I kind of touched on this in another thread a while back, but a story in today’s Washington Post about how the project where Sonia Sotomayer lived in as a little girl has basically gone to shit got me wondering again.
What is it about inner-city housing projects that breeds so much despair and crime? The article mentions that a lot of these places used to be pretty nice. And you’d figure that having subsidized housing would help poor people get a leg up in society, but the opposite seems to be true.
And who qualifies to live in a “project” nowadays? If I wanted to move into one, what would I have to do?
Has anyone here lived in a project? What was your experience like?
A big part of the problem was that you shouldn’t concentrate so many impoverished people and/or criminals in one place. That tends to make things much worse and the U.S. has learned a lot about that since the 1970’s. Chicago had some notorious high-rise housing projects and the outcome was exactly what you would expect in hindsight. That is but one example. A more distributed model of low income housing works much better.
Another problem is that people have no pride of ownership in the projects. I’ve been to places in Mexico where you have high population density and even higher poverty and yet those people take far better care of what they have. In some areas, the people have scrimped and saved to get a $3,000 plot of land to build their ramshackle hut on; they might have a dirt floor and get their water from a 50-gallon drum, but they take care of what they have.
In a project, you’re just a subsidized renter.
A lot of the high rise places have been torn down or imploded.
I wonder if somehow the physical design of projects, especially high-rises, somehow contributes to this. A lack of private yards and other open space, as opposed to communal open space. The sheer ugliness of concrete. The population density. The absence of anything like a sense of neighborhood (other than the hundreds or thousands of strangers you’re stuck in the same bloc as). Recall that many of these physical features catagorized the inner-city tenements of many early twentieth century cities.
Thin walls.
That was the conventional logic, until they started ripping them down in Chicago. Instead of concentrating the gangs/drugs/poverty in one giant building, they spread it out over a wide, wide area, making turf wars worse and harder to fight. See: Cabrini Green.
You might like to read “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” by Jane Jacobs for a few reasons. It’s an older book, but well worth the read.
So why don’t luxury high-rise buildings have those problems? Why is there a waiting list to get into Stuyvesant Town / Peter Cooper Village which are effectively “projects” for middle class Manhattanites.
Projects are such shitholes because sacks of shit often live in them. You are taking a pool of people who cannot afford to live anywhere else and placing them in a large institutional structure that’s maintained as cheaply as possible. The nature of the facility effectively issolates them from the rest of the community. Imagine that out of a building of 1000 residents, 10% are violent criminals, con artists, drug dealers, drug addicts, thieves, unemployables. That’s a 100 troublemakers often with nothing to do and nowhere to go all day. It won’t be long until the other 90% will consist of nothing but the type of people who have nowhere else to go either.
I lived in a low income public housing project (Holly Park) in Seattle from 1967 to 1970. Holly Park was a “garden” project rather than a high rise. The buildings were no taller than two stories and if you lived in a two story unit, both stories were yours. We had lots of green space and open courtyards. Your apartment size depended on the size of your family – bigger families had more bedrooms.
It was like any other neighborhood. Some people took care of their apartments, some didn’t. There was a nice mix of age groups – young families might live next to senior citizens. I don’t know the demographic but it seemed to me like the racial/ethnic mix was fairly even. In the late 60’s many of the tenants were college students and VISTA workers. There was lots of volunteerism and community activities. We had a newspaper, a day care center, a free medical clinic, a clothes closet, a community council, and with the help of the Black Panthers, we had a free breakfast program for kids.
It definitely wasn’t a hellhole. I walked everywhere, day or night, and the kids played outside. Our apartment was burglarized once, but it wasn’t until we moved out of public housing into a “nice” neighborhood that the kids’ bikes were stolen and our cars were stolen (three times).
In about 1970 a low income high-rise complex was built at the edge of Holly Park. No green space, nowhere for kids to play or old folks to sit and watch kids play, no amenities. There were lots of protests. Even then we knew that high rises were a bad idea. Sure enough, within a short time that complex (Greenwood) was crime-ridden. Eventually some of the buildings were torn down and it was converted to senior citizen housing. I think it’s all gone now, but I’m not sure.
I think density is a big part of the problem, coupled with joblessness. It’s not hard to live in close proximity to strangers if you have a job and only come home to eat, rest, sleep. But if you’re stuck there 24/7, with no outlet, that’s different. It won’t turn you into a criminal, but it’s not an ideal environment.
Huh? Cabrini Green had about a 2 block footprint:
Is that wrong? Later in the article it mentions thousands of units. Granted, with the size of the main buildings, thousands would be possible - but it doesn’t read that way.
I used to live near here. Pretty grim stuff to look at, and worse to live in. I also saw a documentary on how they came about. They should this astonishingly good looking model of what the development would be like when it was finished. It was a fantastic model. I’m sure if you were an ant, that model would have been be a great place to live.
