Why did we build high-rise public housing projects? 

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High-rise public housing projects actually works very well in Asia like China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam. Apartments sold to the middle-class in Asia seemed to create cleaner and safer communities compared to the alley slums of unplanned urbanization.

I grew up in a council house (i.e. UK public housing) and so did most of my extended family. It gave us housing security; a good, responsive landlord; and a sense of community. A police officer lived in one of the houses and conflict resolution usually stopped at talking to someone's mom. All that to say: the problem isn't with public housing whatsoever. It can provide housing at a level and cost that the private sector simply cannot and does not want to, it sets a standard that private landlords have to compete with, and it gives people security and the ability to live near schools, family, services. The US' demonization of projects - at a time where housing is one of the greatest universal issues for its major cities and homelessness/housing insecurity is rampant - is unfortunate and misses the mark. Structural racism, ongoing economic and racial segregation, the distribution of public resources, etc. are and always were the issue. Combined with having a "beggars can't be choosers" approach to public housing - wherein residents are simply expected to accept whatever top-down vision some planner or architect dreams up - those influences doom a growing necessity to failure.

Y’all don’t know high rise housing projects until you’ve seen Singapore

The issue was policing and maintenance, not the projects themselves.

As a city planner in Auckland, New Zealand,I love this series. But to be fair mate, there is nothing wrong with well designed high rises, especially with good proximity to public transport. Brutalism is the problem.

Low rise housing projects wasn't a good idea either.

I would love to live in a high rise, that said, The Projects were some of the ugliest buildings ever built.

In Tukey, if you live in a high rise building close to the city center, it means you are rich. Poor people live in suburbs in detached houses. Only super rich lives in detached houses which are close to the city center and have a good neighboorhood.

NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) is one of the last to still maintain hi-rise projects (largely because they house a million of the city's 8 million residents), but it is plagued with problems largely because of divestment over the past 30-40 years, sloppy bureaucracy and financial mismanagement. If you live in NYC you know that the City of New York itself is the city's worst slum-lord. We cannot do like other cities did and tear down our hi-rise projects - too many live there - but we need to fix what we have. Looking back in hind-sight, many of the hi-rise projects never should have been built in the first place. Many organic urban communities were destroyed because of that and highway construction.

Tf in eastern europe these housing projects are super common

Whenever there's a plan to help the poor, there will always be predators to take advantage of any loopholes. (edit) "Fun Fact": Ladders from fire trucks can extend no higher than the 8eight floor.

I'm living in a well maintained high rise. The view is awesome and the apartment nice, nothing to complain about. If you don't maintain the building and utilities, put *only* lowest income families together who are already struggling to survive, well that's just a recipe for disaster. Nothing to do with the actual high rise, though.

You forgot the car. You can't live in a suburb without one and the rise of car ownership and the suburb are closely related. Cities are always offer major job opportunities, especially for non-educated workers. So where should they live, in slums? High rise housing is just logical if there's no alternative for transportation.

I loved my high rise housing projects --1950s. Marble Hill Projects in the Bronx.. veteran's subsidized originally. It takes a Village. Each building had 14 floors. Neighbors looked after each other. We had elevators.. though they frequently broke down. Over years, the projects became multi-cultural.

American city planning seems to mesh with racism frequently

Public housing buildings are usually built with shitty materials that fall apart: 1. The bricks aren't fired long enough, so they crack in the winter. 2. The walls are cinderblock, and the builders don't bother to drywall. 3. The windows are made of cheap metal, so they get stuck. 4. The building is placed far from the sidewalk, so it's isolated.

I've lived in nice 6 story apartment buildings in the Seattle area, and a practical problem not even hinted at with this is the slow elevator problem: to save money, they tend to have horribly inefficient elevators and not enough of them in such places, and that's in "luxury" apartment buildings. I wonder how many and how slow the elevators were in the projects, when they worked? When it's hard to quickly get in and out, human nature is to not do it very often due to too much friction, even if all your neighbors are friendly. The larger and taller a building, the less likely you are to know your neighbors which leads to a lack of social cohesion and friendliness because people only see each other when they have no real choice getting in and out of the building.

But why it didn't work. I was listening the whole time, but you didn't answer it.

