Neither public nor private parties are immune to renting from problematic people. There are a few important factors in determining trajectory from normalcy to abnormal
- Friction to evict for cause.
People are less willing to engage in action against tenants when it is difficult or expensive to evict. This is often less about well meaning protections for tenants and surprisingly more about reasonable process in county. If it takes 6 months to get on the docket to get the process started this is going to be more important than what you have to do when you get there.
- Financial cost and immediacy of impact.
Most places lose tenants at end of term and can find at least some new suckers. Turning your place into a shithole may take years to fully show its impact and in a tight housing market it may still be muffled by the sheer number of poor bastards who need somewhere to sleep.
- Incentive structure and distance from decision makers.
If throwing out the bums requires work pain and risk only from the peons who manage the place for the owners and failure to do so only hurts residents and owners then one may find that these enforcement actions never happen. A bureaucracy further increases distance between actors and decision makers.
If you consider these factors you might rightly conclude that a government project is maximally situated to fail at removing bad actors. Friction to evict those in need is going to be higher than almost anywhere else, front line workers are there for long term career trajectory, have little real power nor incentive and nobody but the residents really feels the pain. If you are running a house of last resort your vacancy rate is going to be low even if its a bad place to live.
None of this makes it impossible to run projects correctly it represents increased risk not destiny.