The Pruitt-Igoe Myth documented the failure of historic slum clearance project. Although I already read the New York Times article about this incident, the movie gives me a more visual and impressive view about how these all happened. The movie demonstrates a more serious situations than from what I imagined based on the article. I was shocked by the interviews of various Pruitt-Igoe residents.

At the beginning of the movie, it describes how poor were treated as the enemies of the society. People usually think that the society was dragged down by all those poor people. As what we learned from our previous readings, African Americans fled from South to North to escape racial discrimination in South, however they faced a lot of discrimination in North as well. According to the film, the interview of Caucasian people who lived in St.Louis reflects how their reaction toward the black communities. Most of Caucasians didn’t want to have black family moving into their neighborhood, because not only it would lower the property value, also bring a lot of problems to the neighborhood such as crimes, and environmental dirtiness. The black minority were treated as most problematic group and with the lowest social rank.

The government’s slum clearance project was meant to provide these poor with a better living environment; however, it was also government’s way of segregating blacks from whites. The government build an approximately 60 acres of public housing in St. Louis, which became a neighborhood that was completely occupied by black communities. One thing that I remembered from the movie was when one of the resident was talking about how there were usually a lot of people went into their apartment asking where was his dad, and he had to lie that he never saw his dad. Personally, I felt that it was kind of unfair and cruel to them that their family members had to live separately; because the public housing rules didn’t allow any able man to live there. I can’t completely agree with the housing authority’s rules. I can understand that the purpose of prohibiting abled man living there was to encourage them to go out and look for jobs. Since there were still a lot of man hiding in these public housing units, the housing authority just have no control over that, so I don’t think that having these regulations were necessary.

When Pruitt-Igoe first opened in 1954, it was a new hope for these poor. One of the woman from the film kept saying that she still remembered first Christmas in Pruitt-Igoe, where there was a big Christmas tree, and kids were enjoying their gifts. Everything sounded so wonderful based on her description. However, things started move in a wrong direction. I think the biggest problem with the collapse of Pruitt-Igoe project was that there weren’t enough funding for the maintenance and the supervision of the buildings. There were garbage everywhere, peoples’ living conditions became far below the standards. With all these problems, people started moving out of the Pruitt-Igoe. Then all those illegal drug trades and killings became uncontrollable in Pruitt-Igoe. And eventually the government had to demolished these buildings.

I was surprised by the film that residents of Pruitt-Igoe had completely different view about Pruitt-Igoe. According to the woman, she still think Pruitt-Igoe as her home, it was the first place that gave her a sense of warmth and joys; she believed that although all those bad things happened, she would never forget about the happiness that Pruitt-Igoe gave her. However, there was a man who had completely different view about Pruitt-Igoe. He was saying there were people who didn’t want others to found out that they were from Pruitt-Igoe, it was a shame to live in Pruitt-Igoe. After watching this movie I have mixed feeling about these government projects, probably these were just unavoidable problems. The government shouldn’t be blamed for the failure of these projects; I think that the society also should be taking the responsibilities.