WE’VE NEVER TRIED ‘REAL SOCIAL HOUSING:’ Hall Of Eternal Shame.

1. Pruitt-Igoe (Saint Louis)

An early experiment from the 1950s, Pruitt-Igoe became an early example, with the crime and vacancy rates accelerating as fast as the facilities themselves deteriorated.

An early example of “social housing”, it was also one of the first to be abandoned; its 33 high-rises were all demolished over fifty years ago.

As Tom Wolfe wrote in From Bauhaus to Our House: 

On each floor there were covered walkways, in keeping with [Le Corbusier’s] idea of “streets in the air.” Since there was no other place in the project in which to sin in public, whatever might ordinarily have taken place in bars, brothels, social clubs, pool halls, amusement arcades, general stores, corncribs, rutabaga patches, hayricks, barn stalls, now took place in the streets in the air. Corbu’s boulevards made Hogarth’s Gin Lane look like the oceanside street of dreams in Southampton, New York. Respectable folk pulled out, even if it meant living in cracks in the sidewalks. Millions of dollars and scores of commission meetings and task-force projects were expended in a last-ditch attempt to make Pruitt-Igoe habitable. In 1971, the final task force called a general meeting of everyone still living in the project. They asked the residents for their suggestions. It was a historic moment for two reasons. One, for the first time in the fifty-year history of worker housing, someone had finally asked the client for his two cents’ worth. Two, the chant. The chant began immediately: “Blow it … up! Blow it … up! Blow it … up! Blow it … up! Blow it … up!” The next day the task force thought it over. The poor buggers were right. It was the only solution. In July of 1972, the city blew up the three central blocks of Pruitt-Igoe with dynamite.

The caption of the photo of tower block going down reads, “The Pruitt-Igoe projects, St. Louis, July 15, 1972. Mankind finally arrives at a workable solution to the problem of public housing.”