SInce watching the documentary about Pruitt-Igoe, a single disturbing detail has been embedded in my mind staunchly. I have not been able to reconcile the idea of the supposed well-intentioned public housing project with the fact that families had to agree to have the main breadwinner leave the household in order to secure a living space in this public project. Essentially, it seems to me that the authorities were breaking these families apart and increasing their need for public assistance before agreeing to provide that assistance.

This would be an unimaginable thing to ask of middle class families. This particular request was not about avoiding any distant relatives and hangers-on from leeching off of the assistance being provided to one family. These families, these children had to agree to live without their father and these wives had to agree to live without their husbands in order to continue receiving the support that they so badly needed. When one of the former residents who’d been just a boy during his time at Pruitt-Igoe spoke of having to lie to the white officials and say that he had never seen his father, I was deeply moved and outraged. I cannot imagine the psychological trauma that a young boy would have to go through in order to lie to about seeing his own father. I also could not help but wonder how much this contributed to the somewhat popular notion that in poor families, males usually abandon their own kids.

Many of the former residents spoke of how their fathers would sneak in during the night to see their families. That kind of behavior is not indicative of an irresponsible parent. One former resident spoke about how her mother even painted one of the walls inside her home with black paint in order to homeschool her children. These stories speak of parents that cared about their children and seem to have been fighting an uphill battle to keep them safe and provide them with a better future. If on the other hand, these men were asked to leave because their presence would have made the families slightly better off and therefore not in need of public assistance, the absurdity of that argument speaks for itself. It cannot have been the objective of public housing that the resident families had to remain at the poverty-line level.

Additionally, some of these children had to also witness their siblings and friends being snatched away by the criminal elements that seem to have taken advantage of these ill-protected people. Whether some of the youth participated in the criminal activity under lack of adult supervision or were simply the victims of violence that arises in such situations, the conditions for children here were definitely not ideal.

I came to the conclusion that these families, at risk to begin with, were placed under enormous stress from the specific circumstances at Pruitt-Igoe. This was not a community where families could live in neighborly harmony and help one another grow. It was certainly not a place that could give the younger generation dreams of a brighter future, something that is essential for the growth of every society. The demands placed upon them by poverty, combined with the feeling that they were all alone and unprotected by the law had to have forced the residents to lose hope. The story of Pruitt-Igoe is unquestionably a tragedy but the real revelation here is that perhaps this tragedy wasn’t as inevitable as some groups seem to have suggested.