I don't think the problem with projects was necessarily form (height/density), but rather context (location/land-use). High-rise public housing can work if it's spread out across various neighbourhoods and integrated with mixed uses (retail, employment, recreation)

The removal of Dad’s by the system helped destroy many of these project communities.Pruitt Igoe in St. Louis initially admitted needy women and children only.

But why do high rises fail? Why can't people live there in peace like in Hong Kong or Singapore? What make Americans (of any race) unable to get along in a high rise situation?

I love my dad for risking his life doing security in these buildings when I was young just to take care of us

When the topic of public housing comes up, I often think about how Singapore did it so successfully when America failed so spectacularly. In Singapore public housing worked due to a combination of good policies. That included highly competent government oversight (the ruling party there prides itself on being known as the ones who housed everyone, so they have a large incentive to maintain the quality of housing), constant upkeep and remodeling, and making its residents buy instead of rent (well, these are technically 99-year leases, but that’s besides the point). Additionally, the government create units in each building that were affordable and desirable to its poor, middle, and upper classes, respectively. Then, when placing people in housing, they made sure it mixed people of different ethnicities (there was a big divide between ethnic Chinese and ethnic Malays in the city at the time) and socio-economic classes were together to prevent certain areas from becoming more desirable than others and ensure social cohesion. The government also worked hard to ensure there were ample public transit connections between the housing projects and places of business, so its residents had ready access to employment. It was as much of a work of social engineering as it was actual engineering. Basically, this is the opposite of what the US government did. Once built, public housing projects were not maintained or policed. These projects were often built in the peripheries of cities, and without decent public transportation. This, combined with most of its residents already being poor blacks, and this invariably helped perpetuate the cycle of poverty. The projects became seen as a place of crime, drug use, and poverty. America’s history or racism and classism lead to the belief that these projects were a failure due to the failures and inferiority of its residents, ignoring the absolutely awful government planning and mismanagement that went into creating the projects and subsequently leading them to fall into decay. Though, in defense of city governments, the decay of public housing also coincided with huge budget crises of the 1960’s and especially the 1970’s, where deindustrialization and white flight turned cities like Detroit from a vibrant manufacturing center to, well, Detroit. The federal government did little to help. America just seems to always fail at implementing large scale social welfare programs, or only ever commits to them half-heartedly. Luckily today, there seems to be some progress being made with housing. It’s becoming increasingly popular for the government to subsidize private housing developers to create affordable housing units. These are usually built as low-rise condos or town homes and are integrated into more affluent/middle class communities, or for every few normal housing units, one unit is an affordable unit. These units are actually quite nice, if modest, and are designed to blend into their communities, rather than be towering eyesore that advertise to everyone “the poor live here.” For Americans it seems, affordable housing is more achievable when done quietly through government subsidies to private developers than when done as massive public works projects.

You glossed over the part of why they failed. There was stigma by non public housing recipients, causing the building to be occupied by only low income residents. This increased disrepair and crime. High rises were not the problem. The lack of integration to the community was the problem. Subsidized high rise buildings with minimum % of section 8 distributed throughout would be a much better solution. Furthermore, residents that escaped the need for public housing would need to leave their existing community to find new housing. Upward mobility in the same neighborhood is an important part of building a strong community.

Singapore was successful in their high rise housing. Seems the US and the UK merely failed to implement what to do next: integrate these housing projects to mass transit and build amenities and accompanying facilities nearby.

Looks like Soviet apartment blocs

Well, to be fair. Le Corbusier was a little out of place with his plan of Paris. Basically he wanted to demolish all the city center...

You didn't really make clear what's supposedly bad about high rise buildings.

While US gave up on high rise resident buildings, Hong Kong embraces it.

The video explained why they were built, but made it sound like hi-rise public housing is somehow inevitably doomed to failure, which is absolutely not the case...

I was listening the whole way through and I still didn't get a straight answer.

Not exactly a"deluxe apartment in the sky"

I'm currently reading a book called "The Color of Law" which covers a lot about housing and segregation during this period. Recommend to anyone who's wants to get into more detail.

As a modernist fan it always frustrates me how Jencks among other postmodernists did such a good job of connecting all the problems of social housing of the time: The crime and state of dilapidation to modernist principles and design rather than real causes like segregation, lack of investment, wide unemployment in the 70s, shoddy craftsmanship etc

Mixed housing and mixed use can create a community that works.

High rise buildings are nice, if they are about 10 to 20 levels, and very *well spaced from other buildings.* 4 large trees between the buildings is nice to have too !

