ipl-logo

Summary Of The Documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

1242 Words5 Pages

Chad Freidrichs, the director of the documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, commented that the area around Pruitt-Igoe “became something of an amenity desert,” lacking sufficient access to transportation, jobs, and food.[ “Why Did Pruitt-Igoe Fail?” Accessed August 16, 2016. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_article_110314.html. ] The poor could not see their future through the 11-story windows, and Pruitt-Igoe were like the dumping grounds for the poor. The pains of suburbanization Deterioration of the cities inevitably drove people out. Several popular TV series of the 1950s such as Father Knows Best and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet celebrated a suburban lifestyle, which was embraced by many white, mostly middle-class people. They sought to escape from the declining inner city with …show more content…

Yet, the horrible conditions of the inner city also pushed out working- and middle class blacks. Postwar black suburbanization coexisted with white flight[ Lewyn, Michael. “Two Types of Black Suburbanization.” January 3, 2016. Accessed August 17, 2016. http://www.planetizen.com/node/82983/two-types-black-suburbanization. ], if not on the same scale (In St. Louis, blacks may move to areas like Spanish Lack and Blackjack, while whites may chose farther locations like St. Charles County). Regardless of race, suburbanization was a process in which economically capable people seek better living conditions. The people who could not afford to do so, on the other hand, were left behind. Suburbanization cast a dark shadow over the Pruitt-Igoe. Occupancy peaked at 91% in 1957[ “Why the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project Failed.” October 15, 2011. Accessed August 17, 2016.

Show More
Related
785 Words | 4 Pages

Policies from HOLC and FHA approved of ethnic segregation and created many suburbs that clearly oppose their objective to address the imbalance in the community. Jackson criticizes how these programs “hastened the decay of inner-city neighborhoods by stripping them of much of their middle-class constituency” (206). However, while Jackson helps make sense of the role of the government in the suburban movement, Jackson sees that the process of suburbanization will slow down in the future. As more minorities entered the middle class, the proportion of minorities in the suburb will increase such that the stimulus to “white flight” will drop. In addition, due to limited availability of energy, high cost of land, credit, and

Read More
404 Words | 2 Pages

This book authored by Jackson, Kenneth T outlines the rise of suburbs in America from their origins in the 1820’s to the present day. He the combination of civil, economic and architectural history to describe the suburban communities in every aspect in comparison to Europe and Japan in view of factors such as swift transportation, availability of inexpensive land and cheap building methods. Crabgrass Frontier explains how transportation technology shaped American cities; how the transformation of the garage increased demand for automobiles. He concludes the book by predicting that the future of residential decentralization will contrasts its past in both U.S and Europe.

Read More
317 Words | 2 Pages

we still have today and which someone knowledgeable on the situation would call “ghettoization” (Jackson). Massey and Denton’s book, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, hits strong on this topic of “residential segregation”. Massey and Denton, both went hand and hand with what Jackson was saying. This is a well organized, well-written and greatly researched book.

Read More
1841 Words | 8 Pages

There has to be a realistic solution that can be put into motion to benefit everyone involved. Referring again to his article “Is Gentrification All Bad?” Davidson argues that urban renewal, if done right, is not a monstrous custom that it is painted to be; nevertheless, he reasons that gentrification depends on who does it, how they do it, and why they do it. As a resident in New York, a city where gentrification is as widespread as the common cold in winter, Davidson speculates that those who go into a neighborhood with the intention to renovate houses, or abandoned buildings ought to have a good reason for it. The author points out that “Gentrification does not have to be something that one group inflicts on another…” (Davidson 349), rather, he suggests that everyone, the gentrifiers and the locals, be on the same page when it comes to developing their

Read More
1550 Words | 7 Pages

With all the money they were making, they “moved their families farther out onto curvy streets in small subdivisions named after plantations, into what passed for Hamlet’s suburbs,” (Simon, The Hamlet Fire, 22). This type of movement of white families was happening in many large cities, most notably in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. This movement became known as white flight and led to the suburbanization of cities. Suburbanization led to decreasing tax codes in the urban cities, resulting in the urban areas becoming run down and full of minorities. The minorities became the main workers at low paying jobs in the heart of the urban areas.

Read More
1157 Words | 5 Pages

The socioeconomic condition of African Americans underwent many superficial transformations from 1910 to 1930. Even though phenomena such as the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance cannot be discredited; the actual experience of the majority of African Americans remained stagnant. In other words, although the African American population experienced a notable shift from rural to urban and a subsequent cultural awakening in the time period between 1910 and 1930, they remained second-class citizens: confined to racial enclaves resulting from housing segregation and barred from the economic opportunities available to whites. African Americans were universally excluded from the social changes that the rest of the nation experienced during

Read More
1152 Words | 5 Pages

While the suburbs were predominately white, the city was a whole smorgasbord of ethnicities. Since the suburban whites had themselves distanced from the minorities in the cities, the whites currently living in the cities wanted to also be separated from the minorities. The city whites achieved this by legal codes that segregated AAs from whites. One example is where races were separated on buses. It was supposed to be separate but equal, however this was not the case.

