At the Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez explores “Saving the village in order to destroy it” — the unintentional hell of mid-century public housing:

What happens when a dream goes wrong? Alexander von Hoffman of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University described the various postmortems of something that was unquestionably dead: the Pruitt-Igoe Housing project. It was once regarded as the vanguard of public housing.  In two decades it would be the symbol of urban failure. It died, but like many things deceased, there was debate over why it expired.

St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project is arguably the most infamous public housing project ever built in the United States. A product of the postwar federal public-housing program, this mammoth high-rise development was completed in 1956.

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Only a few years later, disrepair, vandalism, and crime plagued Pruitt-Igoe. The project’s recreational galleries and skip-stop elevators, once heralded as architectural innovations, had become nuisances and danger zones. Large numbers of vacancies indicated that even poor people preferred to live anywhere but Pruitt-Igoe. In 1972, after spending more than $5 million in vain to cure the problems at Pruitt-Igoe, the St. Louis Housing Authority, in a highly publicized event, demolished three of the high-rise buildings. A year later, in concert with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, it declared Pruitt-Igoe unsalvageable and razed the remaining buildings.

Hoffman claims that nobody ever thought the project was a good idea in itself. Rather, this grandiose development was seen as a levee that would stop the tides which were slowly destroying the city of St. Louis. By building a glittering prestige project, the urban rot could be reversed and the city reinvigorated. With the confidence of those who believed that government money could make a losing proposition into a profitable one. Mayor Joseph Darst believed high quality, low-cost public housing was the answer and decided to build a “Manhattan by the Mississippi”, engaging an architect who was later to build the World Trade Center. So up went Pruitt-Igoe.

In 1951 Architectural Forum praised Yamasaki’s original proposal as “the best high apartment” of the year. … Architectural Forum praised the layout as “vertical neighborhoods for poor people” … Each row of buildings was supposed to be flanked by a “river of trees”. … “Skip-stop” elevators stopped only at the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth floors, forcing residents to use stairs in an attempt to lessen congestion. The same “anchor floors” were equipped with large communal corridors, laundry rooms, communal rooms and garbage chutes.

Being unable to live on its own merits, nothing worked out. The stairwells which were supposed to lessen congestion turned into places where muggers could lurk. The “community” whose lives were planned out according to the latest theories never attracted more than 60% occupancy. It became the victim of the “tragedy of the commons”. “When corridors were shared by 20 families and staircases by hundreds, public spaces immediately fell into disrepair. … I never thought people were that destructive.”

For my own take (with big assists from Tom Wolfe and Theodore Dalrymple) on the horrors of post-war public housing in both America and England, and their shared grandfather, French modern architect and disastrous, self-styled city planner Le Corbusier, click here.