 Residents walk past a building in Chicago's Cabrini-Green public housing development in 2005. The project has been largely demolished. (Tim Boyle/Getty Images) By Max Ehrenfreund Few programs for the poor are so widely reviled as public housing. For opponents on the right, housing projects are costly monuments to the folly of misguided idealism, stifling residents' ambition by surrounding them with crime, decay and bureaucracy. For critics on the left, the projects — which were often segregated — became ugly icons of the racism of the white elite, an elite that was unwilling to implement more effective solutions to social problems. If a child grows up "in one of those housing projects of which everyone in New York is so proud, he has at the front door, if not closer, the pimps, the whores, the junkies — in a word, the danger of life in the ghetto," said James Baldwin in 1963. "And the child knows this, though he doesn't know why." Comprehensive new data published this week challenges this cultural consensus on public housing. Read the rest on Wonkblog.
Chart of the day Despite more frequent drug arrests, drug use is more common now than it was three decades ago. Christopher Ingraham has more. | 
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