During our lecture time on Monday, November 12th, we watched a documentary entitled, "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth."
It was difficult to watch the documentary about a promising housing project in downtown St. Louis in the 1950's and then go to the normal, Monday night session. The documentary was powerful in that it described a brand new, hopeful, and exciting housing opportunity for families drawn to the area for work. Pruitt-Igoe quickly became a dreadful, dangerous, and poverty-striken place to live. Through multiple bad decisions, a lack of funding, and horrible racism, this once intended for families, state-of-the-art housing project deteriorated and was demolished about fifteen years after it was built.
It was a project that went so badly wrong, I could only hope that people (developers, councilmen, lawmakers, lawyers, realtors - everyone) would learn from it to prevent a similar situation from ever happening again.
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