FFAF: Design Flaws that Doomed Public Housing

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So as I said, if you’re new, Fridays are when I talk about whatever I want to talk about. Whatever is percolating in my mind and I find interesting. Today I want to talk about public housing, AKA, the projects and in particular, a set of two public housing entities that have become notorious for the decline of this particular government intervention into public housing. In particular I’m just going to talk about some of the housing design flaws that really fascinate me, the architecture. There’s a whole lot of other subtext when it comes to these kinds of areas of cities that we get into. I might get into that a little bit there, but I wasn’t familiar with this kind of architecture for a long time. I grew up most of my life, until I was an adult, I didn’t really go back east until early college.

I grew up in Anconeus, California, in San Diego area until I was about 10. Then I did high school and college in Phoenix, Arizona. So I was used to some aspects of sprawling cities, but not to what you would call the projects. Well the government called them public housing, but they came to receive another nickname, a much more pejorative one, the projects, things that you would find in New York, in Brooklyn, in Chicago, in St. Louis, in Atlanta, and a lot of these major metropolitan areas back east and a lot of them were built between the 1950s and the 1970s as part of the war on poverty, LBJ, Lyndon B. Johnson. This is dealing with the civil upheaval, especially in the 1960s, seeing the rapid growth in poverty. You had a recession at the end of the 1950s. You had social upheaval with the ending of racial segregation or at least coming to grips with racial segregation that was seen all throughout the country and the poverty and negative consequences that were ensuing from that.

And so the government felt that they had a mandate to do something about this, especially since prior to when these public housing units were created, AKA the projects, and what they’re mostly known for was this kind of modern architectural design. It was very austere. You had these tall units, 11 story, 15 story towers, very tall, very long, that could hold hundreds of people, more people than if you spread them out in smaller units across an area. The idea was that you wanted to create a place where, at least for a lot of the projects actually, they were created for the middle class to have affordable housing. But when they ended up being built, the middle class didn’t want to live there because it wasn’t a very nice place to live. So the only people who wanted to live in these things were the extremely poor and then you had a lot of these issues that would come in later because of that. They were built with the best of intentions.

Government always does this. It has the best of intentions and then it doesn’t go as planned because you have the plan, but you don’t foresee the unintended consequences of the plan. So prior to building these projects, public housing towers, and a lot of these areas, they were basically slums, especially in the early part of the 20th century. So you had lean-to’s, shanty towns, lacked plumbing, lacked electricity, and they were not great places to live or other people you had these kind of rundown homes, you’d have families living in crowded, damp basements of homes and it wasn’t very nice. So the government, they believed that the market could not provide affordable housing for people. So you had government officials getting involved, architects, and one of the architects actually drew inspiration from the large concrete high rises that were built to house people in the Soviet Union.

And the idea is that, “Well if the Soviets can house the poor and they say everything’s working out just fine, why don’t we try this?” Yeah. Why don’t we try this indeed. So these towers were then created. They were funded by the federal government, but they ended up usually being administered by local housing authorities and that’s where the problems arise. I’m just going to focus on two with the design flaws. Mostly it’s the architecture that’s hard ’cause you have planners who think they know what people really want and that they know what people want when actually if you let people choose what they want, they kind of know. People know what they want. So the two that are most infamous I would say in the US or the failure of the projects of public housing would be Cabrini-Green in Chicago and Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis.

So I’ll start with Pruitt-Igoe. This was originally two separate housing units who were put together, one that was going to be built for blacks. I think that was the Pruitt units and the Igoe units, I believe those were for white families and tenants to live in. I might’ve switched that. I’m pretty sure I didn’t, but maybe I did. The point was Pruitt-Igoe was originally segregated. It was built in the early 1950s. And when it was built though, it turns out the only people who really wanted to live there were black tenants, the only ones who were willing to put up with the negative aspects things that were going on. Now I do think that a lot of the problems with the projects though, and housing problems in the 1950s, it’s not just government design flaws. You also have racist policies. You have redlining. You have deed covenants.

So you have neighborhoods that pledged in these covenants to not sell homes to black owners for example or banks would not finance to black families in particular areas that were drawn with a red boundary, a red line, which prevented blacks from being able to acquire homeowner wealth to pass it on today. So we do have what I have called generational racism, these lingering effects in the present of past racist actions. That is definitely part of the problem. The other part that I find fascinating is that when governments stepped in to build these housing projects to help the poor, they didn’t realize many of their design decisions and the architecture of the buildings would actually make it a really awful place to live for the poor because they think, “Oh, high-rise buildings, the wealthy love these things in Manhattan and in other wealthier areas of a city. You can have high rises that the rich love living in. So why not build high rise units that the poor could live in?”

And of course, when government’s trying to solve a problem, they try to solve it as cheaply as possible, right? The problem is when you spend money, so when you spend money on yourself, you want to make sure it’s good and cheap. So when we spend our own money on things, we want it to be cheap as well, but there’s a certain basement. We don’t want it to be so cheap that it’s intolerable and you don’t want to live there. So there’s a balance that when you own your own home for example, yeah you’ll take a cheap approach, but not the absolute worst thing because you have to live there, you have to put up with it. But when you have government officials who are spending money on this, well they’re not the ones that are going to live there.

