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One of the problems with UK housing estates and US projects is that they end up as sink places into which most the troubled and alienated members of society descend. There are plenty of working-class and middle-class people who couldn't give a flying fuck about their neighbourhood, or the state of their gardens and homes. But in a sink estate the balance is skewed so that they can, if not carefully managed, become the majority culture.
Add to that a number of other factors: the stigma of an estate/project with a bad rep begins at a very, very young age. I remember very clearly when i was at school, there was an expectation of trouble from kids who attended from the Johnson Fold Estate. I can't be wholly sure, but from memory they were pretty shabbily treated sometimes. I doubt trouble makers who didn't have that tag were punished as harshly or as often as those who did. I have a very clear memory of one of those lads being forced to sit under the music teachers desk, blocked in by a chair. If he was going to act like an animal then she was going to treat him like one. We were 12 years old, can you imagine how humiliating that must have been?
This follows on into later life. Job applications from a known estate are prejudiced. There's some evidence to suggest that it can have an impact on things like sentencing in the event of criminal conviction.
Geographically such estates are often very separate from the mainstream. Exacerbating the sense cultual divorce. They often have significantly higher levels of unemployment and fewer opportunities to engage with other economic classes except in terms of the adversarial relationships forged between those in social housing and their landlords, those on benefits with the benefits advisors, those involved in minor crime with the police and criminal justice system.
One of the ways to try and get around that is a system called 'pepper potting'. Instead of building massive estates, separated from private housing by distance, style and access, social housing is set in amongst private housing. We've had quite a few developments in my borough, where some of the housing is intended for private sale, and some intended for social rent or half equity assistaed ownership. If you walk into that new build estate, you would not know which were the private houses and which not.
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