The two assigned articles this week give insight on how Public Housing may have failed, using St. Louis as a case study. Heathcott’s book analyzes and discusses the different theories that explain how Public Housing failed in the context of social, political, and fiscal factors that were going on during the 20th Century.

Back then, Housing Authorities traditionally practiced racial segregation in their development efforts: neighborhoods were built specifically for black-occupancy or white-occupancy, and FHA’s suburbanization policies contributed to white flight, which further led to black residential-succession in once off-limits neighborhoods. These socio-political factors, on top of the lack of federal funds due to our participation in 20th Century Wars, led to the downfall of public houses.

The most prominent case of public housing failure highlights the closure of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. While some scholars attempt to explain its failure by pointing to poor architecture and flawed high-rise designs that supposedly stimulated increasing crime rates, I do not particularly find this argument convincing. I think it is worth pointing out an example of my former home Singapore, where most of the residential areas are high-rise buildings — a good amount of which are public houses. Yet the inherent nature of high-rises do not reflect an environment that fosters higher crime rates back there. In fact, here in the US, scholarly analysis of St. Louis shows that crimes and revolts were not limited to high-rise public houses and oftentimes occurred in low suburban houses too. Furthermore, Penn South which was also a high-rise building structurally similar to Pruitt-Igoe did not end up with the same fate.

The scholarly argument that I find most convincingly explains the failure of Pruitt-Igoe is the one presented in Arnold Hirsch’s book “Making the Second Ghetto”, which attributes the fallout of St. Louis to long-standing federal practices of racial segregation and white disincentives toward residential integration. To quote the assigned NYTimes article, “We have our home here and if the colored move in and run real estate prices down, it’s bound to create tension.” This elucidates the economic considerations that White people had to take into account, which can explain the residential patterns in the 20th Century. Add on top redlining and FHA suburbanization efforts, this led to a whole chain of migratory events that ultimately caused the decline of public housing.

Looking at housing historically, while I do think that our real estate system could inherently be problematic, discriminatory, and racist, the failure of Public Housing teaches us the important lesson that paying due notice and attention to socio-political and cultural factors can prevent us from repeating the same failures again.