How bad are the public housing projects where our nation’s poorest live? A handful of tables from HUD released minutes ago may lend some insight. Here are some quick takeaways:

The first is quite a large Excel table detailing complaints lodged alleging discrimination based on factors such as race, disability, religion or retaliation for an earlier complaint, broken down by county where the housing project is located. Sunlight has made it slightly easier to access directly in your browser here.

Some quick sums show that LA County tops the list for complaints of all sorts–whites and blacks alike say they’re being discriminated against because of their race, as do those with disabilities. Of course, that’s mostly because it’s one of the largest counties: to make real use of this data to determine disproportional impropriety, we’d need to pull in housing project population by county.

Tarrant County, Texas takes home the (perceived) sexism award.

A more interesting measure, to me, is physical housing inspection scores (again, I’ve put in Google Fusion tables here), which are provided down to the level of individual housing projects. It would be interesting to visit these buildings and witness cockroaches and holes in the walls–or see whether improvements were made in the wake of failing scores. Perhaps not surprisingly, the worst public housing projects in America are in New Orleans. Looking at average inspection scores per housing authority:

Housing authorities with most run-down buildings

Finally, HUD takes a look at agencies’ administrative performance. Which are riddled with failures and lack of oversight? Which have most improved?

Here’s the aggregate over time, by ranking. Looks like agencies have been getting better over time — but there’s also been fewer of them.