Housing Projects started so nicely

     Watching TV tonight, I enjoyed a show called "10 Homes That Changed America".  

     Did you know that the second federal attempt at Affordable Housing Projects looked handsome?  Built during the Art Deco influence of 1935, it was part of President Roosevelt's famous Public Works, to provide jobs and offset the Great Depression.

     Above, the terra-cotta frieze shows African Americans progressing to better lives/occupations.  That was the USA's prewar attitude.  

     FDR hired African American architect, Hillard Robinson, to design the 274-unit complex.  Named "Langston Terrace Dwellings", it honored an abolitionist Congressman named John Mercer Langston.  
     Wanting a stark improvement from NYC-style "tenement housing" (which began during turn-of-the-century Industrial Revolution)...

...Robinson arranged the garden-apartment units like a campus: a central courtyard, U-shaped buildings, and units that "flowed" with the rolling hilly landscape.  Pubic streets gave access to the buildings, but there was a large green space in the center.

     It was intended for African American, and it cost a mere $4.50 per month.  The Housing Project served a huge purpose during "The Great Migration" of black people from the South to the North.  Robinson believed that great architecture could "inspire a great future".  

     But, after World War II, "affordable housing" was not nicely done.  Therefore, it wasn't as successful.  Postwar urban Housing Projects were awful.  Seen below, massive towers looked gravely austere, and they funneled/concentrated poverty into specific areas.  Residents were often isolated from the rest of the community.  How did America expect that to have positive results?  

Click on these images to make them bigger/clearer...

     The disgusting fact is that all of those images above occurred in America's wealthiest city of New York.
     A 2012 Time magazine article about The Projects in Brooklyn declared them to be the most dangerous place in NYC.  It's one square-mile of slums and poverty!  

     Meanwhile look at what OTHER countries around the world create as their Affordable Housing Projects...

 Spain

France

Sweden

Berlin, Germany

Vienna, Austria

New Zealand

     Compare those appearances with the ones festering in NYC.  Why would the so-called "greatest city on Earth" create housing projects that look like prisons?  Well, the answer might be implied in what the rest of that TV show said.
     The next "home" that it featured belonged to a mayor of NYC, named William Paulding, Jr..  During the era of his city's crappy tenement houses, he built himself a castle, named Lyndhurst, in upstate New York.  That is a terrible di$parity!  

*For similar evidence of missed opportunities & misdirection, please use this link:
http://halfwindsorfullthrottle.blogspot.com/2014/07/changed-values.html