Debunking the Myth: Utopian Public Housing in mid-20th century America
“Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 pm (or thereabouts),” wrote Charles Jencks, a renowned architectural historian.[1] He was referring to the destruction of Pruitt-Igoe, a public housing project in St. Louis built in 1954. For Jencks, that moment symbolized the failure of modern architecture, the failure of American public housing, and the explicit link between them. A large body of scholarly work and public opinion, informed by the media, share Jencks’ sentiments. The scholars point out, among other things, high crime rates, structural mismanagement, dilapidated facilities, racial exclusion, prevalence of drug havens, and high concentration of poverty as indicators for the failure of public housing. From the 1970s onward, the media increasingly described public housing using the terms notorious, violent, or isolated — further stigmatizing public housing.[2] Thus, scholars and journalists have agreed on the failures of public housing and, so far, most of the blame was directed to the very design of the built environment.
But is it? Post-WWII American public housing indeed fell short of many goals of its creation. However, the linkage between housing and modern architecture/planning needs reexamination. In the mid-20th century, public housing projects coincided with the decline of urban economics and suburbanization, favoring a certain demographic. Hence, the causes of public housing’s failures should be traced to a larger framework determining the design of the built environment, not to architects and planners. Contrary to popular opinion, divestment of cities and government policies favoring white suburbanization led to the failure of public housing in the United States.
Conventional Theory
In the latter half of the 20th century, prominent urban theorists and designer’s false sense of agency helped conceive a myth on the decline of public housing. In other words, modern architects and rational planners believed that their designs could improve a community. Based on this notion, critiques have blamed the design of public housing for its decline.
In the post WWII period, modern architecture and rational planning dictated the design of most public housing projects; high-rise apartments in super-blocks popped up across the U.S. from New York to St. Louis. Le Corbusier, arguably the most influential modern architect and urban planner, had “an immense impact on our [American] cities.”[3] Corbusian ideals separating pedestrian and automobile traffic, creating ample open-space between super-blocks, placing residential units on upper floors and keeping ground floors free, using skip-stop elevators, and orienting buildings to maximize views were often manifested in housing projects.[4]
Modern architects truly believed that their designs could influence people’s behaviors. Le Corbusier conceived the modern city “as a city of salvation,” and argued that architects designed more than a building.[5] He thought architects had the power to organize social interactions and control industrial production. James Holston accurately summarizes modern architecture’s dogma: “change the architecture and society will be forced to follow the program of social change that the architecture embodies.”[6]
Similar to architects, rational urban planners acted based on the belief that their policies can improve the urban condition. Planners would evaluate a set of objectives and consequences in order to create “a more orderly, attractive, and just urban America.”[7] Robert Moses, epitome of a rational planner, justified his urban renewal projects by improving traffic, eliminating urban decay, and creating parks.[8] He believed his top-down, scientifically driven, apolitical actions would benefit the cities in the long-term, even though people were displaced in the short-term.
Modern architecture and rational planning were dominant ideas in post-WWII America. Both possessed false ideals that changes in the built environment can have an extensive influence on the people. This misconceived notion serves a base that many critiques have used to justify the failures of public housing. Since modernism believed its designs can improve the human condition, critiques have signaled out their design as the perpetrator.
Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, traces the development of modernism from Ebenezer Howard, to Le Corbusier, to the City Beautiful movement, in order to conclude, “the entire concoction [design of modernism] is irrelevant to the workings of cities.”[9] Throughout her book, she frames high-rise — “towers in a park” — communities as perpetually corroding security and community life. In her view, the modern utopian visions of the city, such as public housing projects, failed because they were too inhuman, nondescript, and out-of-scale.[10] Instead, she argues for the very contrary design solution: diversified, mixed-use, low-density, walkable neighborhoods like Greenwich Village.[11] Paradoxically, Jacobs, one of the biggest critics of high-modernism, also believed in design solutions to improve a community.
Nonetheless, acceptance of Jacobs’ design critiques grew in the 1960s and 1970s amid many public housing’s high crime rates, declining facilities, and social disorder.[12] Even Catherine Bauer, an early advocate of utopian style housing, began to criticize design standards: “In part, the weaknesses are inherent in the physical design … The typical publicly subsidized dwelling is deficient in interior space, in outdoor privacy, and in true American residential character.”[13] Jencks, the author of this paper’s opening quote, relates human emotions and the built environment: “identical regiments of buildings created inhuman environments that fostered anger and anomie among residents.”[14] Other scholars like Oscar Newman pointed out specific structural reasons: “high-rise configuration, skip-stop elevators and galleries exacerbated crime because they prevented easy surveillance, while the absence of bathrooms on the ground floors led children to pee in the stairwells.”[15] When the decline of public housing became evident in the late 20th century, prominent scholars accused the power of design as a problem (or a solution).
