Black communities were bulldozed to make way for highways for being "slums" and forced into isolated "public" housing. This only concentrated the issued of crime and poverty and moved it out of sight of richer whiter communities. This was labeled as "Urban Renewal" and passed under the Housing Act of 1949.

It's not just public housing it's all housing. Even some public housing advocates argue against housing reforms that would make it possible to build public housing!

I've been supporting an advocacy group looking to build social housing and at least half the pushback is from anti-housing "tenant advocates" that work for non-profits funded by extremely foundations with boards that are all very wealthy with multiple homes, and don't see the need for more housing. The "tenant advocates" seem to view housing similarly and only support public housing to the extent that it doesn't actually get built.

The obvious reason is that to a first approximation nobody is building public housing, and so appeals to public housing, especially from owner-residents, read to housing activists as a dodge, a way to perform advocacy for housing without actually providing housing.

A subtler reason is that public housing is drastically more expensive to build than private housing. There's multifarious reasons for this, and the underlying problem is absolutely worth solving (it's one of the three big prescriptions in Abundance), but it's a bigger problem than housing. Right now, people are focused on whatever's going to bring the most units online fastest.

Is there a current best practice for public housing? I remember a project here in South Australia that integrated some apartments for low-income or homelessness-risk tenants, amongst other tenancies. Idea being that it made for a melting pot rather than risk of only slum or only premium housing. But I don't think it was done at any real scale.

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They were historically used, at least most notoriously, for selling crack and sniper fortresses for organized gangs. Your average American envisions something like Cabrini Green when you say public housing.