So they take all kinds of cost-cutting measures to the design of Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini-Green and the cost-cutting measures ended up making it sacrifice the livability of these places. So for example, Pruitt-Igoe is actually designed by the same guy who designed the Twin Towers in New York City, but a lot of his design elements were not featured in the final plan that would’ve made the area a lot more livable and friendly. So it was built in the 1950s in St. Louis and Pruitt-Igoe was 33 11 story towers all put together. And you look at it and the surrounding area is a bunch of single family homes and these giant high-rise units are just standing towering over everything. But the original design also included landscaping and playgrounds and community facilities, these areas in between the towers where people would gather communally and have that sense of community.

But the problem was there was no sense of community. They were cut from the plan ultimately. The green spaces ended up being paved over because there was a loss of income to be able to keep them up. So you had the St. Louis Housing Authority. Their job was the feds come in, spend the money, build the towers, not with the best materials by the way so they quickly fall into disrepair. St. Louis Housing Authority is supposed to use the rent from these units just to handle upkeep and maintenance. But the problem was because only the very poor would end up living here, there was not enough money that came in from the rental schemes to be able to pay for all the upkeep. And as I said earlier, people love the high rises in New York. Why wouldn’t they like it here at Pruitt-Igoe? Well the wealthy high rises in New York have a lot of amenities that make them nice.

They have doormen that will keep out riffraff. They have janitors and maintenance staff that live on site to promptly repair things. So when you have staff on hand to keep things up, it’s very nice, but at Pruitt-Igoe and at Cabrini-Green, which was built more in the ’70s and then ended up being torn down in the ’90s, Pruitt-Igoe was built in the ’50s, demolished in the ’70s. It basically became a high rise slum that was built to replace the shanty town slums originally. So you didn’t have these communal spaces that were designed. There’s no sense of community there. And so people don’t look out for one another and you quickly get this sense of isolation and a nefarious community does move in and that’s going to be criminal gangs. And one area that the gangs would occupy were the stairwells.

And it was actually a design flaw at Pruitt-Igoe that allowed the gangs to take over the stairwells of the complexes. So in order to cut down costs, they installed something called skip stop elevators. These are elevators that don’t stop at every floor. They stop at floor one, four, seven, and 10. So because of that, if you’re not lucky enough to live on those floors, you get out of the elevator and then you have to take a stairwell to get to your unit. And stairwells are, if you’ve lived in an inner city, urban areas, anywhere, stairwells are not fun to be in. They’re isolated. No one can look in and see what’s going on. So gangs will congregate there and mug people and rob people. And the other problem with these units is that they were basically just a bunch of single income families. The extreme poor, the single income families there.

So the majority of the residents were children who ran amuck, the older kids ended up joining gangs, and they would take over the communal spaces. One area that was interesting, they tried to create a communal space that ended up falling apart, was the idea was that on the first, fourth, seventh, and 10th floors you’d have washing machines, you had these gallery areas that were fenced in that you looked out, but there was chain link. And the idea was kids would play there while the moms do laundry and stuff like that. But what ended up happening is because people don’t own these facilities, it’s not theirs, they quickly ended up getting trashed and nobody wants to stay there. They wreak. Whereas the areas in the apartment corridors between the units were actually pretty clean because you want to clean up the area around where you live, but if you don’t live or own something, you let it go to heck.

How do I know that? Go visit the bathroom at the local public park and you’ll see the answer there. When nobody owns something, everybody thinks it isn’t their job to take care of it. So that’s one of the problems there. Cabrini-Green actually had a different problem than Pruitt-Igoe that it was built to cut costs and one way they cut costs was that the hallways connecting the units and the elevator gallery areas were open air. You would step out, concrete walkway, you could look out, you would see out whether it was chain link to prevent you from falling over or jumping into the courtyard or chain link there and over the balconies to prevent you from dumping trash into the courtyard, which made the whole thing look like a giant prison.

If you wanted to get anywhere in the building at all and the second you stepped out of your building to walk these long concrete corridors, it would be cold as heck in the winter. Think about Chicago winter. But then summer wasn’t good either. They didn’t have air conditioning and these long corridors, and these were long, rectangular buildings, high rises, they faced east to west. So they were always being pummeled by the sun in the summer and in the winter, you step outside, it was cold and it was very difficult. One report on, one author writing about this, he has an interesting quote here that I’ll share with you. “During the 1960s, city planners wrongly assumed that poor people would prefer to live in a large building surrounded by a common green rather than a small flat with their own garden. As it turned out, when everybody owns the lawn, no one owns the lawn, except perhaps for the gangs that move in after dark.”

“The projects were a disaster because the size of the buildings failed to match the normal feeling that one’s home is meant to evoke, a sense of privacy, ownership, and intimacy. And so that is the failure of the projects. I hear people all the time trying government officials with the idea of the right to housing and try to resurrect these things. Hopefully they will learn from the mistakes of the past.” Very interesting there. If you just look up Cabrini-Green or Pruitt-Igoe on YouTube, you can see more history of this, the stories. Oh, the stories are gruesome. There is one story of a guy talking about how when he was a little kid, he saw his mom tending to his older brother who had been shot by gang members in the hallway. I can’t even describe the details of what happened. It’s just disturbing.

But yes. Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Hopefully those who want to solve the housing problems today don’t try to resurrect these flawed solutions. But thank you guys so much for listening and I hope that you have a very blessed weekend.