Housing projects and private high rises seem like they would have similar problems...I'm not finding this easily, but confess I have no academic background in management!
you could search for Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago (torn down) or Pruitt-Igoe towers in St. Louis (torn down), for starters. Or the Cabrini–Green Homes in Chicago.
It was the private ones and the implied comparison that I was after -- but now that I'm re-reading the parent post maybe there was no comparison, just a long sentence describing public housing projects as torn-down neighborhoods with high-rises...
The entire book is about systems and how we typically ignore them to our disadvantage.
There is some overlap between this and Weinberg's Quality books.
And, of course, _Systematics_ explains it all clearly.
The idea was to give more people a better place to live.
What the opponent said was you're going to concentrate a bunch of poor people in a building that neither we nor they will maintain, it will be far away from any jobs, and it will lead to more crime and more poverty.
I don't think it takes much to say that people are short-sighted and some are only interested in their own personal short-term gain, certainly no metaphor or analogy is needed to state the obvious.