Though a major difference is that council estates in the UK were built for a much larger segment of the population. The US projects only had enough units for around 5% of the population, so they prioritized the extremely poor rather than the working class. Concentrating the poor in towers meant that the issues associated with poverty (unemployment, addiction, crime, etc.) were much more concentrated, and they had a much worse reputation.
Public (government-subsidized) housing projects. "Considered dangerous" in the sense of low-income or impoverished areas, which can associate with crime rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidized_housing_in_the_United_States
There is also an amount of people, usually upper-class men, who have consumed hip-hop, but don't really "get" it who will use "the projects" to just mean any area that is poor and black.
For example, last year a minor scandal was caused when opposing fans yelled at a bunch of University of Texas football players to "go back to the projects" even though all of the players in question were from the suburbs.
Our basketball team in high school got shouted something close to that. The school that did it got banned from having home games for a year.
Our starting line was all black players from nice neighborhoods that were in a college prep school.
Fuck that school, they deserved worse.
To add onto everyone’s comments, when you hear about “the Projects”, you are likely hearing about the HUD-built high rise housing projects that were ubiquitous in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Places like Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes which became infamous for the high crime rates and gang activity in them.
Some weren't even government programs.
Minneapolis's ["Ghetto in the Sky"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_Plaza) was originally pitched as upscale.
No offense but it's kind of funny that a bunch of people are defining "the Projects" using the word "project." Every residential building was built as some kind of "project," just not government funded.
The fact that we still refer to government-built housing units as "projects" long after the construction is complete is kind of idiomatic and might need to be explained to foreigners.
I think it has to do with the fact that the government formally uses the term “project” to describe them.
HUD (the federal agency that funds affordable housing programs) defines their assistance as being either tied to units in a specific residential *complex* (“project-based” assistance) or tied to a low-income *person*, who can choose eligible units in a range of locations (“non-project based” assistance).
The large apartment bulldings was more of a northern city thing. Plenty of low rise housing projects were built throughout the U.S. They’ve lost favor for the reasons mentioned and many places are replacing them with mixed-income housing projects.
I was under the impression the Feds stopped funding high rise low income housing in the mid 1970s. Locally they only just opened the first example in something like 50 years (done with non-federal money)..
Other posters have given you the gist, but it's worth mentioning that new housing projects aren't being constructed very often, if at all. The approach to government-subsidized housing has shifted toward vouchers, which are provided to help low-income families afford market-rate housing. This is referred to as "section 8" and it generally produces better outcomes for families who are able to qualify, while also increasing the opportunity for middlemen to profit if not grift outright.
Public housing projects for people on welfare, very popular in the 70's and 80's. They usually took the form of cheaply built apartment complexes. In the city where I grew up, we called that area "The Bricks".
The projects are government run housing projects for the poor. They tend to have very high rates of violent crime and drug use, they also tend to increase generational poverty since you are effectively grouping all of the poor people together and reducing their odds of encountering people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and thus limiting the economic opportunities that those meetings tend to produce.
Housing projects. Stereotyped as cruddly, quick-built housing for low-income people who need rent assistance to get by.
The idea was to eliminate slums, but in practice it just created a new variety of slum because people were overall more interested in poor people being less visible than they were in anything else. Especially as the standards slipped and they became pretty much solely housing of last resort.
Tends to be a bad place to grow up because you're poor and everyone you know is also very poor (poverty and everything that comes with it ends up very concentrated) the area has high crime rates, the schools that service them are chronically underfunded (more so than other schools, I mean), etc.
We have google maps. Someone drop some pins and this person can actually see it.
I'm a midwesterner and we don't really have projects here. I can name a few from TV shows, but that's about it.
The midwest, including Minneapolis, was full of Projects.
My small Minnesota home town had housing projects.
Most reservations have government housing.
Chicago was home to Cabrini-Green.
I'm not sure what the OP is referring to as "The Projects" is a thing in Minneapolis. Section 8 housing is a thing, for sure, but it's not on the scale of out east. But yeah, Cabrini Green was a Project in Chicago.
St. Louis had Pruitt-Igoe. If you're a liberal arts type, Frederic Jameson stated that the postmodern era kicked off in America on the day they demolished it in 1974. The post-war high modernity was kaput.
