The Pruitt Igoe Fallacy

Given my bachelor's in architecture, I was [as I'm sure many who may stumble across a blog like this could be] privy to the basics of the Pruitt Igoe development in St. Louis. It was an experimental low-income development based on modernist tenets from ideologies found in the writings of Le Corbusier and his peers that failed due to a combination of poor planning for maintenance and systems planning. The issues arose due to the anger felt by tenets who felt unheard and underserved. That anger fell to neglect, and the rise of crime and unwanted activity in the area culminated with the aforementioned issues to the ultimate demise of the project, and thus "the death of modernist ideologies". This is the end of the story, right? 

I was perfectly content to accept these superficial causes as the root cause of the failure of this project, as well as the failure of "the projects" in general. Upon this revisitation, it is clear that this acceptance was just the product of a mind that did not want to entertain deeper roots of problems and one that just did not want to a lot the mental bandwidth to the cause and effect factors of these community's failures. The documentary that we viewed in our seminar first go over the problems that are more surface-level and easier to wrap your mind around. It then went into an area that I had not seen before, and that is the first-hand accounts of those who absolutely loved the community at its onset. It was initially everything that modernist social low-income housing promised. It gave those who would have alternatively up to that point been living in slums or tenet housing a place to be proud of, their "poor man's penthouse". Looking at the joyous response of the initial tenants, I became curious about how the demise of this community came to be. If everyone loved it, why was it not continued in this positive trend?

It was damned from the beginning. The most surprising and shocking "planned to fail" policy was that of the St louis housing authority making it against the rules, punishable by eviction, to have the father present in the household that is subsidized by them. There was some half-hearted excuse for this policy about how if the father is present in a family, there should be no need for a household to be subsidized. On one hand, this is ignorant of the culture of discrimination and hardships faced in getting a job that pays a livable wage of the predominantly black populous of the Pruitt Igoe projects, and on the other, it seems a deliberate attempt to dangle this carrot of a "taken care of wife and children" in front of many in st louis with the sinister undertones of an aim to use the modernist low income housing option as a means to tear apart minority communities from the inside. How insane a policy to deliberately break up black families, and then wonder why crime and mischief ensue within that community. Why have we not been cued into this practice? Why has there not been more outcry? Why have I been educated on architectural history, theory, and philosophy for five years and have just now learned these things? 

 

It seems that the powers that be will take the chance to allow for social welfare, only if they can use it as a means to an end to control those without power. Was Pruitt Igoe allowed to be constructed with systems and policies put into place from the onset that was certain to fail and destroy the community, and push farther the narrative of inner city crime and an inability to raise a family there to grow the Fordist dream of satellite suburb communities dependent on the car? I wonder.

Links for consideration

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_article_110314.html

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/22/pruitt-igoe-high-rise-urban-america-history-cities