NYCHA s policies can be grouped into three major ideological trends.
1. The first era stretched the longest, up to 1968. During this time NYCHA was an institution dedicated to the idea of model housing as a municipal service. Model housing meant replacing slums with tightly man- aged, high-quality housing projects. NYCHA's era of model housing lasted much longer than in other cities, and this helped it to survive the second, more challenging phase.
2. [This phase] stretched from 1968 to the 1990s: welfare-state public housing. During this difficult era the authority faced, and survived, most of the strains that broke housing systems in other cities.
3. The final phase, which stretches from the 1990s to the present, can be considered a return to early management principles, with a twist. The authority now maintains public housing to a high standard because of its vision of public housing as affordable housing rather than welfare housing, a subtle but important difference. While other cities implode or redevelop their public housing from the ground up, NYCHA has been able to reengineer its existing system for the working poor.
So, can we find other examples of success?