Word: pruitt
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...idea of defensible space first emerged back in 1964, when I was part of a team of architects and sociologists who were studying why the notorious Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis was being torn apart by the people who lived in it. Every public area-the lobbies, the laundries and mail rooms-was a mess, literally. There was human excrement in the halls. Except in one small area on each floor of each building. You had to go through a fire door and then you were in a little hallway separating two apartments. This little hall...
Ghost Town. Today Pruitt-lgoe is a case study in misery. Three-fourths of its 2,800 apartments stand empty. Rows of abandoned, windowless buildings loom against St. Louis' skyline like a modern ghost town. Yamasaki's galleries, ill-lighted and unpainted, are havens for junkies and muggers...
...reason Pruitt-lgoe failed is sociological and financial, rather than racial. Planners built in the worst slum in St. Louis. Many of the first tenants were drawn from the high-crime area, and brought their problems with them. As a result, the working-class white and black families living in Pruitt-lgoe began to move out. With apartments empty, St. Louis welfare officials pressured the Public Housing Authority to admit more welfare cases...
...buildings. Because families earned no money, they could not pay existing rents. Rents were lowered, while maintenance costs went up, causing such a strain on the PHA that funds that would have been used to keep up smaller public-housing projects around the city had to be diverted into Pruitt-lgoe...
...Pruitt-Igoe's slide into disaster was also caused by economy measures that compromised Yamasaki's original design. Landscaping was reduced to a few oases of green. Steampipes were left uncovered, and a number of people were severely burned. Public toilets were eliminated from the ground floors and playgrounds, and out of either urgency or irritation, children resorted to elevators or hallways to urinate. Cramming 12,000 people into 57 acres of land exacerbated already grim social problems...