The Bronx housing project where Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor lived as a child is being portrayed as some sort of “urban log cabin,” says Howard Husock, vice president of the Manhattan Institute. However, since children who live in public housing do the worst in school, according to a 2008 New York University study, public housing is much more likely to lead to long-term poverty than a seat on the high court.

After injecting a trillion dollars into the housing market over the past few decades and even triggering its collapse via the Community Reinvestment Act, government officials still haven’t learned their lesson. In many U.S. cities, government is the largest landlord. The infamous Cabrini-Green public housing development in Chicago consisted of a group of mid- to high-rise apartment buildings built to house 15,000 low-income people – the same sort of high-density development long favored by the environmental crowd. But, like other government-run housing projects around the nation that cost millions of tax dollars to erect, Cabrini-Green became a run-down crime and drug-infested hellhole that had to be completely torn down.