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The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: An Analysis

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Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, many U.S. cities experienced sudden transformations. After World War II, many suburbs began to grow and develop across many U.S. cities. The suburbs represented a new modern and affluent life. However, the suburbs were very exclusive to certain people, mainly white, middle-class families. The inner city became entangled with cycles of poverty and urban decline. Despite the improvement in sanitation, questions of environmental racism remained present targeting minorities of color. The housing inequality in U.S. cities in the second half of the 20th century gave rise to an increasing gap in life in the suburbs and life in the inner city. As many residents left the inner city, many African-Americas …show more content…

The documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and the St. Louis residents who called it home. This was the first national urban renewal program of the 1950s and 1960s, which was caused because of the creation of suburbs and emptied American cities of their residents, businesses, and industries. Those left behind in the city faced a poor, rapidly de-industrializing St. Louis, and increasingly segregated by class and race. The residents of Pruitt-Igoe were among the hardest hit. Their interesting stories of survival, adaptation, and success are at the emotional heart of the film. The domestic turmoil wrought by pushing public welfare policies; the frustrating interactions with an oppressive and cash-strapped Housing Authority; and the downward spiral of vacancy, vandalism and crime led to resident protest and action during the 1969 Rent Strike, the first in the history of public housing. And yet, despite this complex history, Pruitt-Igoe has often been stereotyped ( Documentary)

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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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In the Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas Sugrue he talks about, how the poorly planned city lead to massive poverty and inequality amongst the people in Detroit. Mr.Sugrue shows us how Detroit desperately depended on the automotive company Chrysler. Mr.Sugrue in a way shows is how Detroit parallels the south of America with its dependency on slaver and once slaver ended or in this case Chrysler left Detroit, there was no longer a sustainable economy. Mr. Sugrue explains how housing had become a major problem for “organized political activity in the 1940s, where Detroiters, black and white, fought a battle that would define Detroit politics for decades to follow" (55).

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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.

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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.

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On a normal scale, measuring the association between two subjects, one would assume gentrification and school segregation are not related in any sense. In fact, most would argue that school segregation ended in 1954 with the Brown v. Board of Education. This assumption would be incorrect. Deep within the American society lies a new kind of segregation that is neither talked about nor dealt with. Segregation is a result of gentrification—the buying and renovation of houses in deteriorated neighborhoods by upper-income families or individuals—thus, improving property values but often displacing low-income families.

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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.

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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

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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

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Therefore, the US became much more culturally diverse and areas were inhabited to form mini “hubs” for people of similar ethnicities and races to live together. Although internal migration in the US had a big impact

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Public Policy on Housing Discrimination Executive Summary Housing discrimination and segregation have long been present in the American society (Lamb and Wilk). The ideals of public housing and home buying have always been intertwined with the social and political transformation of America, especially in terms of segregation and inequality of capital and race (Wyly, Ponder and Nettking). Nevertheless, the recent unrest in Ferguson, Missouri and in Baltimore due to alleged police misconduct resulting to deaths of black men brought light on the impoverished conditions in urban counties in America (Lemons). This brings questions to the effectiveness of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in devising more fair-housing facilities (Jost).

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Situated in historically marginalized racial minority and urban communities it results in the impoverished community being ill-prepared to compete in neoliberalism’s rules of engagement because such communities have little economic, social or political power. The remainder of this essay will address current rebuilding strategies in Baltimore within the framework of the three strategies of urban neliberalization described above (see table 1 for outline). Before doing so it is important to provide context from the past ways racialized neoliberalization community building existed pre-late1900’s. While the label “neoliberalization” became synonymous with the evolving US political economy during the Reagan administration, many of its strategies have been in practice for decades previous, perhaps with greater government oversight, more social welfare, and not as much private ownership of public goods -as a white supremacist liberal political economic system (Kendall 2003). The right of the white individual to secure outcomes in their best interest through a free market system permeates the past liberal and current neoliberal political economies of the US.

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Since transportation was easier and faster, people could live in the suburbs on the edge of towns. For example, queens outside New York doubled in size in the 1920s. By the end of the 1920s, more than 26 million cars were sold, and lots of new towns were created. Another advancement that is important is the development of trucks. In the beginning, trucks were old fashioned and had lots of flaws.

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Title: Gentrifying Chicago neighborhoods. General Purpose: To inform my audience of Gentrification in the Norther part of Chicago around the 1960s. Specific Purpose: At the end of my speech, the audience will understand the meaning of gentrification, how Puerto Rican families in the Northern part of Chicago lost their homes to Gentrification, how they fought against gentrification, and how gentrification is now occurring to Mexican families in the Southern part of Chicago. Thesis: Puerto Rican families lost their homes in the 1960s when Lincoln Park was gentrified despites their best efforts, and today Mexican families are losing their homes in Pilsen to gentrification. Introduction I. Attention: What would you risk in order to continue having a home?

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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

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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)

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