Their critique on the design have translated into the media, shaping popular opinion. In 1986, the Chicago Tribune wrote a series on public housing called “The Chicago Wall,” a metaphor to the “physical and psychological barrier that divides the city.”[16] On the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest public housing projects in the country, the Tribune writes, “There are blank spaces here, wide gaps between buildings. These are desolate spaces, empty rather than open, threatening rather than restful. Where there is grass, it is overgrown. But mostly there is concrete, rough and hard.”[17] Even the texture of materials serves as a metaphor, cementing the idea that public housing’s grim aesthetics were to blame for its decline.
Both the architects and planners, who conceived the design, and critics, who accused the design, believed in the power of aesthetics as a tool to improve human condition. The history of mid-20th century public housing concluded that high-rise apartments in super-blocks had been the cause of its collapse. However, this lesson is far short of the complete picture.
Divestment of Cities and White Suburbanization
An understanding of the complete picture demands explanation of urban economics and government policies surrounding public housing. The design of public housing is indeed one of the problems, however, not the primary one. The crux of the problem lies on the divestment of cities and white suburbanization. Those two factors — urban decay and suburbanization — are essentially the same thing in an inverse relationship; thus, it is difficult to discuss one topic without the other. This section considers various factors at once to present the true case on the failure of public housing.
During the post-WWII period, many industrial American cities began to lose population and industry to suburban areas. For example, Detroit, center of the automobile industry, lost 20 percent of population between 1950 and 1970. St. Louis, symbol of Western expansion especially after the completion of the Gateway Arch in 1965, lost 27 percent in the same period. Likewise, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, and many other industrial cities lost substantial number of people following the decades after WWII.[18] The destination of the people was not too far — just couple of miles outside the city center to the newly created suburbs. As the population of cities declined, suburban population doubled in the same 20-year period.
As people moved to the suburbs, so did industry. Well-paying industrial jobs disappeared from the city and moved to the suburbs due to the rise of trucking, development of highways and road infrastructure, stable fuel prices, and new manufacturing techniques.[19] The scale of these changes in demographics and industry would not have happened without specific government policies. The passage of the Federal Highway Act of 1956, authorizing 41,000 miles of highways over a 10-year period, and intense lobbying by the National Association of Realtors, enabling affordable mortgages for certain demographics, resulted in “an otherwise impossible level of suburban development.”[20] These policies coupled with the fear of nuclear war in the Cold War era, encouraging even more impetus to disperse, led to an unprecedented flight of capital and people away from the city in the post-WWII period.
The loss of people and decline of an urban economy resulted in a shrinking tax base for cities. As a result, cities found themselves unable to support many basic services and utilities to the people who were left behind. This started a rampant cycle. Crimes rocketed and basic services, such as policing, grew increasingly inadequate in inner cities; thus, encouraging more movement to safer and well-subsidized suburbs as city governments plummeted into debt.[21]
One racial demographic, white, drove most of the movements of people and capital. The common (and inadequate) explanation for the white dominance of suburbs and black dominance of inner cities is that white families simply have, on average, higher income and greater wealth than those of black families. Thus, white families can afford to move. However, as Richard Rothstein powerfully argues in his book The Color of Law, nearly every aspect of spatial inequity has its roots in racial state policies, including the role of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Federal Highway Act.
Rothstein writes, “The FHA had its biggest impact on segregation, not in its discriminatory evaluations of individual mortgage applicants, but in its financing of entire subdivisions, in many cases entire suburbs, as racially exclusive white enclaves.”[22] For example, the famous Levittown development, providing 17,500 single family houses, denied Blacks from obtaining a proper mortgage because the policies of the FHA and Department of Veteran Affairs favored only white veterans in that neighborhood. Real estate developers of suburban projects accredited the white dominance their suburbs to government action — developer William Levitt testified before Congress in 1957 stating, “We are 100 percent dependent on Government.”[23] Like Levittown, NY, many suburban enclaves across the nation were deliberately schemed as white-only projects and explicitly prohibited blacks from moving in.
Local policing tactics also contributed to the racial segregation of communities. When a police attempted to block a Black family, who can afford, from moving into their home in suburban Cicero, IL in 1951, the police chief told the real estate agent to “get out of Cicero,” and “Don’t come back … or you’ll get a bullet through you.”[24] The family did not comply with the police’s order and, instead, obtained a court injunction ordering the police to stop inferring with their house. Then, “a mob of about 4,000 rioted, raiding the apartment, destroying the fixtures, and throwing the family’s belongings out the window onto the lawn where they were set ablaze.”[25] The police arrested nobody from that crime scene.
