As Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson moves forward with plans to convert parts of the Loop’s financial district into public housing, critics warn the city is walking directly into the same disastrous policies that once produced Cabrini-Green, the Robert Taylor Homes, and decades of concentrated poverty. One of those critics—policy scholar and author Howard Husock—joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to explain why America’s public-housing legacy should serve as a warning, not a model.
Husock, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the new book The Projects: A New History of Public Housing, argues that today’s progressive mayors are reviving a failed vision born from top-down ideology rather than community need.
“There was never grassroots demand for public housing,” Husock said. “It was progressivism on steroids—a small group of intellectuals deciding they would remake cities completely.” That remake, he noted, meant bulldozing functioning, upwardly mobile neighborhoods like Bronzeville and replacing them with massive government-run complexes that quickly became magnets for extreme poverty and crime.
Proft cited staggering data: in New York City, 20% of all violent crimes occur within 100 feet of government housing. Meanwhile, only 3% of households in such housing consist of two adults with children. Most are single-parent households or elderly residents—an entrenched dependency that Husock says public housing was never designed to address.
“When you don’t own your home, you can’t build wealth,” Husock said, adding that early public-housing residents quickly realized that renting indefinitely from the government offered no path to the middle class. As those early middle-income tenants moved out, the projects became exclusively low-income—concentrating social dysfunction at unprecedented scale.
The ripple effects are still felt. When Chicago razed its high-rises and expanded housing vouchers, residents in Black middle-class neighborhoods like Roseland and in the south suburbs loudly objected—not out of prejudice, but from firsthand knowledge of the culture clash that results when people with no experience in stable communities are suddenly inserted into them.
“Middle-class Black households were penalized,” Husock said. “They had sacrificed to buy homes, save money, get to good neighborhoods. And suddenly they were sharing those neighborhoods with people who hadn’t made those same commitments.”
The voucher system, he added, created a new set of perverse incentives. Landlords who accepted Section 8 tenants were guaranteed government rent payments every month, whether they maintained the property or not. “It’s a great deal to be a housing-voucher landlord,” Proft noted. “You get subsidized by taxpayers while providing often substandard housing.”
Chicago’s move to re-enter the landlord business—using $1 billion in bonding authority to convert Loop office buildings into mixed-use public housing—strikes Husock as a remarkable failure to learn from history.
“The government has no capacity to manage property effectively,” he said. “New York’s housing authority has 78 billion dollars in deferred maintenance. That means mold, broken plumbing, leaking ceilings—conditions no one would accept from a private landlord.”
So what’s the alternative? Husock says conservatives should be clear: the goal isn’t to abandon low-income families—it’s to restore upward mobility. That begins by redesigning subsidies so they don’t penalize work. Currently, public-housing tenants pay 30% of their income in rent, meaning a raise at work triggers a rent hike. “Who would sign a lease like that?” Husock asked.
His prescription is straightforward: time limits on subsidies, flat rents instead of income-based rents, and savings accounts that help residents accumulate what they need for a down payment when their assistance ends. Welfare reform in the 1990s adopted limits with remarkable success; housing assistance, he argues, should follow suit.
Proft agreed, pointing out that public housing in Chicago has left, at best, a mixed legacy of dependency and decay—and at worst, the outright destruction of once-functioning communities.
Husock’s overarching message: cities like Chicago don’t need more government landlords. They need more opportunity for the families who want to build stable lives. “Anything that keeps people renting from the government forever,” he said, “is doing no one a favor.”
Howard Husock’s The Projects: A New History of Public Housing is available now.