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Why is low income housing called the projects?

Did it start out as a project way back when?

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1. They were built in huge government construction projects, lots of units all at once. The "war on poverty" in the 1960's launched all that. Somehow, the government believed that you could give a poor person the trappings of the middle class, and they'd just become middle class. The projects were intended to be a kind of middle class wonderland. It didn't work, of course. The reasons that individual people were poor was that they were morally weak. Once they all got in a building together, it wasn't wonderland. Even though that was 40 years ago, we have never been able to discuss the reasons that doesn't work, and of course the government has not officially stopped trying to make it work. You won't hear a lot of politicians say anything about it. In fact, I heard some talking head on MSNBC just a few weeks ago saying the reason for the decline of the middle class is that we're not giving free money to the lower class fast enough. The truth is, if you're not disabled, you'll only stop being poor because you make choices to stop.