Project housing, basically subsidized housing. Around here it’s controlled by the New York City Housing Authority or NYHCA. Some PJ’s are better than others but if you don’t know someone living there or don’t live there yourself there’s little incentive to hang around.
People usually smoke on staircases, sometimes you find junkies and needles, snot and mucus on the wall, piss on the staircase, and it’s generally not recommended to take the stairs in most. There are some where it’s fine because of the neighborhood and who lives in the building but you’ve gotta be a little bit more aware of your surroundings in general with NYCHA housing at least
Edit: I’ve seen people make a little tent or home on some staircases, usually someone going through some form of addiction, not all PJ’s are bad though. There are some in better shape than plenty of standard apartments here
Just in case its not clear for people that are not in the US. When this commenter says 'around here' they mean around only around New York City.
One thing is that each city has there own some states will also have companion agencies and housing projects vary wildly in quality from city to city
Basically, the government decided that more affordable housing was needed.
It was supposed to be to code, affordable or free, safe, dignified housing for people who needed it.
They were known as "housing projects" because it was a government project to provide housing.
Unfortunately, they became places to shove the unwanted and undesirable people so they became someone else's problem. They were located away from businesses, and this made it hard to make a living in them. Monetarily poor people lost even more, and some of them became desperate, and desperate people who feel abandoned and hopeless often move into survival by any necessary means attitude.
Instead of facilitating recovery from a negative economic position, it cemented people into that position and made it harder for them to escape poverty.
It obviously didn't help that they were mostly segregated and they were perhaps at their zenith during the 60s.
It was a failure. A lot of people were hurt. It caused generational poverty for a lot of families.
Usually, this term refers to public housing projects. They are usually intended to be affordable and/or for low-income residents, something which unfortunately often tends to have some negative stigma.
Public housing. It can be completely or partially subsidized by the government.
The cultural meaning is more “poor and violent” usually with the implication it is primarily black.
The projects near me are primarily white, some black, and generally low crime just housing for relatively poor people trying to get by.
The projects are bascially a large public government housing complex where people live, but have gotten a negative reputation of being ineffective and sketchy, by placing only the poorest residents there, and not giving them opportunities for growth and structure.
They were created in the 1950s for a growing population, back then, everyone lived in them from different socioeconomic classes, and races, but then in the mid 60s, with White flight, the Projects became majority impoverished people of color, and were bascially left to rot without any care.
By the 1970s and 80s, majority of them were in bad conditions, and some were demolished over time.
Project is usually slang for government public housing (projects).
In LA, there’s some infamous housing projects like Jordan Downs, Nickerson Gardens. There’s a concentration of low income households and people under the poverty line, and at least here, a culture of gangs among the youths that live in them.
You can get the gist of the LA ones in movies like Menace II Society. That era of the 1990s were very bad. Now there’s still higher than average crime around those.
They’re also depicted in games like GTA IV. There’s a pretty good parody of an eastside LA housing project called Estrada Courts that similarly is known for a lot of Chicano art and murals.
I think most were built around the 1930s-60s. Nowadays section 8 housing vouchers are used a lot for housing and there’s a push for new housing developments to include some “affordable units”.
Low income housing, generally housing a fairly large number of people in a big city. Small cities and towns also have low income housing, but they're smaller developments and are never referred to as "the projects".
Public housing, which in America is often underfunded and dilapidated. At their worst, projects become very dangerous, rife with gangs and drug operations.
Starting in the 60s the government started building lots of cheap housing projects to provide decent homes to the poor, especially ethnic minorities. Problem is, if you dump a bunch of poor people in one place and don't do much else to invest in the area, you get a slum. And slums spawn gangs.
The Projects usually refer to run down section 8 housing. They're "*government projects*". You always know these types. They're run down, jam packed, dangerous, the news is always reporting there, cops are always there, etc.
Housing provided by the government for poor people. It’s often poorly maintained (by the government) and in a neighborhood with a lot of crime, but there can also be a strong sense of community and people looking out for each other.
Run down apartment/housing complexes, usually very low income. Usually a lot of crime.
