Because we tried it and it didn't go well, they were called the projects and it concentrated poverty and crime.

Well it’s worth reading the link to see how they avoided that problem in Austria... they had two strategies that seem to have succeeded there: the buildings are on a desirable area of town, and rent does not go up if your income goes up. The second point means that the area ends up being mixed income. You have to have low income to qualify for entry but then once you get on your feet and income rises you get to stay there. So they made affordable public housing that doesn’t become a slum.

If we evaluated software according to this policy, software would have been abandoned as unworkable and we would be using obviously more practical abacuses.

We should have tried the version without crack cocaine and general access handguns and systemic racism in education and employment.

Back to my original point the problem with public housing was that is was concentrated.

Americans love their class symbols, and chief among them neighborhood. It's therefore absolutely necessarily that public housing be sprinkled around evenly.

Both of which share many crucial characteristics with American housing projects, particularly concentration of poverty.

Meanwhile, in the Austrian example given in the link above, Singaporean home subsidization, and other successful cases what you find are schemes that manage to create and maintain an admixture of incomes. There are different ways[1] to accomplish that and they're not all easy, but it does seem like a necessary requirement for success.

[1] As in the Austrian example, you can remove income requirements after move-in, so that people aren't forced out as they move up the income ladder. Or rather than subsidize rent you can subsidize ownership. By having an ownership stake people are incentivized to maintain the property, and even if they move they'll be replaced by someone with a similar income (or at least an income above the initial ceiling). Unfortunately, many liberals who promote subsidized housing scoff at permitting people to continue to benefit from that initial subsidization after their income has increased. But that resistance is precisely the kind of policy dynamic that concentrates poverty!