My guest this week is Howard Husock, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a longtime public policy analyst and expert on housing and poverty. I brought Howard on the show to discuss his new book, The Projects: A New History of Public Housing, which presents a critical reading of federal efforts to get rid of slums in American cities. In short, he regards those efforts as a failure, and in this conversation, we get into where the vision of civil society advanced by twentieth-century reformers went wrong.
Howard traces the origins of public housing back to American reformers’ embrace of utopian, European theories of urban planning, like those of Le Corbusier. In their attempt to implement that vision, those reformers destroyed black small businesses, displaced homeowners, and splintered functional communities. Sure, some of those neighborhoods were slums, Howard says. But they were also organic communities thick with social capital that constituted a well-functioning environment for most of their impoverished residents. Furthermore, they at least provided those residents with a way out, while the public housing projects that replaced them ended up locking poor residents into cycles of housing dependency. What’s needed now, according to Howard, is a return to the idea of housing projects as temporary stepping stones to home ownership. Ideas like Zohran Mamdani’s rent freezes won’t help. Investments in social capital will. As I say, poor neighborhoods can also be good neighborhoods—that’s something we seem to have forgotten.
0:00 Howard’s new book, The Projects: A New History of Public Housing
5:58 The failed utopianism of American public housing
12:04 The dispossession of urban African American communities
14:54 Ground News ad
16:40 Did reformers have a reason for demolishing the slums?
22:01 Changing the culture of public housing
30:13 What’s working in public housing
33:35 Trump’s plan for a two-year limit on public housing
35:25 Howard’s criticism of Zohran Mamdani’s proposed rent freeze in NYC
41:13 The causes of homelessness
44:21 The “Move to Opportunity” experiments
48:11 What does it take to ensure that poor neighborhoods are also good neighborhoods
Recorded November 19, 2025
Links and Readings
Howard’s new book, The Projects: A New History of Public Housing
Scott Davis’s book, The World of Patience Gromes: Making and Unmaking a Black Community
Le Corbusier’s book, The Radiant City: Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization
Catherine Bauer’s book, Modern Housing
Herbert Gans’s book, Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans
HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program
Zohran Mamdani’s “freeze the rent” ad
Matthew Desmond’s book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
