It's interesting that some of the worst public housing projects were built by liberal Harvard/Yale B.Arch. grads back in the 1950s. From a website on
Chicago's Slums:
Architecture, racism and even good intentions have conspired to create a poverty trap in Chicago's housing projects. As elsewhere, public housing was first designed in the 1930s as transitional housing for the working poor, often with stiff eligibility requirements that screened out the neediest.
Chicago's special problems were born in the 1950s when local politicians, including the mayor, Richard J. Daley, began to use public housing to segregate the city's rapidly growing black population. Meanwhile, city builders had become enamoured of Le Corbusier's vision of urban buildings as "islands in the sky". The result was hulking high-rises in poor black neighbourhoods, the worst of which is an uninterrupted four-mile stretch of public housing on the city's south side.I wonder what else of 20th century society was disfigured by the prejudices of pretentious left-wing "intellectuals"?
But back to the projects: Not only were the towers built with overall cheap material, they were usualy ringed with the new federal Interstate highways so that the tenants couldn't even
walk outside their prison.
Interestingly, practically perfect, lily-white liberal Boston has as many project developments as New Orleans. And,
damned if you step foot into either one!
Richard Nixon's legacy to the civil rights movement was assured in 1971, when he placed a moratorium on the construction of any new housing projects. God bless him.
