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This was the argument Oscar Newman put forward in "Defensible Space" in the '70s, and it remains influential, but I don't think it's the consensus among urban historians anymore https://twitter.com/mtsw/status/1346711871194161157
Even though many of them were built with cut-rate materials and designs that were pale imitations of Corbusier, a lot of the modernist midcentury public housing was superior to the housing it replaced. Pruitt-Igoe residents commented on how they enjoyed having working heat.
Instead of blaming modernist architecture the most recent generation of scholarship has focused on two things: (1) the consensus that public housing should be an option of last resort and should encourage people to find housing elsewhere, thus necessarily concentrating poverty
and (2) the collapse of the funding structure for maintaining the buildings amid the municipal finance crises of the '70s and '80s
As one of the initial replies pointed out, modernist towers-in-a-park that did not intentionally concentrate the poorest of the poor and did not rely on city funding for maintenance are doing fine. It's competitive to live in Co-op City and Stuy Town.
The two cities most notorious for high-rise projects, St. Louis and Chicago, also had some of the most severe collapses of their economies in the '70s-'80s of anywhere in America, and some of the most segregated neighborhoods overall. The high-rises were a convenient scapegoat.
