Where Does Crime Go After Public Housing Projects Are Demolished?

As critics have lamented for years, the mega American public housing projects built during the 1960s and ‘70s were often so flawed in their design as to harm residents – and the neighborhoods around them – more than they helped anyone. They were designed on super blocks that cut residents off from the surrounding community and that kept police from easily accessing the grounds. They were built in shoddy barracks and imposing towers, neither of which gave residents any control over the safety of their communal outdoor spaces. They were, in a sense, dangerous by design (although no one thought of it that way at the time).

“There’s this combination of all of these issues serving to perpetuate that stereotype about people who live there, that public housing itself were bad areas, and they were havens for crime,” says Meagan Cahill, a researcher at the Urban Institute. “But in a way, they did become havens for crime. It’s hard for police to police them, you had a lot of low-income people living there, a lot of people who might have been marginalized economically, and not a lot of job opportunity in neighborhoods where the housing was built.”