Disclaimer: If you are reading this in your own home with a nice drink next to you, in a temperature-controlled environment, take a moment to recognize your good fortune. It is not because you deserve it or worked for it. It's because the odds fell in your favor. You were not born in Somalia. You were born with ample control of your limbs. You were born to people who had enough money to feed and clothe you.
You are in the minority as far as Planet Earth is concerned.
Last weekend, we caught The Pruitt-Igoe Myth at Off Broadway. Pruitt-Igoe was a St. Louis public housing project built in the 1950s, consisting of 33 buildings, each 11 stories tall.
Largely due to changes in the farming industry, migrants moved to the city in large numbers over a relatively short period of time. The only kinds of housing they could afford were in decaying inner-city buildings, most of which didn't even have indoor plumbing. As the city's population grew, city planners wanted to simultaneously clean up the inner city and provide humane housing for its new (though poor) citizens. Born was Pruitt-Igoe.
Fast-forward a mere 20 years: Decay, drugs, and high levels of homicide led to the demolition of the project, leaving the space to be overcome by plant growth.
This is a difficult subject to write about. It was simultaneously a massive failure and a massive lesson for public housing systems. Given its large scale, it was also a very visual failure: Here today, gone in just 20 years. As I was born during the final 20% of the 20th century, it was a bit of a shock to realize that no one in my life has ever brought this up. Not in public school, not at home, not in college, not at a tour of the arch, not in the grocery store, not in the news. Not in 2008 during the housing crisis, not on St. Louis public radio, nowhere.
The owners of the project offered tenants extremely low rent, but the state of Missouri did not allocate the funds needed to maintain such a large property. A few years before the first building was demolished, the project was in the news one winter when the water pipes froze over, flooding water and sewage into the halls and apartments.
Imagine: It's January, and you're a single mother with children. Most of the buildings surrounding your complex are empty. The elevator, which is broken most of the time, only visits certain floors, so you have no choice but to take the stairs in order to exit the building to buy food for your family. You grip the rails and try not to slip on the ice, which is a slow process. You do all you can to ignore memories of stories of stairway rapes, muggings, and beatings. It's 1970, and in order to receive welfare, your husband isn't allowed to live with you. You're doing all you can to scrape enough money for a down payment+first month's rent in a better neighborhood, but it's a slow process. You have no family; your only option is to live for a while at Pruitt-Igoe.
"Society's level of care for the poor is its true measure of wealth." -Many People Have Said This
This is because, in the U.S., the poor receive what the self-sufficient are willing to give them. They get the leftovers. Their programs are cut first: See Medicaid in the state of Missouri. (And that article is 6 years old…imagine the state of Medicaid today.)
Fortunately, public housing has learned some lessons since Pruitt-Igoe, Cabrini-Green, and Darst-Webbe.
Oscar Newman, architect and city planner, is the author of the quote at the top of this blog. His book, Defensible Space, examines public housing projects during the 20th century: High-rises vs. garden apartments and town homes. The more adults (non-familial) you share a space with, the less likely you are to take ownership over its maintenance. You will not spend time in that space. This section from chapter 1 is worth looking at, as Newman compares three sketches of communal living with varying degrees of publicness and privateness.
Newman's thesis underscores the lesson that should be taken away from disasters like Pruitt-Igoe: The tenants did not destroy the project. The tenants acted like anyone would in their situation, given the lack of maintenance, financial cushion, and privacy.
There is still state-funded public housing in St. Louis, but some choose to inhabit privately owned, decaying neighborhoods, rather than accept the pennies that conservative politicians will allocate (while looking down their self-righteous noses).
This house is in the middle of an inhabited neighborhood, within city limits. People watched as we took photos. They wake up every morning and see houses like this, that have been in this state for years. No one with financial capability is interested in this real estate.
There is no way to tell how these houses were abandoned and how long it took for the roof to fall in. If you look close enough, you can see items decorating bookshelves, untouched.
These are the options for people who have no family or support system. This is happening here, in 2011, in your home town.
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