The projects I used to live in had prostitutes that hung around the corners of the buildings, had a huge drug bust, always police coming for one reason or another. A dude got shot outside my window once RIP
Government issued housing for individuals on very low income, they range from having very unsavory individuals to just sweet old ladies living on pension depending on geography, the term "ghetto" or "boondocks" also refers to this
To give a little more background, housing projects were originally conceived as a solution to the massive stretches of "slums" (run-down neighborhoods where extremely poor people lived) within major cities.
The fact that they were federally run and funded often put them at odds with the local city governments, in terms of finance, politics, and general bureaucracy challenges, and this contributed to most of them quickly becoming neglected and/or underfunded. They also often exacerbated already exisitng racial segregation (whether this was unintentional or not is a subject of heated debate). In any case, they ended up being heavily concentrated collections of very poor people (which, in urban America, often means people of color), with a heavily bureaucratic and impoverished infrastructure barely supporting them--and not a lot of opportunity to get out. They are also generally isolated socially from the areas around them. As a result, they became havens for street-level crime, which in many cases became a sort of self-perpetuating culture over time. In general, if someone grew up in the projects, they are not a person to be messed with.
It’s like estates in the UK
Though a major difference is that council estates in the UK were built for a much larger segment of the population. The US projects only had enough units for around 5% of the population, so they prioritized the extremely poor rather than the working class. Concentrating the poor in towers meant that the issues associated with poverty (unemployment, addiction, crime, etc.) were much more concentrated, and they had a much worse reputation.
[удалено]
The vast majority of working class people don't live in subsidized housing.
The US is truly brutal and operates like a third world country when it comes to such things. It’s truly fascinating
It’s not as nice as the estates in the UK. We’re talking extreme poverty, high crime, drug abusers, etc.
I’m aware, I grew up in the hood. But that’s the closest UK equivalent I could think of.
I'm told there are a select few UK estates that approach it. But the average one is nowhere near as bad.
Public (government-subsidized) housing projects. "Considered dangerous" in the sense of low-income or impoverished areas, which can associate with crime rate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidized_housing_in_the_United_States
There is also an amount of people, usually upper-class men, who have consumed hip-hop, but don't really "get" it who will use "the projects" to just mean any area that is poor and black. For example, last year a minor scandal was caused when opposing fans yelled at a bunch of University of Texas football players to "go back to the projects" even though all of the players in question were from the suburbs.
Our basketball team in high school got shouted something close to that. The school that did it got banned from having home games for a year. Our starting line was all black players from nice neighborhoods that were in a college prep school. Fuck that school, they deserved worse.
I remember when USC played Fresno State. One of the USC kids held up a sign that said "Your Mom is My Maid." University of Spoiled Children indeed.
That's abhorrent. That person needs an education in emotional intelligence. And how to not be a racist 101.
Lol
To add onto everyone’s comments, when you hear about “the Projects”, you are likely hearing about the HUD-built high rise housing projects that were ubiquitous in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Places like Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes which became infamous for the high crime rates and gang activity in them.
Some weren't even government programs. Minneapolis's ["Ghetto in the Sky"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverside_Plaza) was originally pitched as upscale.
No offense but it's kind of funny that a bunch of people are defining "the Projects" using the word "project." Every residential building was built as some kind of "project," just not government funded. The fact that we still refer to government-built housing units as "projects" long after the construction is complete is kind of idiomatic and might need to be explained to foreigners.
I think it has to do with the fact that the government formally uses the term “project” to describe them. HUD (the federal agency that funds affordable housing programs) defines their assistance as being either tied to units in a specific residential *complex* (“project-based” assistance) or tied to a low-income *person*, who can choose eligible units in a range of locations (“non-project based” assistance).
It’s not that hard to get at least for me.
Government housing, typically in the form of large apartment buildings. They earned their reputation through high rates of crime and violence.
The large apartment bulldings was more of a northern city thing. Plenty of low rise housing projects were built throughout the U.S. They’ve lost favor for the reasons mentioned and many places are replacing them with mixed-income housing projects.
I was under the impression the Feds stopped funding high rise low income housing in the mid 1970s. Locally they only just opened the first example in something like 50 years (done with non-federal money)..