Read More
1082 Words | 5 Pages

Millions of Black Americans left the rural South for urban areas in the North during the Great Migration in an effort to avoid racial violence and pursue better opportunities. It states in (Our History) “ Between 1900 and 1920 nearly 750,000 African Americans fled the discrimination and terrorism of the South and traveled north in search of greater freedom and new economic opportunities.” Opportunities for artistic expression and the development of a collective identity were made possible by the Harlem Renaissance and the arrival of Black intellectual and cultural

Read More
1172 Words | 5 Pages

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is a documentary that explores public housing in Saint Louis, Missouri, in particular the history of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex. Pruitt-Igoe was a public housing project billed as the perfect solution in the early 1950s, to solve the problems of slums in Saint Louis and to bring people back into a city that had seen a population decline from previous years. Saint Louis was an ageing city desperate to regain their postwar prominence as a bustling city, but faced many challenges pertaining to the racial makeup of the segregated city and the loss of many jobs to suburban areas. Many whites had begun to participate in what is now referred to as “white flight”, or the migration of middle class whites to

Read More
720 Words | 3 Pages

During the 1920’s, African Americans transposed to cities in the North in order to find better opportunities for work. Areas like Newark, Detroit ,and Chicago, which were mostly all white, presented glittering opportunities for African Americans to receive better jobs. Soon African Americans as well as immigrants, initiated their move to the city areas in the North, and pursued jobs that had better quality work conditions than they received in the South. However, when African Americans and new immigrants came to the North, they were not greeted with equal treatment and were presented with more escalated violent behavior from white Americans as they did in the South, and limitations on job opportunities. Even though African Americans and immigrants were presented more opportunities outside of the South, African Americans and immigrants were still discriminated against from racial tensions because of the Norths fear of African Americans and immigrants gaining equal

Read More
1317 Words | 6 Pages

According to William Julius Wilson in When Jobs Disappear the transition from the institutional/Communal Ghetto to the Jobless/Dark Ghetto was driven by economic transformations in American from the late 1960’s to the 1990’s. While for Logic Waquant in Urban Outsiders, thought the economic factors were significant; the political factors were more impact. William Julius Wilson most studied about south side of Chicago it’s a classical example of inner city its wasn’t like before in the 1960’s it’s was a community and by the late 70’s the community was gone. According to Wilson, even though it’s was gone the community was not even a wealth community its was a poor community the majority member of that community where indeed Black American

Read More
1336 Words | 6 Pages

The levels of violence were high, including the number of murders in the city. These were all the worst effects of urbanization in America. The centers of cities became full of people and the richer inhabitants moved outside the city center to escape the overcrowded, dirty conditions to the suburbs with their clean, green spaces. Tenements were also constructed on the outskirts of the city in undesirable districts close to stockyards or slaughterhouses. The movement to the more rural areas outside the central city areas is referred to as urban sprawl, yet another of the effects of urbanization in

Read More
108 Words | 1 Pages

Between 1910 and 1930, African Americans migrated from the rural South to the urban North in search of better economic opportunities and as a means of escaping the racism of the South, but they were disillusioned with what they encountered. To begin, African Americans still experienced racism—segregation, profiling, and unjust law enforcement—In the North, though it was more subtle. As a result, blacks were forced into lower-paying jobs than whites. Thus, while the northern white, middle-class population grew wealthier during the post-WWI economic boom and were moving to the suburbs, blacks and other poor, working-class groups were left in the cities, the state of which grew progressively

Read More
1680 Words | 7 Pages

It is widely believed that the segregation is the most important issue contributing to the development of social division as well as the economic division. When referring to ghetto, one would often mention the idea of black ghetto. This is connected to the phenomenon of the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial Northeast, Midwest, and Far West which “blackened” the image of an American city and caused high resistance from the white population (Avila 5). Thus, the black people were obliged to live in the ghettos since they were rejected by the local population. Nevertheless, ghetto refers not only to the racial or ethnic relations so that there are also examples of white ghettos where white people are excluded from the community for a definite reason, such as cultural or economic.

Read More
502 Words | 3 Pages

Lance Freeman, an associate professor of urban planning in Columbia, wanted to investigate if there was any displacement going on in two predominantly black neighborhoods that was briskly gentrifying. Much to his dismay, he couldn’t find any correlation between gentrification and displacement. What was surprising to Freeman was his discovery, “poor residents and those without a college education were actually less likely to move if they resided in gentrifying neighborhoods”. (Sternbergh, 19) Freeman adds, “The discourse on gentrification, has tended to overlook the possibility that some of the neighborhood changes associated with gentrification might be appreciated by the prior residents.” (Sternbergh, 19)

Read More

More about Summary Of The Documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Related Topics

Open Document