Last week I had the privilege of viewing the documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Documentary: an Urban History. Chad Freidrichs’ four-year project masterfully incorporated failed housing policies with the lives of real people trapped inside the structural demons of race and poverty.
I most liked the emotional stories by former residents like Sylvester Brown Jr. and Ruby Russell. Right before your eyes, you witness the beat-down of people and the systematic manipulation of their economic, political, social and psychological well-being.
The documentary provoked my thinking about Pruitt-Igoe, Laclede Town, Team Four, public policy, affordable housing, racism, poverty and urban sprawl. It seems we have learned little from the failed policies, initiatives and projects that tend to segregate people by race or class for the purpose of profit.
When I accuse St. Louis city planners of being racist, creatively-challenged and backward in their vision about urban living, it is not without a history of tangible, damning consequences. I truly understand the complexities cities face, but the intentional moves that are shrouded in race have cost us dearly in dollars, resources, human potential and lives.
Racism causes people to act irrationally, even against their own self-interests. It is a behavioral response that profiteers have counted on for generations. During the days of segregation, realtors played on the fears of white people by steering them into certain neighborhoods to get away from black or poor people who also had been steered towards targeted neighborhoods. We are all pawns in the big game of capital.
But what happened in St. Louis when the steering began to hit walls? White people moved to the suburbs during the 1950s and 1960s. During the oil crisis of the 1970s, some white suburbanites returned to the city, displacing some of the very same black citizens they ran from 10 or 20 years prior. Others moved further west, trying to avoid new upwardly mobile African Americans, who had created the phenomenon of black flight.
These fleeing people are the perpetrators of urban sprawl, created by planners and developers who ring the race bell to summon those with the resources to satisfy an upgrade of the American Dream. The irony is that there is nothing planned about urban sprawl. It shifts people to low-density areas outside of cities under the guise of choice.
Criticism of urban sprawl has been building for years, but it’s intensifying with yet another energy crisis and a new focus on our destruction of the environment. Urban sprawl brings with it higher per capita costs for energy, land and water. It requires the use of cars to travel because people have to drive to get to any place they need to go. It puts an overall drain on resources (especially fuel for transportation), has a negative impact on the environment and results in urban decline. Further problems include inefficient delivery of citizen services and ill-conceived infrastructures.
We all pay the high price for the individualistic actions of urban sprawlers to live in a house on several acres with two or more vehicles in the driveway.
Unless cities innovatively deal with issues of affordable housing, job creation, quality schools and the permeating effects of race and poverty, we cannot have sustainable living areas. To do so requires the seemingly undesirable task of working together to develop a plan that guarantees quality of life for all citizens, promotes the sharing of political and economic power, and makes an ecological commitment to future generations.
In St. Louis, the ghosts of Pruitt-Igoe swirl around City Hall, St. Louis Development Corporation, the Community Development Association and other entities responsible for land use plans. Those ghosts are crying to be put to rest. It is easy to ignore the past and to concentrate on accommodating those with the money. Those people who have been labeled “worthless” while their neighborhoods are “blighted” will still be here. We will always fight for dignity and for the right to a quality life. We will always fight for a better world.
