Public Housing Myths

Public Housing Myths Guest: Fritz Umbach, professor of history and criminal justice at the City University of New York The conventional wisdom among politicians and planners across political divides is that public housing is a failed experiment. So, cities across the country are demolishing their public housing projects and replacing them with developments meant to mix people of all income levels. But the notion that "mixed-income redevelopment" is the only wait to fix failed public housing is a myth, according to a new book co-edited by Nicholas Bloom, Fritz Umbach, and Lawrence Vale. They challenge virtually everything we think we know about public housing in their book titled "Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality and Social Policy."