Quote:
Originally Posted by TakeFive
With Me Context is Everything
America's grand experiment with affordable HUD-funded high rise housing was a utter disaster, most notably in Chicago and St. Louis. They became gang & drug infested prisons for those who lived there. This goes back to the ~1950's.
Thanks to a huge bi-partisan effort tons of money were poured into tearing down all the high rise buildings and replacing them with low rise mixed-income projects. Denver benefitted when it's own HUD mess although low rise was torn down and replaced with new mixed-income low or mid-rise housing.
America has done little to solve its drug and crime problem in the last 70 years and it's now getting worse and worse again.
When dude steals cars etc. in Denver da judge say "don't do that again" and lets dude out of jail. Within 24 hours dude is back to stealing cars etc.
I have no interest in debating conservative vs liberal but I can proclaim that subsidized affordable high rise housing will never happen; it's a non-starter.
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Sorry, but you can't come onto a forum about urban development and spout such ill-informed nonsense without being called out on it. The complete failure of the American public housing of the 1950s was a result of the racist, segregationist social programs of the time. The drug use and crime were merely a symptom of this failure and their problems were ultimately rooted in economic and social isolation and lack of social support. They failed just as much because they were in food deserts and had no jobs nearby as they did because of drug-crazed criminals.
As an example the Cabrini-Green homes in Chicago, one of the most notorious public housing "disasters", was the subject of Gautreaux vs. the CHA and eventually ended up in a consent decree because it was conceived and run to concentrate poor minorities. That case didn't make its way through the Supreme Court until 1976, and as a result most of the large urban housing authorities went into consent decrees and began tearing down and revamping their public housing. From that point onward concentrating poor people was illegal, because poverty and crime are understood to be self-perpetuating and the state should not take part in that system. So the isolated towers were torn down and replaced by mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods. Like the ones in Denver.
The disaster was not a result of crime or drugs. It was the result of racism and discrimination both racial and economic.
We could still build larger, higher public housing. It is possible. Unfortunately it seems like a majority of Americans only pay attention to the information hand fed to them and struggle to fact check or question the "news" - and so much like people now have been convinced that current crime rates are equal to what they were a generation ago, most people are convinced that it was the "high rise" part of the projects that caused problems. So you're right that we probably won't build any ever again. Or at least until the generations that had first-hand knowledge have passed.
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