The decline of public housing in the post-WWII period needs to be understood from this larger perspective. The creation of many public housing projects in the mid-20th century coincided with a decay of urban economics and white suburbanization. These frameworks have greater consequences than the design of housing projects.
As white families afforded subsidized home mortgages and moved to suburbs, middle-class black families, who were denied a mortgage based on redlining, moved into formerly white neighborhoods in the city. In turn, impoverished black families moved to formerly middle-class black neighborhoods. This succession of demographic movements eventually “filtered down to public housing.”[26] Public housing projects were left in a limbo due to the shrinking of the city budget and federal policies favoring suburban areas. Only the poorest of the poor began to live in public housing projects. Facilities crumbled and vacancies increased in public housing. Hence, rent collection from tenants, the prime source of income for maintenance of housing, decreased, intensifying the cycle of decay. Vacant rooms began to be havens for drugs and prostitution, inadequate city budget led to deter maintenance of critical infrastructure, lack of surveillance and policing led to increase of crime, and lack of blue-collar jobs in the city led to fewer economic opportunities for city residents.
Thus, the failure of public housing is a result of the changes in demographics, racially-driven federal policies, and decline of urban economics. This perpetual cycle of decay is best shown by examining a well-known example, St. Louis and the Pruitt-Igoe apartments.
The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments
When the Pruitt-Igoe homes in St. Louis were destroyed in 1972 only after 18 years of existence, many scholars blamed the design of the buildings for its failures. After all, Pruitt-Igoe exemplified the Corbusian ideal — a housing super project with 33 nearly-identical buildings, 11-storeys each, arranged across 57 acres. Urban planners marketed the project as a “poor man’s penthouse,” that they can enjoy stunning views of the city in a prime location.[27] Planners hoped that the Pruitt-Igoe apartments can replace “the tenements, gangs, and disease to a paradise not only of simply sanitary housing but of better living and behavior.”[28] Thus, the Pruitt-Igoe apartments housing 2,870 units manifested the idea that rational planning and modern architecture can improve the human condition.
Hence, it only seems relevant to impute the demise of Pruitt-Igoe to the architects and planners — and that is what happened following the highly-publicized destruction of the apartments. Some scholars, like Jencks, credit the end of modernism and start of postmodernism to Pruitt-Igoe’s collapse. However, as new scholarship emerges, the destruction of Pruitt-Igoe had more to do with the declining urban economy of St. Louis and racial exclusion, than the building itself.
In 1991, Katharine Bristol wrote, “this version [blaming modern design] of the Pruitt-Igoe story is a myth.”[29] Her paper signaled the change in scholarship that culminated in an award-winning documentary film The Pruitt-Igoe Myth released in 2012. These scholars present a more accurate picture on the demise of Pruitt-Igoe. Instead of focusing on the design of buildings, they point out the economic struggles of the city and mismanagement of St. Louis Housing Authority (SHA) as the primary reasons.
Contrary to perception, the Pruitt-Igoe homes opened to stunning success. Sylverster Brown, a former resident of Pruitt-Igoe featured in the documentary film, recalls pleasant memories of the apartments: “smells of pies, and cookies and cakes,” and playing with friends “up and down these little breezeways.”[30] Some residents were thrilled that they can live in to high-rise modern apartments overlooking the city. In fact, after three years of opening in 1954, Pruitt-Igoe’s occupancy rates peaked at 91% in 1957.[31]
The success of the opening, however, did not last long. As Bristol argues, “slow overall metropolitan population growth and the overproduction of inexpensive suburban dwellings helped open up the previously tight inner-city rental market to blacks. Many chose to live in inexpensive private dwellings rather than in public housing.”[32] Thus, the movement of demographics, starting with white families with favorable mortgages encouraging them to move to suburbs, allowed lower-income families to consider private homes in cities as places of living, not public housing. The demand for public housing decreased as some private real estate in St. Louis were more affordable and attractive than the massive Pruitt-Igoe apartments.
This led to a decrease of occupancy rates and it directly impacted SHA’s ability to effectively maintain the projects. The film and Bristol both explain the fact that most public housing projects in the U.S. were constructed using federal money, however, the maintenance of housing had to be funded by tenants’ rents.[33] With declining occupancy rates, SHA was not able to collect adequate income to maintain Pruitt-Igoe. Thus, beginning in the 1960s, SHA was forced to defer maintenance, resulting in the acceleration of the project’s decline.
