Hello and welcome to 10 blocks. My name is Steven I'd. I'm a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor to City Journal, and I'll be hosting today's episode.

My guest is Howard Husek, a senior fellow in domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a long-term contributor to City Journal, and the author of two of my personal favorite city journal articles of all time,

How the Agency Saved My Father from the Spring 1999 issue,

and Dreams of My Uncle from the Spring 2017 issue.

Today, though, we are not going to be talking about those articles, but something else, Howard wrote.

His new book, The Projects, a new history of public housing published by NYU Press.

Howard, congratulations on your new book, and thanks for joining Ten Blocks.

Thank you so much, Stephen. It's so good to be with you, and thanks for having me.

Let's start with the title. To many Americans, when they hear the term, the projects, they may think, well, isn't that an old debate?

It's a topic we used to spend a lot of time going back and forth, maybe back in the 1980s.

We have different concerns now.

What is your argument that this theme of public housing still has a major claim on our attention?

Well, first of all, Stephen, there are still 876,000

public housing units in this country and another 2.7 housing voucher units, and that's a program

that is really a spin-off from public housing. And so the legacy of public housing, simply as a housing

policy per se, remains very much with us. But more broadly, how public housing happened,

as I try to show in the book, a small elite in New York led to the changes, physical changes,

and policy changes across the country affecting millions of people. How that happened, that process

is very much worth understanding and visiting in detail less than a lot of people, how that happened, that process is very much worth understanding and visiting in detail lest we make similar mistakes.

Yes, you spend a lot of time on what you call the intellectual origins of public housing.

And when I was reading this section of the book when you were going through these essayists,

journalists, planners laying out their initial vision, I was so struck by just the grandiosity

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