Originally published in 1987 and now re-issued with a new preface, this book examines attempts by successive individuals and governments to overcome slum conditions and homelessness, to reform landlord-tenant relations and to provide sound modern dwellings with full amenities for those who need them. Its focus is on how those responsible for public housing concentrated their energies on buildings rather than management, on property rather than people, in sharp distinction to the women who played such an innovative and humanizing role in the early days of housing reform. Efforts to resolve public housing problems are examined in a study of twenty housing estates, and of the initiatives that local authorities have taken to reverse the sometimes overwhelming decay.