> Look at French banlieues, German Plattenbauten or British Councils - they are synonymous with Crime and physical as well as cultural despair.

Sure, because what existed before was absolutely fine [1][2]...

The truth is that these policies worked so well that pepole completely forgot what existed before. The alternative to housing projects wasn't a country without crime or despair, it was more crime, shanty towns, people displaced by war and unable to get back to normal life, and young workers unable to move to places of employment in the postwar economic boom. That topic was so uncontroversial that every european government, leftwing or rightwing, did it.

I agree that a social housing project alone isn't enough to fix every problem, but that doesn't make it the source of other unsolved problems.

[1]: Nanterre's shanty towns, https://www.defense-92.fr/exposition/la-vie-des-bidonvilles-...

[2]: pre-war shanty town, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2019/jul/04/how-p...