What can Pruitt-Igoe Teach Us

St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project is arguably the most infamous public housing project ever built in the United States. A product of the postwar federal public-housing program, this mammoth high-rise development was completed in 1956. 

Only a few years later, disrepair, vandalism, and crime plagued Pruitt-Igoe. The project’s recreational galleries and skip-stop elevators, once heralded as architectural innovations, had become nuisances and danger zones. Large numbers of vacancies indicated that even poor people preferred to live anywhere but Pruitt-Igoe. In 1972, after spending more than $5 million in vain to cure the problems at Pruitt-Igoe, the St. Louis Housing Authority, in a highly publicized event, demolished three of the high-rise buildings. A year later, in concert with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, it declared Pruitt-Igoe unsalvageable and razed the remaining buildings.

On paper Pruitt-Igoe was a testament to modern engineering. In practice, the housing project was a disaster. The sprawling 33 building, 57-acre layout of Pruitt-Igoe ignored the traditional knowledge about how cities grow and develop. Nearly every successful city on our planet was built organically and unpredictably. Building popped up as needed. City Blocks expanded gradually.

There is a reason we tend to undervalue old ideas

At first glance we see just an idea that has been around for a long time. We incorrectly assume that familiar ideas provide average results. “Everyone does it this way, so it can’t be that great.”

What we fail to understand is that fundamentals are not merely a collection of good ideas. The fundamentals are a collection of good ideas that outlasted thousands of bad ideas.

FOR EXAMPLE…

• FITNESS – How many exercise fads have we seen over the years. In our quest for immortality and fitness we have been willing to do just about anything. Yet weight lifting and daily walking has outlasted all fades.
• ENTREPENEURSHIP – The truth of business is that making more sells calls can be the difference between success and failure CEO of Starfighter Patrick McKenzie says that patient execution of doing what we know to do is what breaks barriers.
• READING – How many books will fail even though they have good ideas today? Their truths may in fact be proven to be wrong tomorrow. However there are a handful of books which we return to over and over. These are the books we should spend time with.

The power of inherited knowledge

Across the street from Pruitt-Igoe was a more traditional housing development called Carr Square Village. This was a smaller complex with more traditional designs. It was built 12 years prior to Pruitt Igoe and yet boasted of lower crime and vacancy rates all the while being in the same neighborhood of Pruitt-Igoe.

James Clear writes that perhaps what is needed in modern world is to do the fundamentals better and more consistently than everyone else. Everybody already knows that is very different from Everybody already does that.

Credits:

Harvard Sociology Department

St Louis News

James Clear