DC is 60% black!?

[minionofmidas]

True...(although I was thinking mostly of 70's architecture.) Not to mention that class prejudice can be quite as bad as racial one...really it's one and the same. The fundamental message of privileged group x-ism is "these are not really people like us. We need not care what happens to them."

But I'm not claiming that's the only reason, only that it plays a role in shaping attitudes towards public housing architecture.
God. Architects. Don't get me started on architects. Anyone who values the aesthetic pleasure of a model higher than the opinions of people who'll actually have to live in or work in or, in the cases of skyscrapers, live or work near them is a piece of human buttwipe. (stops ranting)

Much as I hate public housing, I don't really agree that there was malice behind the design of it.  It was really more stupidity than malice in my opinion.

If the motive was malice, it would have been easier to simply do nothing about housing.  We spent billions of dollars on "slum clearance" and built new housing in its place that was supposed to solve the slum problem, but instead created worse slums than existed before. 

But the intentions were good, in my opinion.  Public housing was made dense so that it could accomodate as many needy people as possible.  These nightmarish hellhole projects are actually a good example of runaway idealism, untempered by any type of realistic look at problems.  The thought was that slums were a building/construction problem, and that new buildings that were well-maintained would solve the problem.  This thinking didn't take into account the fact that it was the tenants themselves who were destroying the buildings, shooting out windows, urinating in the elevators, etc.  These projects were also a product of failed urban planning notions that gained popularity starting in the 1930s that failed to take into account the way people really live.

So while I am hostile to public housing, the disaster we created was more a product of unrealistic idealism, and a certain amount of presumptuousness and ignorance, rather than malice toward the poor, in my opinion.  People who really hate the poor don't advocate spending billions of dollars to house them.

You're living in a democracy, and one with a bureaucratic apparatus at that. That means that people of very different persuasions are involved in shaping decisions. The people who sit on the planning comittees that decide which architect to use are not the same people who forced the decision to "do something" through congress.

Then, it should be noted that the problem was in no small part a construction/maintenance problem, and that a modern "project" is tangibly better than a 19th century slum. Don't believe me? Look at the cholera rates.

I'm not saying that your point is entirely ludicrous, not at all - just that it needs a fair bit of tempering to make it into a valid one.

[dazzleman]

You're living in a democracy, and one with a bureaucratic apparatus at that. That means that people of very different persuasions are involved in shaping decisions. The people who sit on the planning comittees that decide which architect to use are not the same people who forced the decision to "do something" through congress.

Then, it should be noted that the problem was in no small part a construction/maintenance problem, and that a modern "project" is tangibly better than a 19th century slum. Don't believe me? Look at the cholera rates.

I'm not saying that your point is entirely ludicrous, not at all - just that it needs a fair bit of tempering to make it into a valid one.

The architecture used in public housing was designed for cost-effectiveness.  The goal was to house as many people as possible, and even in the liberal 1960s, planners knew that there were limits to what the public would fund.

I don't mean to claim that the slums that the projects replaced were good.  But in fairness, to use the example, the cholera rates would have dropped with or without public housing because of things like sewage and plumbing.  It didn't require the level of investment inherent in public housing to bring that about.

Initially, the projects were a step up from the old slums.  At the beginning, public housing tenants were carefully screened to keep out the riff-raff.  Then some liberal groups claimed this was discriminatory, and the floodgates for open.  Paradoxically, this grievously hurt the people that liberals claimed to care the most about -- the poor.  Liberal emphasis on income transfers over work in the 1960s were also a death knell for the projects, as many residents gave up working for the security of a small but reliable government check.  Therefore, public housing became a huge island of people who didn't work, and had no connection to the overall larger society.  This deepened the poverty problem since there were fewer and fewer avenues of escape, and made people increasingly dependent on welfare in a very vicious cycle.

As life in the projects became worse and worse, with more and more violence, a huge stigma settled over those who lived there, and now it was the outside society that wanted nothing to do with the people from the projects.

It is a complicated problem, but I think it's clear that US urban policy in the 1940s through 1980s was a collossal failure.

[minionofmidas]

The architecture used in public housing was designed for cost-effectiveness.  The goal was to house as many people as possible, and even in the liberal 1960s, planners knew that there were limits to what the public would fund.

Yeah, exactly. So what were they so f'cking surprised about if they knew they weren't doing enough? After all, 19th century slums had been built for cost-effectiveness too, so they should've known what they were creating.

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Actually, it would have required a higher level of investment...just over a longer period of time, in a more localized manner, and with a smaller government involvement quota.

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Well, and obviously both sides had a point... you can't tear down the slums and not offer anybody who lived there a place to go, can you? Well, you can, if you're a brutal military dictatorship and are perfectly ready to gun them down at any sign of further trouble.
But of course, there's no reason why dysfunctional people should behave differently in one sort of cost-effective nightmare than in another one.

