Olasky Books: A new history of public housing

In December I reviewed Jane Leavy’s audaciously-titled Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It. Howard Husock’s The Projects: A New History of Public Housing (NYU Press, 2025) comes from an academic publisher, which almost guarantees a boring title. A better title would have been: Make Me HUD Secretary: I Know What’s Wrong With “Affordable Housing” and How to Fix It.

Husock, an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow and top analyst of housing and poverty, gives us a century-long history of public housing. He concludes “that the vision of experts may not be wisdom, that the plans and preferences of ordinary citizens must be valued.” Urban planners wiped out poor areas because they “did not trust people of modest means to strive, to improve their conditions over time.”

How to fix the problem? Husock examines strategies such as making housing assistance an entitlement, using vouchers as a ticket to higher-income neighborhoods, and dispersing new, subsidized, privately managed developments—and none has worked well. His better way: Help poor communities have public services like decent schools and safe streets, and realize that old houses with community are often healthier than “gleaming high-rise towers” with isolation.

People, in short, need homes, not just housing, and houses become homes when the people inside share hope and ambition: “Poor neighborhoods can be good neighborhoods.” 

The title of Beyond Homeless: Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes, Transformative Solutions, edited by Mary Theroux (Independent Institute, 2025), gives away the plot, but it’s a good one. The authors show how the “Housing First” concept beloved by some urban planners “puts most critical needs last.” Another slogan, “Harm Reduction,” is also unrealistic.

The authors offer bad news—we have “a homelessness-industrial complex”—along with some good news: Programs called “transitional housing” or “housing readiness” work better than “Housing First.” The book mentions but underplays groups that are most transformative by nudging the despairing toward faith in God.

The centrality of God brings me to an important memoir: John C. Lennox’s My Story (SPCK Publishing, 2026). Lennox, an 82-year-old Oxford mathematician and theologian, offered a Christian alternative to Steven Jay Gould’s materialistic punctuated equilibrium, whereby species have long periods of stability followed by bursts of change. Lennox wrote that the Bible is accurate in reporting six days of creation, and theorized that long periods of time separated each.

Lennox’s life has been punctuated equilibriums: teaching, travel, teaching, debates with atheists, teaching, controversies. Everywhere he meets people who have faced suffering and abandoned faith. Everywhere he confronts them: Give up on God and you have no way to tell right from wrong, or any hope for justice.

Last month brought the 89^th birthday of another prolific author-philosopher, Peter Kreeft, who shows in The Mystery of Joy (Ignatius, 2025) that we can have contentment amid trouble by remembering that “every atom in our bodies is made of ‘star stuff,’ every event in our lives is made of ‘divine providence stuff.’”

Kreeft doesn’t ignore “the forces of selfishness, joylessness, faithlessness, hopelessness and lovelessness, which are our real enemies and which have embedded themselves in our souls like little vampires sucking our lifeblood.” And yet he describes life by quoting C.S. Lewis’s description of Aslan in Narnia, “‘He isn’t safe. But he’s good.’ For He is love, and love is not safe. In fact, it is excruciating. But it is our supreme joy. Do it! Be a saint. What else is there?” 

Briefly noted

In Joyride (Avid Reader, 2025), Susan Orlean describes well the pleasures of her journalistic career: “Being able to communicate through writing is sorcery. Little scratches on a page or screen, delivering knowledge and emotion and mystery—it’s astonishing. To make these little scratches on the page for a living is a miracle.” 

Tim Perry’s When Politics Becomes Heresy: The Idol of Power and the Gospel of Christ (Lexham, 2025) is the opposite of a joyride. He argues that “the temptation far too many evangelical Christians are yielding to is a willingness to purchase political power by promising the idols of our age the language of our own devotion…. They go on to affirm that, if the faith is to remain relevant in the public square, it will have to purchase a claim on that power.”

David Brown’s In the Arena: Theodore Roosevelt in War, Peace, and Revolution (Scribner, 2025) is a biography that moves well of a president who was constant motion.

Subscribers to Olasky Books might enjoy Marvin Olasky’s Substack, which is also free. Please visit his page at marvinolasky.substack.com, click the “Subscribe” button, enter your email address, and you’ll receive his weekly posts by email.