A. built the country’s first 51 public-housing developments, including three in Chicago. By then the shortcomings of the for-profit real estate market were evident in eviction riots, in sprawling homeless encampments and in cities overflowing with mile after mile of cheap, decrepit frame dwellings. In segregated black neighborhoods, where families were excluded from competing for housing on the open market, the conditions were more dire. Without government intervention in some form, private developers and landlords were never going to build or maintain anywhere near enough homes for the urban poor. Like other New Deal assistance programs — relief for farmers, aid to senior citizens through Social Security, food stamps — public housing treated poverty as a widespread social and economic injustice that the country was obligated to right. The subsidy was also intended to help jump-start the economy by rebuilding moribund cities and creating jobs. In 1937, Congress passed more extensive legislation, establishing a federal housing agency; Chicago and other cities formed their own housing authorities to operate the program locally. “I see one-third of a nation ill housed, ill clad, ill nourished,” Roosevelt announced that year. “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

Then, as now, the idea of government-run housing was maligned as anticapitalist and socialist; it clashed with a national ethos wrapped up in visions of the frontiersman and the self-made entrepreneur. When the Housing Act of 1937 was being debated, it was opposed by real estate trade groups and property owners’ associations, by builders, suppliers, the U.S. Chambers of Commerce and the departments of the Interior and the Treasury. Although the subsidy was reserved for only stable families with modest incomes — the “deserving poor” — the ceiling on what qualifying residents could earn was said to discourage hard work, acting as a sap on initiative and pluck. Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” dramatized the backlash against Roosevelt’s call for a deeper social contract of shared responsibility: The hero of the 1943 novel is an architect of a public-housing complex who becomes enraged when he returns from a trip to discover that his bare-bones high-rise has been compromised to include “the expense of incomprehensible features” like balconies, a gymnasium, extra doorways and decorative brickwork. In an act portrayed as a valiant defense of his convictions, he dynamites the entire building. Maybe most telling, the same Depression-era legislation that funded the first public-housing complexes also created the federally insured private home loan. With this revolution in home financing, buyers were able to put down as little as 10 percent of a house’s cost and pay off their mortgages in small increments over an unprecedented 30 years. Even today, the federal government devotes three times as much each year to mortgage-interest deductions and other subsidies to the speculative real estate market — essentially public housing for homeowners — than to the entire annual budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The first public-housing developments were often simple and unadorned brick rowhouses or duplexes. They were required to be built to minimum standards, so as not to compete with the private rental market, and the overall populations were diverse, in part because federal rules dictated that public housing couldn’t change the existing racial makeup of a neighborhood. In the 1950s, cities began to build massive complexes of clustered towers encircled by plots of land closed off to through streets. It was a purity of modernist city planning, influenced by the avant-garde “towers in the park” urban reimagining of the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. The density and nearly identical stripped-down designs of the high-rises were also believed to cut down on costs while meeting greater demand.

“It’s almost like I died and went to heaven,” one of the first tenants of a development in Chicago recalled years later. J.S. Fuerst, the former head of research and statistics at the C.H.A., collected this testimonial and dozens of others like it from early occupants of the agency’s properties for a 2003 book titled “When Public Housing Was Paradise.” Even though these were low-income communities of thousands of people crammed together on isolated plazas, many families still found a modest home to be somehow divine after the damnation of the cold-water flats they left behind. There, they had been afraid of fires and sickness and eviction. Public housing, by contrast, was new and orderly. All the families went through a screening process. The buildings had teams of janitors on call around the clock. Groundskeepers maintained the gardens and lawns. There was a city agency responsible for answering calls. The C.H.A.’s first executive director, Elizabeth Wood, worried not that the new developments might be too large and come to define an area as low-rent, but rather that they wouldn’t be large enough to counteract the damaging effects of poverty and disrepair around them. “If it is not bold,” she said in 1945, “the result will be a series of small projects, islands in a wilderness of slums beaten down by smoke, noise and fumes.”

Across the entire country, a majority of public housing remained in low-rises; there were eventually more than 3,000 local authorities, most with fewer than 500 units. But large housing “projects” came to dominate urban landscapes and symbolize for many the unruliness and otherness of the “inner city” in decline. The towers-in-the-park design was only ever partly to blame. In Chicago, as elsewhere, high-rise developments were built intentionally in neighborhoods that were already segregated racially; rather than apportioning the working poor across a number of areas and helping to diversify cities, public housing had the effect of solidifying racial and economic boundaries in superblocks detached from the street grid, in towers of concrete and steel. Yet they were also perennially underfunded and perilously mismanaged. The developments were allowed to deteriorate as maintenance and repairs lagged. And as the broader fortunes of cities declined — diminishing populations and disappearing jobs, spiking poverty and crime and drug use — public housing bore the worst of those effects.

Soon, those same broad trends were used to justify abandoning the basic democratic idea of providing shelter for all. In 1972, when the 33 Pruitt-Igoe towers in St. Louis began to be imploded a mere 18 years after the complex fully opened, the televised image, with its mushrooming cloud of dust and debris, defined the popular notion of the public-housing experiment: It needed to be destroyed.