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Actually, wasn't the 1960s. Take a look at US unemployment rates for the 50s, compared to Europe. But yeah, sure, least-effort survival strategies. Perfectly sensible, from a "business science" point of view, as soon as you give up all hope of rising out of poverty through hard work, btw.

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The funny thing is...while all that is true, probably at no point was a majority of the people living there like that.

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Word.

[Storebought]

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.

[Storebought]

An image of one of the Robert Taylor ghettoes:



One project, described as a "family site"

[minionofmidas]

Horrible places.
And Le Corbusier is a good example for the sort of archtiect I was cursing above.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

An image of one of the Robert Taylor ghettoes:



One project, described as a "family site"

Good Lord... people lived in those things? Makes Drumchapel look like paradise...

I have a new theory:

Maybe the planners stood a brick up vertically, drilled a few holes in it, did the same with other bricks, plonked them all together, drank too much and decided that they looked like lovely housing?

[??????????]

Those remind me of some of the old soviet style housing. If I had to live in one of those I'd take myself to the top and free fall my way down. Yuck what horrible places. The projects we have here are not really like that. They were mostly duplex houses, single story. They actually aren't built bad the problem is that most of the tenants ran them into the sh*tter because they don't know how to take care of their property properly.

[A18]

An image of one of the Robert Taylor ghettoes:

The windows look way too close together for that to be real.

[dazzleman]

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.

Amen, brother.

[A18]

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.

Amen, brother.

That's a good thing how?

[dazzleman]

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.

Amen, brother.

That's a good thing how?

Have you been reading the thread?

[A18]

No.

[minionofmidas]

Those remind me of some of the old soviet style housing. If I had to live in one of those I'd take myself to the top and free fall my way down. Yuck what horrible places.

Very few of East Germany's Soviet style monster blocks look anything like that bad. Although some do.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Very few of East Germany's Soviet style monster blocks look anything like that bad. Although some do.

So an ironic congratulations to U.S City Planners then?

[Hitchabrut]

I thought it was more black.

[Cubby]

I thought it was more black.

It was more black in the 70's but the immigration boom since 1990 has brought in a lot of Hispanics and Asians who weren't there back in the day, hence the lower percentage. Also, some blacks from DC seem to be going to neighboring Prince George's County in Maryland, it is suburban but majority black as of Census 2000.

[AuH2O]

Gentrification is in full swing. DC is actually becoming much more white, and will continue in that direction. Blacks will be a mere plurality within a decade probably, and possible a minority in time. The real question is to what extent the slums in the SE will be reclaimed.

[A18]

Great. Maybe in another decade, we'll be able to get as much as 15% of the vote in DC. Probably not though.

[AuH2O]

The problem is that the white people in DC are liberal too.

So no, there isn't a lot of hope politically.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

So my question is how the heck did DC get such a concentrated, large black population?

Washington, DC is geographically restricted, so most of the actual "city" is in Maryland and Virginia.  Only the inner city is DC proper.  If you took inner city Philadelphia, Chicago, or Detroit, and made them their own cities, they would also be predominantly black.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Washington, DC is geographically restricted, so most of the actual "city" is in Maryland and Virginia.  Only the inner city is DC proper.  If you took inner city Philadelphia, Chicago, or Detroit, and made them their own cities, they would also be predominantly black.

Good point. Going slightly off topic I noticed this the other day

[Virginian87]

Although the black population in the District is very well-distributed, the white population is concentrated on the west side, expecially SW.  SW contains Geogetown while NW has American University and the National Cathedral.  The neighborhoods surrounding these landmarks are mostly upper-class areas where diplomats and politicians live.  There are plenty of blacks here, but not nearly as much as in NE or SE.  SE (Anacostia) is particularly impoverished and has had several shootings in the last year.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

Washington, DC is geographically restricted, so most of the actual "city" is in Maryland and Virginia.  Only the inner city is DC proper.  If you took inner city Philadelphia, Chicago, or Detroit, and made them their own cities, they would also be predominantly black.

Good point. Going slightly off topic I noticed this the other day

Yep, that's exactly what I thought.  Blacks are moving further east into the MD suburbs, while NW DC is "gentrifying."

The really sad thing is, back in 1998 I visited some former neighbors in central PG county (the county due east of DC), who complained how the neighborhood was "going downhill with all of the blacks moving in."  I wanted smack them upside the head.  Amazing that those sort of attitudes still persist.

Having grown up in a majority-black area (although we moved out to white Bowie for a few years), I just sort of take the racial equality thing for granted.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

Although the black population in the District is very well-distributed, the white population is concentrated on the west side, expecially SW. 

There isn't much residential in SW.  It's mostly government buildings and corporate headquarters.  Georgetown is north of the mall, so I think of that as being in NW.