06/01/2026
Seen on Facebook::
Nick Lindsey ·
The Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project in St Louis. Often cited as everything that went wrong with 20th Century urbanism, as the victim of a decades-long framing campaign.
Yes, I genuinely believe that the "failure" of Pruitt-Igoe and similar projects was manufactured on the ground through neglect and through the media via misrepresentation in order to destroy American support for large scale public housing. This may not have been intentional, but it has been very convenient for public housing's biggest enemies in crafting a visceral aversion across the political aisle to any sort of large-scale housing project.
For half a century, it has been a universally accepted truth that the blocks were poorly designed in a manner that rendered inevitable the social problems, crime and poverty that manifested around them. There are many enticing arguments about skip-stop elevators creating unsafe corridors, "sterile" design contributing to vandalism, overindulgence in communual spaces causing mass isolation.
But I have never really been convinced by this line of thought. If you go to Moscow, Belgrade, China, even places like the Barbican in London or Arterlaa in Vienna, you see plenty of functional, safe, healthy communities built around such huge blocks which also contain skip stop elevators, large communual corridors and grey walls, even in countries that are (on paper) much poorer than the USA. Why is it that what is built in Yugoslavia functions perfectly well there, but causes immense social problems when built in the Anglosphere?
Maybe I'm naive, but I genuinely do believe that there is absolutely nothing wrong with large scale mid 20th century public housing projects which cause them to foster dysfunctional communities. Social problems are caused by segregating people along racial and class lines into an isolated block, and cutting off virtually all services and opportunity from that area. But such treatment would cause chronic issues in any part of a city regardless of whether it takes the form of towers in the park or a shanty town. The association of this form of neglect with high-density public housing is a rather insidious invocation of the correlation-causation fallacy.
In many cases, at least in the UK, the problems of the new "slums in the sky" were no worse than the high-density low-rise slums that they replaced, except the newer blocks had heating and running water. The reason there is such a prevalent narrative that our cities would be perfect if the Victorian slums were left untouched is a result of the fact that there are almost none left due to redevelopment, and people have forgotten just how blighted they were. And as we all know by now, the demolition of Pruitt Igoe, Brewster-Douglas, etc didn't absolve St Louis and Detroit of poverty and social problems whatsoever. In many cases, that sort of "improvement" just pushed the most marginalised people in society even further out of the city .
Even among Leftists there's a prevalent view that "The Projects" represent a large scale failure of 20th century policy, but let's see that for what it is. It is the of result of decades of aversion in the media to industrial-scale, state-led housing construction, pushed on behalf of a landlord class that would stand to lose the most from it. It relies on a correlation-causation argument that falls apart when you look at the rest of the world, masking the real reasons behind urban problems. It's much easier to blame architecture for Pruitt-Igoe's "failure" rather than the systems of state neglect, policy-driven unemployment and racial discrimination it was built on top of.
Perhaps modernism did fail in its ideal of eliminating social ills through steel and concrete, but we have established that those are issues well beyond the remit of mere housing policy. The truth is that large-scale state-built "co**ie block" housing still remains the most effective tool to tackle a housing crisis, despite a near-universal antipathy to it in the postmodern West.
