There’s general agreement among urban historians and sociologists that the highrise projects built in many large US cities failed because they so intensely concentrated poverty and hopelessness.

The movement to provide better housing for the poor had begun with some philanthropic projects in the 1920s, and then true publicly financed housing during the Depression. Initially, these were walk-up apartment buildings with densities very close to the surrounding neighborhood, but typically providing playgrounds, laundry rooms, community gardens, and other amenities that made them a shining alternative to the crowded tenements, carved-up mansions, and alley shacks in which much of the urban poor was housed. But as federally aided public housing began to be built under the Housing Act of 1949, limits on the cost per unit forced big cities like Chicago to build big clusters of highrises rather than the smaller-scale buildings and projects nearly everyone recognized as a superior environment. Federal policy (the “Neighborhood Composition Rule” required projects to house the same race as the surrounding neighborhood, and in many cities there was also local resistance to public housing projects, making sites outside slum areas even more difficult to find. Meanwhile, freeway construction and urban renewal projects were displacing large numbers of families who needed to be rehoused, and some local housing agencies relaxed formerly strict screening of tenants. Social norms and expectations changed substantially in the 1970s, and—like all impoverished urban neighborhoods—housing projects saw increased drug use, single-parent households, and street crime.

It turned out there were also often problems with the buildings themselves: poor designs and budget eliminations that caused elevators to seldom work, choices (bathtubs rather than showers, no airconditioning) that became anachronistic, poor construction and soundproofing. The energy crisis of the 1970s sent utility and maintenance costs soaring. In some big cities, notably Chicago, building maintenance became almost nonexistent due to political corruption, making the buildings even more undesirable for anyone who could live elsewhere. That created a spiral of deterioration in which the only tenants who remained were desperately poor or drug sellers. None of the residents worked—or even knew anyone who worked.

In his book Blueprint for Disaster, Brad Hunt makes the intriguing argument that Chicago Housing Authority highrises were simply overwhelmed by the number of children, which was often 70% of a project’s total population—far, far greater than an ordinary neighborhood would have and be able to supervise through informal social expectations. Of course, it was unrealistic to expect any direct supervision of older children and teenagers by a parent located 10 stories away. The landscaped areas around the buildings, which initially seemed like a pleasant contrast to wall-to-wall tenements, were quasipublic spaces over which no one had no clear "ownership" and control. Design choices such as open-air “sky galleries” became dangers rather than amenities in buildings where the only security presence was control by a street gang.

In 1968 the federal government stopped funding highrises for family housing, and attention shifted to scattered-site programs and direct subsidies like Section 8 vouchers. A number of highrise projects like Pruitt-Igoe were demolished as unsalvageable. In the 1990s, HUD’s HOPE VI initiative funded reconfiguration and renovation of some midrise and highrise projects, and encouraged new mixed-income replacement communities whose residents would not all be desperately poor. It’s interesting that in The Netherlands, Singapore, and South Korea, there’s little stigma attached to residence in “social housing,” and highrises have served well. New York’s public housing complexes, though not ideal, have continued to be an important part of the housing inventory for the poor and lower middle class. The UK and France have had experiences similar to big US cities, and many London “council flats” have been demolished since 1990. There clearly are sociological factors that are just as important as the architecture.

Alas, my library is pretty Chicago-centric on this subject. Besides Brad Hunt’s book, there’s Devereaux Bowly’s chronicle The Poorhouse: Subsidized Housing in Chicago, 1895–1976, and Arnold Hirsch’s book Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960. The Spring 2001 Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, devoted to “Race and Housing in Post WWII Chicago,” includes an article by Hunt on the failure of Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes.