A single failure doesn’t somehow cancel out the more successful versions, it says you should learn from them how not to repeat the mistakes. The toxic stew of racism of the south in the 1950s, for example, seems significant as does the realization that you can’t just toss up a building with no shopping, jobs, poor transportation access, etc. and expect it to go well.
Sure, but it wasn’t just one. Essentially every public housing project in America failed. I’d argue the main problem is American culture as a whole, which emphasizes an attitude of “if I don’t personally own something I should ruin it immediately”
It’s not true that every project failed, and you really have to keep things in context. The problem was not the concept of public housing but rather the racial segregation underlying much of that era’s policies and design, and those same policies had many other negative impacts. Saying that we shouldn’t build public housing is responding to the symptom, not the problem.
Pruitt Igoe suffered from a number of structural issues (including literal issues with the structures) that had little to do with it being government funded. Indeed one of the biggest issues was the government's unwillingness to fund it - several parts of the project were cancelled, then when the city's population started to plummet and vacancies started to mount there was no assistance to make up for the shortfall in maintenance revenue.
