Editor’s note: This has been excerpted with permission from the Pacific Research Institute. To read the entire article, click here.

Politicians and activists have long tried to dress old, failed, sometimes contentious and often intrusive ideas in new clothing. Gun control has become “gun safety.” Illegal aliens are “undocumented immigrants.” The politically charged term abortion has been softened for the palate to “women’s reproductive health.” Often labels are changed due to negative connotations that have arisen from the original terminology. Other times the new phrasing is an effort to obscure.

Of the latter, we’re seeing it in California, where Democratic Assemblyman Alex Lee of Milpitas has introduced a bill with the title, “The Social Housing Act.” He wouldn’t dare call it “The Public Housing Act.” Too much baggage associated with that terminology. So the concept was renamed.

Lee’s Social Housing Act, Assembly Bill 2881, part of a seven-bill legislative package, would “establish the California Housing Authority to produce mixed-income housing that is affordable and financially self-sustaining.” It also creates a Department of Housing and Community Development. The goal, says Lee’s office, is to follow “international best practices of developing mixed-income, self-sustaining housing like Singapore and Vienna.”

What makes Lee, his bill co-authors and the lawmakers who will eventually support AB 2881 believe the successes of social housing in Singapore and Vienna (are they in fact successes?) will seamlessly translate to California? What will prevent repeats of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe, and the Pink Houses of Brooklyn, N.Y. three of the most wretched public housing projects in this country’s history? Two were so fourth-rate, so soul-stealing that they were eventually pulled down. Though still standing, the third is overdue for a date with the wrecking ball.

Cabrini-Green was one of the most notorious instances of the state playing the role of slumlord. 

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