Ufortunately, actual human beings don’t live in tiny models, but in real life apartment blocks. The model didn’t scale up very well. My suspicion is it was never really meant to. The archiect got his fee, the builders were paid, the councillors responsible for approving the project felt good about themselves - and the people who had to live in the anthill? They were poor and didn’t matter.
We learned the same lesson here in Canada. It just does not work well to put a whole lot of poor people together in subsidized housing.
My daughter lives in a housing Co-op in St. Catherines Ontario. This is a system that really works well. It’s a beautiful but basic low rise building of about 100 units. The rent is geared to income and there is everyone from people with no income but welfare to people who have good jobs and make good money. The residents elect their own administrator who is responsible for the overall management of the Co-op The government makes the inital investment for the building and the idea is that the building then carrys it’s self. This is done by balancing the ratio of income among the tenants so as to not have a deficit. There are a lot of activities run by the Co-op which creates some pride in their community and their home. They also have people who can help in finding a better job or accessing any government programs like subsidized child care, pensions, etc. I have told my wife many times that I would not mind living there at all. It’s spotless, well maintained and has a real good feel to it.
One of the problems is that the people who can, get out as fast as they can. Besides creating turnover (rapid turnover is never good for an apartment-type project) it means the people who are left are the ones who aren’t able to make it.
Public housing has had alot ofproblems, the bigest being th fact that the innercities rarely have any well-paying factory jobs left. As th USA has abandoned manufacturing, the jobs available to poor inner city residents are mostly service jobs (bartenders, chambermaids, etc.) Hence, there is a lot of male unemployment-and these guys get into trouble. add to this, many city governments are corrupt, and these "projects’ are often poorly maintained. Addto that drugs and gangs, and you have some ofthemost dangerous housing on earth.
Whic is weird, because these people (project dwellers) live better than 99% of the 3rd world-they have TVs, refridgerators, and PCs-only they have no self respect.
Here’s a link to the Washington Post story I mentioned in the OP, if anyone’s interested.
I didn’t find anthing in the article that mentions that “a lot of these places used to be pretty nice.” Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor said that the apartment was “spacious, pristine white.” on the day that her family moved in. I had the impression from what she said that it was a new apartment at that time.
These apartments at that time were not intended for the poorest of the poor. Only 10% of the residents were on welfare. It was hard to get one of these apartments if you were not working or if you were a single parent or if you had a drug record. Acquiring an education was emphasized.
In 1981, Congress changed eligibility rules to give preference in public housing to the poorest households, which "effectively made public housing the housing of last resort. The article in the Washington Post fails to make it clear that the great sin is not in the poverty itself. Poor people just don’t have the money to make their spaces look like showplaces. They can’t change the decor when styles change. They can’t make a slipcover for the sofa when the upholstery looks faded and stained. They can’t get new carpeting or paint whenever they would like to.
And it’s not that druggies come from the impoverished. When someone becomes addicted to drugs, they are more likely to become impoverished than if they weren’t spending $400 a day on a habit. The poor are more often victims of crime because criminals dwell among them.
More likely than not, refrigeration is provided by the renting agency. An awful lot of the Third World has television now and I’m a little skeptical about how many people living in the projects have PCs. Do you have a cite for your claim? I also disagree with you that they have no self-respect. That varies from person to person just as it would anywhere.
Regardless, blame the deterioration on the introduction of drugs and gang wars – not on poverty itself.
Here’s another data point, from a different culture, this time from the Netherlands. Our biggest problem “project” was the Bijlmermeer. Hig rise flats, but spacious apartments and lots of green and parkland in between the high-rise. When the Bijlmer was first built in the 70’s it was a chic place to live.
In the next 15 years, the place went to hell. Well, not really to hell; the ban on fire arms in the Netherlands did a lot to make all violence less deadly and less spiralling out of control. Gang wars are just not that appealing if you have to stab the enemy at close range with a knife, instead of shooting at them from your car. The Bijlmer nowadays is a place where a lot of (immigrant) people live, the unemplyment rate is very high, and single families/unwed young moms are the norm.
Countless studies have been done to determine the cause. And I hate to say it, being a bleeding heart liberal, but msmith537 has a point. It’s not the buildings itself, it is the combination of young men and having no prospects. When young men have no prospects, no reasonable chance on a good job, good income, good relationship with girls, a certain percentage of them will turn to crime. It’s simple math. And if their moms and neighbours and teachers don’t pull them back in, they spread a lot of misery.
Projects concentrate people with minimal capacity and minimal incentive to take care of themselves.
In broader society, the minority of folks with limited abilities are essentially supported by those with greater abilities; in a family with four brighter individuals and one less capable one, the support of the functional carries the less functional. Projects concentrate the dysfunctional and less capable, and the opposite effect occurs: even the more capable are dragged down by the majority.
Did you intend to leave out their fathers?
And why do males do this?