To top it, security cameras are not put where they are most needed i.e. Stairwells are the unsafest places in this public housing project yet impossible to avoid due to regularly malfunctioning elevators. Moreover, the constant presence of rifles and guns creates a dangerous environment for residents and officers alike. Residents were moved by this shooting but they weren’t shocked they had been complaining about the conditions for years.ĭark stairwells and neglected conditions make fertile ground for crime to sprout, and this is exactly what happened. This statement cannot be truer for a place where no one cared to fix a lightbulb until an officer shot a man in an unlit stairwell. “Work does not get done until someone gets killed.” Earl Greggs, who lives on the 3 rd floor, reveals the extent of negligence that the housing project suffers: Patrol officers and cooks at the nearby restaurants are the only people with jobs. The project is isolated from the urban fabric and hence completely neglected by the city. Thereupon, Charles Jencks, an architectural historian, regarded Pruitt Igoe’s doom as a failure of architecture to solve social problems. In 1976, the municipality demolished the housing on live media. This event marked a major call for demolition. One time, loud gags echoed from the buildings as faulty plumbing broke, letting all raw sewage loose on the hallway walls and floors. Skip-stop elevators stopped every 3 floors, making the stairwells an opportunity to rob residents as they moved between the elevator floors. The government didn’t assist, and the public didn’t care.īy the mid-’60s, the crime rate greatly soared while living conditions declined. Heaters, toilets, garbage incinerators, electricity, all started malfunctioning. Thereafter, the project became hard to maintain. Within a decade, just the poor black tenants inhabited Pruitt-Igoe. However, the project seemed to offer every luxury that slums lacked: electricity, plumbing, green spaces, etc. Restricted budgets resulted in poor building quality and cheap fixtures. These public housing buildings appeared utterly alien to the surrounding low-lying buildings. Thus, they erected 33 racially segregated 11-storey high-rises on 230,000 m 2 cleared of the city fabric. Japanese-American architect, Minoru Yamasaki, first proposed a mixed-rise cluster of buildings, but the public housing administration objected to its pricing and insisted on building cost-cutting uniform towers. The last high-rise bits came down in 2011, but we still don’t know if the housing authority kept its promise of finding new homes for the residents. “a virtual war zone, the kind of place where little boys were gunned down on their way to school and little girls were sexually assaulted and left dead in the stairwells” – USA Todayįinally, in the late ’90s, the government issued orders to demolish these public housing buildings and set a new program. Since then, Cabrini-Green made the greatest record of poverty-stricken crime conditions than any of Chicago’s housing projects. Crime soared further with working residents becoming unemployed as the nearby factories closed. More tenants became fearful to leave their homes. Gangs took over public spaces and drug dealers started preying on the young. All kinds of social ills spread throughout the complex in no time. Dumpsters started overfilling and no one cared to fix anything. Due to the racial biases in Chicago at the time, the maintenance funds were denied and deterioration furthered. Cost-reducing measures taken during construction led to quick deterioration.Īlthough original residents were the Italian families (who inhabited the land before), the housing later became exclusively black. The project was a symbol of hope for mitigating slum life but soon became a high-rise slum itself. The government prioritized the poorest people, including single mothers and the homeless, to access housing.
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