The Time the Federal Government Built a Flawed Housing Project and Tore It Down 20 Years Later

[Kamaji]

The Time the Federal Government Built a Flawed Housing Project and Tore It Down 20 Years Later

The government has learned nothing about affordable housing in the 50 years since Pruitt-Igoe came toppling down.

By Howard Husock
3.16.2022

On the 50th anniversary of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe, it's nearly impossible to understate the failure of the St. Louis public housing project.

Famed architect Minoro Yamasaki, who would go on to design the World Trade Center, received praise for his vision of the 57-acre property where Pruitt-Igoe once stood, even though his original plans didn't exactly come to fruition. The property had significant structural and design problems (including "skip-stop" elevators that encouraged stairwell crime by only stopping on select floors) and it's widely accepted that the housing project only exacerbated the ills of poverty and substandard housing.

Pruitt-Igoe represented complete racial and economic segregation. The building was dominated by single mother households that symbolized the collateral damage of public assistance. This was described by sociologist Lee Rainwater, in his book Behind Ghetto Walls: Life in a Federally-Subsidized Slum, "Only those Negroes who are desperate for housing are willing to live in Pruitt-Igoe." When imploded, the buildings weren't even two decades old.

The problems that toppled Pruitt-Igoe do not go nearly far enough to capture the deeply mistaken assumptions about government housing policy whose bad ideas continue today.

After clearing seedy areas, housing reformers who pushed for Pruitt-Igoe assumed that the neighborhoods they replaced were irredeemably bad and required what Architectural Forum magazine called, in 1957, "slum surgery." In reality, the DeSoto-Carr neighborhood—like Chicago's Bronzeville, Detroit's Black Bottom, and New York's East Harlem—contained small businesses, community institutions (such as a St. Louis hospital financed by African-American philanthropy) manufacturing, and, most notably, owner-occupied homes. Of the housing units cleared, according to the Census Bureau, 21 percent of the properties had "nonwhite owners." What's more, an additional 25 percent of those included rental units. It offered, in other words, a path to wealth accumulation through property ownership—a path wiped out by public housing.

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Pruitt-Igoe may be gone, but its lessons remain unlearned. Federal housing policy continues to support ill-founded utopian ideas.

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Source:  https://reason.com/2022/03/16/the-time-the-federal-government-built-a-flawed-housing-project-and-tore-it-down-20-years-later/

[Hoodat]

The design of Pruitt-Igoe's modernist garden of towers would, instead, reflect the reformer's hubris that planners, financed by government, could build a better neighborhood. Yamasaki was operating out of the Le Corbusier playbook, one in which that French modernist envisioned a new kind of city—built around a campus instead of streets. It was one which, in other words, jettisoned the dynamism of true cities and their dispersed ownership. As Jane Jacobs put it in Death and Life of Great American Cities, there was room for "nobody's plans but the planners." Le Corbusier was blunt: "The plan must rule." It is no understatement to view this as a form of totalitarianism.

Clearly, the only reason it failed is because they didn't have the right people running it.  Just like communism.

But the government proved with Pruitt-Igoe and hundreds of similar projects across the country that it cannot build the social fabric that defines communities. Instead, it subsidizes anti-neighborhoods. And even Pruitt-Igoe still has its defenders, in the 2012 documentary film The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, University of Michigan historian Robert Fishman observes, "We don't want people to think of Pruitt-Igoe as a failure if they're going to then translate that failure to all public housing or all government programs or all social welfare or all modernism. That's what Pruitt-Igoe has been freighted with."

But that's just it.  All government programs and social welfare have been failures.

The first public housing project in the US was built here in Atlanta - Techwood Homes.  At the time, poorer people living in the cities were much better off than their counterparts in rural areas.  They have jobs.  They had opportunities.  And as the article says, many were on their way towards property ownership.  Public housing changed all that.  The original intent was to draw the poor from rural areas into the cities where they could be better managed in a central location.  What they got was the invention of the slum.  The dilapidated segments of our inner cities are 100% government-created.

[Kamaji]

Clearly, the only reason it failed is because they didn't have the right people running it.  Just like communism.


But that's just it.  All government programs and social welfare have been failures.

The first public housing project in the US was built here in Atlanta - Techwood Homes.  At the time, poorer people living in the cities were much better off than their counterparts in rural areas.  They have jobs.  They had opportunities.  And as the article says, many were on their way towards property ownership.  Public housing changed all that.  The original intent was to draw the poor from rural areas into the cities where they could be better managed in a central location.  What they got was the invention of the slum.  The dilapidated segments of our inner cities are 100% government-created.

Slums long pre-existed government interference in housing.  The lower east side tenements in NYC were not the result of government intervention in the housing market.

[Hoodat]

Do you think rent control may have had something to do with that?

[Kamaji]

Do you think rent control may have had something to do with that?

With what?  Not with the rise of the tenement slums on the lower east side.  Those arose in the 1800s. 

[catfish1957]

With what?  Not with the rise of the tenement slums on the lower east side.  Those arose in the 1800s.

I have seen an absolute explosion in construction of what appears to be low rent or free housing.  Wonder if the government is anticipating the pending economic apocalypse.

[DefiantMassRINO]

Boston's West End fell victim to the post World War II "urban renewal" trend.  They tore down a vibrant working ethnic neighborhood to create a tundra of Soviet-style-architecture concrete abominations.

It's one of those "We're from the Federal Government, and we are here to help." cautionary tales.

That was an era in which civil engineers thought they could re-engineer society.

Leonard Nimoy was from Boston's West End.

[Kamaji]

Boston's West End fell victim to the post World War II "urban renewal" trend.  They tore down a vibrant working ethnic neighborhood to create a tundra of Soviet-style-architecture concrete abominations.

It's one of those "We're from the Federal Government, and we are here to help." cautionary tales.

That was an era in which civil engineers thought they could re-engineer society.

Leonard Nimoy was from Boston's West End.

It's that way in too many places.  The so-called "urban planners" think that their ideology and desire for hegemonic control over other peoples' lives are an adequate substitute for leaving people alone to work out their own lives.

[Fishrrman]

These giant housing projects were abominations from the get-go, no doubt about that.

But having said that, sometimes it's just "not the buildings", but rather, the people who live IN the buildings.

Take "the residents" of Pruitt-Igoe out of Pruitt-Igoe, disperse them around, and you're just spreading "the same problems" all over the place.

Quite frankly, I'd rather have them all concentrated in the Pruitt-Igoes of America than anywhere near where I am...

[Wingnut]

In Chicago, Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor high-rise housing projects accomplished one thing.  It was the 1st urban warfare training facilities in the US.

[Kamaji]

The fundamental problem with most urban planning, particularly of the 1960s ideological kind, is that it assumes that individuals are like gelatin, who seamlessly mold to the built environment.

Their logic can be boiled down to the essential logical fallacy that one can negate a conditional argument simply by negating the premise and the conclusion, which is not the case; the negation of the statement "If A, then B" is not "If not-A, then not-B", it's the contrapositive, or "If not-B, then not-A".

In other words, they started with the premise that if people grew up and lived in blighted slums, they would have miserable lives - not a completely unreasonable thought, standing on its own - and then drew the logical fallacy that therefore, if people grew up in nice new buildings (i.e., in "not-slums"), they would have nice lives (i.e., "not-miserable" lives).

But that doesn't work.  As billions of dollars in wasted construction on urban housing projects abjectly demonstrated.