Ray Gindroz sees the film as a Greek tragedy, with mortals, actors, and a chorus of “erudite urban experts who describe what was happening to the economy of cities and the way in which public policy undermined the cities’ ability to function.” Well, policymakers didn’t set out to undermine cities. They were trying to create decent housing for factories’ poorest workers because the old neighborhoods next to the factories had turned into slums.
It was a nice idea until the gods shifted the winds. Factories and jobs picked up and moved to the suburbs, leaving Pruitt-Igoe’s residents stranded in high rise towers away from the jobs and bus lines to take them there.
Not only were the jobs gone, but so were the neighborhoods. “Instead of the common ground of the street outside your door, there was a labyrinth of ‘common areas’ that had to be maintained and supervised. The neighborhood had been replaced by an institution.”
Pruitt-Igoe didn’t pan out the way everyone hoped, but some folks learned from the experience. Planners and policy wonks figured out that a proposed development had to become a neighborhood instead of a low-income project. In fact, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s HOPE VI housing program seeks to replace failed public housing projects with mixed income neighborhoods.
