Yeah, Penn South is not social housing, it’s a Mitchell-Lama cooperative, although Robert Moses and city/state governments definitely were in the kitchen from the start, and there were some icky machinations that annihilated six full city blocks of “slum” to make it happen. This is pretty high quality housing. The only real “eyesore” here is the parking garage.
The redevelopment of the Elliott-Chelsea houses across 9th Ave is covered here:
Whenever I read someone dismissing the homes of two thousand people as “an eyesore”, I get queasy. You’re dismissing the people along with the building. Sure, you can cherry pick examples of public housing redevelopments around the world that suit your tastes, but the uncomfortable truth is that an awful lot of these “redevelopments” ultimately go quite badly for the people that live in them.