> "a lottery for the working poor and lower middle class who desire to live among the upper class and rich" This isn't even remotely true in the typical case.

> "a lottery for the working poor and lower middle class who desire to live among the upper class and rich" This isn't even remotely true in the typical case. It is a lottery, to be a certain, but most NYC public housing is not in rich neighborhoods. Living on the ass end of Bushwick, East Harlem, Crown Heights, and Coney Island is not opulent, nor has it ever been. All of these neighborhoods are still poor, and while some are gentrifying none of them can be identified in any way as upper class, or even upper-middle class. There are notable exceptions - the projects on the Lower East Side for example were built when the neighborhood was one of the poorest in Manhattan, but in the past ten years has transformed into a playground for the wealthy with shiny new glass skyscrapers going up every which way. The public housing system in NYC was neither intended as, nor does it generally have the effect of, mixing the poor with the rich. All of the complexes were built on what was at the time land that nobody ever expected would be worth much, the mixing of economic strata was not a major concern - in fact the design of the public housing system was in large part driven by a desire to segregate the poor.