Lazy and Crazy!

PI from the air

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth was an excellent documentary that captured the evolution of urban decay. The project started out with 33 brand new buildings funded by the Government for the rural poor to move to the city and have better living conditions. As time moved on and less and less people paid their rent, the projects started to break down, due to lack of maintenance. The housing authority depended on the rent to pay their workers to maintain the grounds. The projects got worse and worse and as they did more people moved out, leaving vacant housing for criminals to move in and destroy the structure and the society that had developed in the projects. By the time the buildings were imploded they had been picked over for anything of value, the windows broken and no amount of maintenance could restore the projects to its original glory.





building C-15

PIM

The Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis, MI was infamously imploded in 1972. According to many advocates, “It became a symbol of how the United States had failed to deal with its urban poor.” I say, “That’s crap.” Those people were given a hand out and destroyed it themselves. The residents are the ones that didn’t watch their kids as they destroyed the elevators and vandalized. The residents thru their garbage all over the site and destroyed it for themselves. We do not live in a socialist society, this is capitalism, and those people should have taken better care of their own living environment.

In the documentary the residents talk about how the police never came, then in a segment later they talked about throwing bottles and bricks from the eleventh floor at the police. I wouldn’t go in there either, if I were a policeman. The whole idea that the US owes its poor something is asinine. If you don’t like where you are at get an education and do something about it. Don’t have five kids, smoke and drink then complain that you have no money and the government owes you this.