The SHA looked to the city government for help, but St. Louis, too, lost large portions of corporate and personal taxable income due to suburbanization. As stated earlier, St. Louis’ population decreased by 27 percent from 1950 to 1970 and the focus of industrial production shifted from the city to the suburbs. The city government could not help its public housing agency. This started an inescapable cycle of destruction. SHA increased the rent for remaining tenants, perhaps the most impoverished residents of the city, and tenants responded with a rent strike for 9 months in 1969.[34]
What happened in the remaining years of Pruitt-Igoe is well-published. This spiraling cycle of destruction, starting with the decline of an urban economy and white suburbanization, led to increased vacancies that were used for illicit activities, decrease in surveillance leading to crime, decrease of rental income leading to lack of maintenance, and, thus, stigmatization of Pruitt-Igoe. The myth framing utopian visions of architecture and urban planning as perpetrators, instead of racially-driven government led suburbanization, became increasingly popular. The building had to be blown up (Fig. 1).
Final Thoughts
The myth that modern architecture and rational planning led to the failure of American public housing projects has critical flaws in its argument. It is important to understand the larger framework determining the built environment — economy and government policy — in order to truly understand the full picture.
As Rothstein argues, the state effectively sponsored de jure segregation of suburban areas, through mortgage policies and racial policing.[35] This left the historically disenfranchised African American communities without access to adequate economic opportunities in inner cities. They lived in a stateless state inside public housing projects, without proper hygiene and maintenance, at the very core of declining American cities. The myth, blaming the design for public housing’s failures, has proven so powerful that it shifted attention away from important institutional problems for decades.
What if the city and the federal government cared for these people? What if the government implemented non-racial policies in suburban areas and subsidized black families as well as white families? What if high-modernist superblocks could be viewed as a success not as a failure? There is an interesting counter point to consider.
In Chicago, the Raymond Hilliard Towers Apartment, completed in 1966 as part of the Chicago Housing Authority, features futuristic, honeycomb-shaped towers, designed by a Bauhaus-trained architect Bertrand Goldberg. High modernist ideas dictated the design of the Hilliard Towers, just like Pruitt-Igoe. However, the management of the Hilliard Towers implemented policies that helped the Towers remain a success until today. From the project’s inception, applicants for tenants were screened to identify and select stable families with working parents. Community activities, ranging from pizza parties to dance contests, were organized to encourage communal spirit.[36] Though the Hilliard Towers also deteriorated in the 1980s, activists in the community and the Chicago Housing Authority actively sought to improve conditions. Now, The Hilliard Towers houses 654 affordable housing units and has been registered on the National Register of Historic Places due to its architectural merit.[37] The building will never crumble.
Thus, high-modernist towers that Le Corbusier envisioned can serve as successful places for public housing. Though modern architects and rational planner had a mistaken notion that their designs of the built environment can be the solution, which led to criticism, their utopian visions should not be the center of blame. The history of public housing in mid-20th century America has taught us to consider the larger structural and social frameworks governing the built environment. The destruction of Pruitt-Igoe symbolizes the decline of the city, not the death of modernism.
[1] Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), 9–10.
[2] Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Fritz Umbach, and Lawrence J. Vale, eds., Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 14–17.
[3] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 23.
[4] Le Corbusier, “CIAM: Charter of Athens,” in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 137–145.
[5] James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 41.
[6] Ibid., 56.
[7] Michael Brooks, “Centralized Rationality: The Planner as Applied Scientist,” in Planning Theory for Practitioners (Chicago: APA Planners Press, 2002), 82.
[8] Michael Powell, “A Tale of Two Cities,” New York Times, May 6, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/nyregion/thecity/06hist.html.
[9] Jacobs, 25.
[10] Ibid., 22.
[11] Ibid., 143–221.
[12] Bloom et al., eds., 9.
[13] Catherine Bauer, “The Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing,” in Architectural Forum 106 (May 1957), 141.
[14] Joseph Heathcott, “Public Housing Stands Alone,” in Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policy, eds. Nicholas Dagen Bloom et al. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 41.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Patrick Reardon and Bonita Brodt, “Public Housing Draws the Dividing Line,” Chicago Tribune, November 30, 1986, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-11-30-8603310237-story.html.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Heathcott, 38.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Vishaan Chakrabarti, A Country of Cities: a Manifesto for an Urban America (New York: Metropolis Books, 2013), 31.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of how our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017), 72.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid., 145.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Heathcott, 39.
[27] Chad Freidrichs (director), The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (Columbus: Unicorn Documentary Films, 2012), Film.
[28] Bloom et al., 1.
[29] Katharine G. Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” in Journal of Architectural Education 44 (Milton Park: Taylor and Francis, 1991), 163.
[30] Freidrichs (dir.), The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.
[31] Bristol, 166.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid.; Freidrichs (dir.), The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.
[34] Freidrichs (dir.), The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.
[35] Rothstein, 216–217.
[36] Maya Dukmasova, “The Goldberg variation: High-rise public housing that works,” Chicago Reader, October 5, 2016.
[37] Ibid.
