Flag Courts was not the only housing project whose problems Baltimore solved so emphatically. Was the problem of public housing insoluble? Much supposedly expert opinion in the UK and US thought so.
But doesn't the history ofboth New York City’s public housing and the Sutton Dwellings Trust demonstrate the opposite?
According to Nicholas Dagen Bloom, “administrative incompetence ” has been the main problem in public housing, whether called social housing, council housing, or “the projects.” He offers the example of New York City's public housing, which constitutes 10% of all such dwellings in the United States, as an example that it can and has worked. The New York City Housing Authority's “history illustrates that housing management practices, broadly defined, are the most important factors in the long-term shape of public housing communities.” New York has certainly “operated under many of the same stresses that bedeviled other housing authorities,” but its fundamentally different approach proves that constant attention permits public housing to flourish even amidst surrounding ghettos. Bloom quotes one of the housing administrators who explains that failing to maintain the structures even for a few days would create a "serious impact on quality of life." Bloom concludes that “very few other housing authorities had any sense of urgency to their management operations and most failed to address serious defects either on a daily or even yearly basis.”