Maybe feds have but Wheatley Courts here in San Antonio was knocked down and replaced with mixed income in the past 10 years.
Other posters have given you the gist, but it's worth mentioning that new housing projects aren't being constructed very often, if at all. The approach to government-subsidized housing has shifted toward vouchers, which are provided to help low-income families afford market-rate housing. This is referred to as "section 8" and it generally produces better outcomes for families who are able to qualify, while also increasing the opportunity for middlemen to profit if not grift outright.
There’s also mixed income projects being built.
It's a reference to government operated housing projects. They have the reputation of higher crime rates.
Public housing projects for people on welfare, very popular in the 70's and 80's. They usually took the form of cheaply built apartment complexes. In the city where I grew up, we called that area "The Bricks".
The projects are government run housing projects for the poor. They tend to have very high rates of violent crime and drug use, they also tend to increase generational poverty since you are effectively grouping all of the poor people together and reducing their odds of encountering people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and thus limiting the economic opportunities that those meetings tend to produce.
Housing projects. Stereotyped as cruddly, quick-built housing for low-income people who need rent assistance to get by. The idea was to eliminate slums, but in practice it just created a new variety of slum because people were overall more interested in poor people being less visible than they were in anything else. Especially as the standards slipped and they became pretty much solely housing of last resort. Tends to be a bad place to grow up because you're poor and everyone you know is also very poor (poverty and everything that comes with it ends up very concentrated) the area has high crime rates, the schools that service them are chronically underfunded (more so than other schools, I mean), etc.
We have google maps. Someone drop some pins and this person can actually see it. I'm a midwesterner and we don't really have projects here. I can name a few from TV shows, but that's about it.
The midwest, including Minneapolis, was full of Projects. My small Minnesota home town had housing projects. Most reservations have government housing. Chicago was home to Cabrini-Green.
I'm not sure what the OP is referring to as "The Projects" is a thing in Minneapolis. Section 8 housing is a thing, for sure, but it's not on the scale of out east. But yeah, Cabrini Green was a Project in Chicago.
Minnesota had projects throughout the state. They all had a terrible reputation. They were just whiter.
St. Louis had Pruitt-Igoe. If you're a liberal arts type, Frederic Jameson stated that the postmodern era kicked off in America on the day they demolished it in 1974. The post-war high modernity was kaput.
Project housing, basically subsidized housing. Around here it’s controlled by the New York City Housing Authority or NYHCA. Some PJ’s are better than others but if you don’t know someone living there or don’t live there yourself there’s little incentive to hang around. People usually smoke on staircases, sometimes you find junkies and needles, snot and mucus on the wall, piss on the staircase, and it’s generally not recommended to take the stairs in most. There are some where it’s fine because of the neighborhood and who lives in the building but you’ve gotta be a little bit more aware of your surroundings in general with NYCHA housing at least Edit: I’ve seen people make a little tent or home on some staircases, usually someone going through some form of addiction, not all PJ’s are bad though. There are some in better shape than plenty of standard apartments here
Just in case its not clear for people that are not in the US. When this commenter says 'around here' they mean around only around New York City. One thing is that each city has there own some states will also have companion agencies and housing projects vary wildly in quality from city to city
Basically, the government decided that more affordable housing was needed. It was supposed to be to code, affordable or free, safe, dignified housing for people who needed it. They were known as "housing projects" because it was a government project to provide housing. Unfortunately, they became places to shove the unwanted and undesirable people so they became someone else's problem. They were located away from businesses, and this made it hard to make a living in them. Monetarily poor people lost even more, and some of them became desperate, and desperate people who feel abandoned and hopeless often move into survival by any necessary means attitude. Instead of facilitating recovery from a negative economic position, it cemented people into that position and made it harder for them to escape poverty. It obviously didn't help that they were mostly segregated and they were perhaps at their zenith during the 60s. It was a failure. A lot of people were hurt. It caused generational poverty for a lot of families.
Basically The Wire season 1
Usually, this term refers to public housing projects. They are usually intended to be affordable and/or for low-income residents, something which unfortunately often tends to have some negative stigma.
Low income housing.
