New York’s mass transit system originally included a group of privately run contractors, which government had to take over once it regulated fares so low that the private companies went broke. New York City’s public housing began as a partnership between the city and federal governments, and from the late 1930s to the 1960s was reasonably well-maintained and well-managed. The era of new public housing ended in the 1970s and was replaced by “section 8” vouchers subsidizing private housing under the Community Development Act of 1974. That, along with the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s and the anti-government era that took hold with Ronald Reagan’s presidency in 1981, propelled New York’s public housing into a long, slow decline.