Public Housing, Private Labor

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.

“A family's claim to a territory diminishes proportionally as the number of families who share that claim increases.”

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.

Known and Unknown

I failed. I did not finish Donald Rumsfeld's Known and Unknown. I made it to chapter 20 or so, ending somewhere before 2004. It has been very interesting to hear a conservative's first-hand account of the majority of republican presidential administrations since President Johnson. Hell, it's interesting to hear anyone's first-hand account of the executive branch during the second half of the 20th century (only a decade or so were in democratic administrations). Given, of course, its watered-down politicky nature. This must be understood and accepted.

According to Donald Rumsfeld, Donald Rumsfeld is a likeable guy. He's intelligent—I'm assuming it was his choice, not his editor's, to put quotes from Saul Bellow, H.L. Mencken, etc. at the beginning of most chapters—but his most defining characteristic is his pseudo-puritanical good ole boy-ness. An article featured in Financial Times referred to his schedule as Spartan-like and he is known for working while standing up. He is obviously a hard worker, disciplined and all that.

He's such a hard worker, he worked at Searle for almost 15 years, the pharmaceutical company that created aspartame, which probably boosted his status as a multi-millionaire. While there, he downsized the company's workforce by 60%, earning praise for the company's freshly polished “bottom line.” A winning characteristic of his is similarly unsettling: his ability to go in and meet a goal despite, or in light of, the cost.

He's careful to never criticize democratic presidents (though he came very close to criticizing Jimmy Carter on his defense policy). He does nothing short but lavish praise on the republican presidents, especially the ones he worked for. I guess that's a good goal for a president, to hire a cabinet that adores him, and I would be quick to assume Obama's cabinet offers similar praise for the Commander-In-Chief.

It's important to note his dissatisfaction with the media during the war in Iraq. I remember being similarly dissatisfied, though for different reasons: He criticized the mainstream media's use of sources such as blogs and Youtube videos. He thought they were unreliable. When one of Iraq's prominent museums was raided, he ignored initial accounts and wanted to wait for the “facts” to come in, undoubtedly referring to the AP or a similar news conglomerate with corporate interests. For shame, to assume that the AP's take on an event is the Real, True Account, ignoring the fact that, like all good news stories, any account of the event would ignore some details in favor of others to create an overall impression for the reader to take with him/her. (I re-iterate that this is the most efficient way to spread information, but no one should forget that it's not “the whole truth.”) It's safe to assume that the AP's account of a raid in a country the U.S. has invaded is likely to support national interest.

So what's wrong with Rummy? This is a man who is firmly holding on to a 1940s and 50s American values system in the midst of a post-modern, self-aware digital age. THIS is his problem. This, and the obvious other fact that he was born a well-built white male with enough intelligence to go to Princeton on a wrestling scholarship (though some would see that as a solution). Combine these things with his refusal to admit he may have done things wrong, and you've got the standard patriarchial archetype—big belt buckle, loud shoes, small heart.

Those who are born disadvantaged, who fight their way into some form of success, actually have an advantage over those who were born “with advantage.” I respect Rumsfeld's life and work for the fact that he lived it, probably did the best he could with the values/morals he possessed, and is now donating all profits from his memoir to veteran's charities (as anyone possessing a soul would.) But he was born into an advantage (notwithstanding the hard work he did put in) and doesn't seem to have the wisdom one would expect from so many years in D.C. As a history professor wrote, “Rather than seriously contemplating the implications of the events in which he participated, Rumsfeld spends more than 800 pages dodging them.”

In true politican's fashion (and one must NEVER forget that Rummy is, above all, a politician), any semblance of self-reflection is overwhelmed by the desire to put forth a consistent self-image. The price for this characteristic is what is needed most in regards to a person who is authorized by the government to determine life-and-death matters: Trust.

Withnell

This is the abandoned school across the street. There's a ballroom on the top floor, and sometimes the people who run the adjoining church, St. Agatha's, have dances. I know this because they own a set of these and use them until midnight. They shine on through the bedroom window, rotating green, purple, blue. Given the small congregation and the financial problems I'm sure they have, sometimes I wonder if there will be an "everyone drink the punch" ending to one of these dances. I'll wake up one morning to see the globe rotating in silence.

We've been dying to explore the building ever since we signed the lease. Last fall, the people who own the property had a junk sale in a few classrooms and what used to be the cafeteria. We went in on the pretense of being junk-lovers just to see (and smell) the school. (The school smells as elementary schools should--of oppression and decades of sweat due to lack of air conditioning.) There is an old-fashioned wheelchair lift on the side of the steps, and a stilled windsock hanging from a light fixture in the hallway. The people running the sale, who also own the property, told us the school has been empty since the 1970s. What used to be a German-Catholic parish is now Polish-Catholic. (Insert WWII metaphor now.)

Once we walked around the outside of the school and looked through all the windows. Into the basement, we saw a chalkboard with a hangman game. It probably hadn't been there as long as we'd have liked, given our romantic ideas of "abandoned school" and "the way things were." The blanks were filled in with "Forgiveness," even though the man was hung. Indeed.

The people who owned our house probably sent their kids to that school. They were probably members of the church, and they all lived in community with the other houses on concrete and brick, surrounded by iron fences. They were probably uneasy with how the city was changing (and how their close-knit community was getting smaller) and with the school's closing, they began to feel queasy and probably migrated to the suburbs sometime in the 1980s.

I had wondered if the proximity of such a large, abandoned building would be cause for paranoia when doing things like exiting my car late at night, but that hasn't been the case. The school is a friendly presence, and the streetlamp is a comforting reminder of civilization. The only unexpected knocks at our door has been pizza delivery for the house behind us.

Once in a while, it's nice to look up at night.