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Analysis Of The Documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

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The documentary, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, asks the big question regarding this controversial housing project: why did it fall? The Pruitt-Igoe housing project was meant to help impoverished people. Through this, the housing committee wanted to provide a safe place for kids to play, families to live, and most of all allow the city of St. Louis to prosper. Instead of Pruitt-Igoe cleaning up the city and providing more job opportunities, it created concentrated poverty and hyper segregation. Along with these demographic factors, the lack of maintenance and end of World War II added additional pressures to Pruitt-Igoe. After opening, the maintenance crew slowly dwindled away, leaving the buildings in filth for its residents. Trash was no longer removed, …show more content…

The housings basic services were allowed to deteriorate, little assistance was offered to residents or Pruitt-Igoe generally, and those who lived there learned to fear the environment they were forced to live in. Since the location of Pruitt-Igoe was in a transitional zone, it led to the concentration of poor individuals, while governmental services followed the white middle class to the suburbs. When the services left, “broken windows” started to occur, encouraging others to break more windows and vandalize the surrounding area. Leading to the eventual sky-rocketing crime, evacuation, and demolition of Pruitt-Igoe. There are two aspects that I feel needed further information: the factor of racial heterogeneity explaining an area of transition and, secondly, when disorder can be stopped in the broken window theory. From the documentary, it appeared as if Pruitt-Igoe housed almost exclusively African Americans. It may be possible that racial homogeneity is also a factor of inequality, leading to crime. The second aspect, when crime should be stopped to prevent community deterioration, may be that this theory can only be reversed if the first signs of disorder are stopped. The push back of “unbreakable” objects seemed only to encourage crime in Pruitt-Igoe, so the attempt to stop crime may have come too late. The extent of how far crime may go before it is irreversible should be studied for this theory. Overall, Pruitt-Igoe is a sad story of racial disadvantage leading to the fall of another much promising opportunity for the

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• For example, Oscar Newman's research for the U. S. Department of Housing and UrbanDevelopment in the late 1960s included a 740-unit public housing high rise development, Pruitt-Igoe, which never achieved more than 60% occupancy and was torn down about 10 years after its construction at a loss of $300 million, because it had rampant crime. Across the street, an older, smaller row-house complex, Carr Square Village, occupied by an identical population, was fully occupied and free of crime during and after the construction, occupancy, and demolition of Pruitt-Igoe. Newman's research regarding multiple communities, including Pruitt-Igoe, into what caused these differences in crime resulted in a new, but related, term of "defensible space. This

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