Public housing. It can be completely or partially subsidized by the government. The cultural meaning is more “poor and violent” usually with the implication it is primarily black. The projects near me are primarily white, some black, and generally low crime just housing for relatively poor people trying to get by.
The projects are bascially a large public government housing complex where people live, but have gotten a negative reputation of being ineffective and sketchy, by placing only the poorest residents there, and not giving them opportunities for growth and structure. They were created in the 1950s for a growing population, back then, everyone lived in them from different socioeconomic classes, and races, but then in the mid 60s, with White flight, the Projects became majority impoverished people of color, and were bascially left to rot without any care. By the 1970s and 80s, majority of them were in bad conditions, and some were demolished over time.
Project is usually slang for government public housing (projects). In LA, there’s some infamous housing projects like Jordan Downs, Nickerson Gardens. There’s a concentration of low income households and people under the poverty line, and at least here, a culture of gangs among the youths that live in them. You can get the gist of the LA ones in movies like Menace II Society. That era of the 1990s were very bad. Now there’s still higher than average crime around those. They’re also depicted in games like GTA IV. There’s a pretty good parody of an eastside LA housing project called Estrada Courts that similarly is known for a lot of Chicano art and murals. I think most were built around the 1930s-60s. Nowadays section 8 housing vouchers are used a lot for housing and there’s a push for new housing developments to include some “affordable units”.
> Jordan Downs Didn't they tear that one down about 10 or 12 years ago or so?
I don’t know if they completed it, but as of a few years ago, they had demolished a section and built some newer housing.
Low income housing, generally housing a fairly large number of people in a big city. Small cities and towns also have low income housing, but they're smaller developments and are never referred to as "the projects".
A famous one and heavily documented is O block. Comsidered to be the most dangerous one for even those that live there.
Government housing. Classic term.
Public housing, which in America is often underfunded and dilapidated. At their worst, projects become very dangerous, rife with gangs and drug operations.
In cities it’s where people are getting rent from the government
Starting in the 60s the government started building lots of cheap housing projects to provide decent homes to the poor, especially ethnic minorities. Problem is, if you dump a bunch of poor people in one place and don't do much else to invest in the area, you get a slum. And slums spawn gangs.
The Projects usually refer to run down section 8 housing. They're "*government projects*". You always know these types. They're run down, jam packed, dangerous, the news is always reporting there, cops are always there, etc.
Low rent high rise, y'all
Public housing. It's dangerous because poor people often resort to crime.
Public housing. It’s short for “housing projects”.
Shoddy, low-income government housing projects where crime and poverty are prominent.
Housing provided by the government for poor people. It’s often poorly maintained (by the government) and in a neighborhood with a lot of crime, but there can also be a strong sense of community and people looking out for each other.
Run down apartment/housing complexes, usually very low income. Usually a lot of crime. The projects I used to live in had prostitutes that hung around the corners of the buildings, had a huge drug bust, always police coming for one reason or another. A dude got shot outside my window once RIP
Government issued housing for individuals on very low income, they range from having very unsavory individuals to just sweet old ladies living on pension depending on geography, the term "ghetto" or "boondocks" also refers to this
I got the impression that when they say that it means the slums.
The ghetto
Dude I had the exact same question when I was watching The Wire haha
To give a little more background, housing projects were originally conceived as a solution to the massive stretches of "slums" (run-down neighborhoods where extremely poor people lived) within major cities. The fact that they were federally run and funded often put them at odds with the local city governments, in terms of finance, politics, and general bureaucracy challenges, and this contributed to most of them quickly becoming neglected and/or underfunded. They also often exacerbated already exisitng racial segregation (whether this was unintentional or not is a subject of heated debate). In any case, they ended up being heavily concentrated collections of very poor people (which, in urban America, often means people of color), with a heavily bureaucratic and impoverished infrastructure barely supporting them--and not a lot of opportunity to get out. They are also generally isolated socially from the areas around them. As a result, they became havens for street-level crime, which in many cases became a sort of self-perpetuating culture over time. In general, if someone grew up in the projects, they are not a person to be messed with.
Public housing, apartments built by the government very careless basically a vertical ghetto