EV When social housing was first built by councils in the Uk, it was to replace housing which was condemned as unfit for habitation. The projects were enormous and expensive at the time (I think the twenties saw a lot of them) but were needed for an increase in demand for accommodation by returning demobbed servicemen and their families and a rising population - as in the fifties and sixties, the other boom time for council housing.
Public money was scarce. The aim was to build simple affordable housing cheaply, so yes, they were not fancy edifices, but they were vastly better than the alternative. My mother was a child in the twenties, and their move to a council house - a plain rectangular semi with no claims to arhitectural elegance, was like going to heaven. Their own front door! A bathroom!An indoor loo! A kitchen to themselves, instead of a shared sink and cooker on the landing! Three bedrooms! A place to keep the pram which wasn't used by the sweep they shared the house with as storage for bags of soot! No rats! No leaks! Luxury!
Most of those old estates have been pulled down and replaced, but they served their turn in housing people who would otherwise have been renting a la Rackman.