Yeah, I have the same thoughts. Speaking from my experience with Resi, people often feed off of each other’s energy and vibes, and it’s hard to treat somewhere with respect when nobody else cares. In the case of public housing towers, that can mean anything from not giving a shit about how noisy you are when nobody else does either, to littering or graffitiing because why not?

The only 2 ideas that come to mind are either: not allowing such behaviour and evicting people who don’t behave in an acceptable manner (not great since then a lot of people would have no choice except homelessness, and there’s a very big power imbalance), or spread everybody out into the wider community with little units or similar (not great since that would be very expensive, and can you imagine the NIMBYism everybody would kick up if they tried?).

There’s also other options, although to be effective enough they’d also need to be combined with other things, like better mental health care, generally affordable housing, less institutionalisation through incarceration and similar, etc

I know how much those housing towers suck. I’ve never been in one, but I have been in a housing commission flat out in the country and that wasn’t great. I’ll be honest, I would never consider living in one of those housing towers. I would genuinely rather be homeless than live in one. So I can’t exactly say I blame the people there for very much at all