One thing the execution of the housing towers project towers was poor. The high rise complexes that were built lacked a lot of the features of Le Corbusier's original concept. Instead boring buildings that were pretty much warehouses for people were built and they were poorly policed and maintained.

I love this type of housing structure, in places like Spain for example its beautiful. Its all about keeping the peace in this type of environment for it to work well.

I lived in the Robert Taylor projects. My family moved in a year after they were built, I think 1962. I have wonderful memories. Both my parents lived in those slummed neighborhoods as kids prior to the buildings being built. We did move out long before the demolition. The building that I lived in was the very first building torn down.

High-rise Housing is a good idea that was poorly implemented

It wasn't designed to fail- it failed because all the authorities wanted it to fail.

The reason the projects got demolished was crime, crime, crime,because in the sixties they were shooting at the police from the top floors ,some people has to ruin it for others.

It sounded like the biggest issues was funding if they went with the cheapest option. They also didn't have the funding to maintain them so if something broke it was broke for a long time. Also, with so many people in such a tight space, I bet there was a long waiting list to get anything done.

5:44 Wonder if this was part of the reason Kendrick's dad moved out of Chicago. "He came from the streets the Robert Taylor Homes Southside Projects, Chiraq, the Terror Dome Drove to California with a woman on him and 500 dollars" - Kendrick Lamar; Duckworth

There are thousands of high rise apartment buildings in Japan (and in Manhattan too), and there are no problems. I think the real problem is the income of the people living in them. Moving them from the slums to apartments does not change their attitude or improve their economic situation.

I love living in my high rise building in Switzerland. I have a great view, cool and fresh air and because there are many people here, there is good connectivity by road and many shops close by. Although there are a couple other high rise buildings in the vicinity it is not like those blocks but rather with varying heights and shapes. I think that makes a big difference.

Great video! I grew up West of the Chicago suburbs in the '90s, so I've always heard about what a terrible idea high rise public housing was and what a lasting, damaging effect it had on society. My dad (who went to architecture school at one point) had no shortage of ideas about how to improve public housing. I don't live in public housing, but my current housing situation is quite similar to the ideas he described. It's a small complex of low-rise buildings in a decent neighborhood, not far from the center of town. The buildings are well-constructed, but they're obviously old, so rent is super low. We're a mixed tenant population (both ethnically and demographically) and we all hold jobs. It's not a perfect arrangement by any means, but we make it work. I hope the current public housing model provides individuals and families with a similar quality of life.

Down with low-income, high rise, public housing projects, and welcome over priced, high-rise condominiums.

The housing projects that Good Times was set in, was also torn down, many years ago.

Instead of public housing apartments for rent, we should build subsidized condos for purchase.

These ugly high rise houses literally are the same as what China built through 1950~2000, not as public housing, but as mid-end private residencies. Most of them survive today, and quite a sight to behold. Do a video on China please~

I LOVE videos like this, it gives a glimpse into history, even if some parts of it aren't as comfortable as we would like it to be. Thank you very much for making these.

Very nice video. Want to share some info: I live in Moscow, Russia. Hi-rise buildings were a standard in USSR like one-family houses was a standard in US. But in our case, soviet hi-res buildings didn't become ghettos and are still most common housing solution. The reason for that is, well, there was no house market in USSR ( people waited for years to get flat from state for free), and inhabitants of one building could be from different social stratas. In one building there could live scientists, military officers, workers, alcoholics and antisocial people, people of different nationalities , and people of different age. There could be better micro district, there could be worse micro districts, but, in general, the quality of life was the same.(1990-1998 was a shit time for Russia, but I remember how i was shocked as a kid, how horrible cities were in American movies and how "Candy" beautiful suburbs were ). But now, the situation is changing. Our house development companies went crazy and started to ignore soviet building standards: thinking about profit, they started to build tall houses very close to each other and they don't care about infrastructure (I live in 8 floor tall house in a micro district build in 1960, and i love the fact that everything i need is in 5-10 walk minute, including subway). People buy those flats, but in time, those micro districts will become ghettos... Check this out: varlamov.ru/ 2225584.html varlamov.ru/ 1845663.html I personally believe, that city, as a complex system, should have different housing solution. The majority of resident house should be medium (4-7 floor tall), as they have best personal comfort/city efficiency balance. But there is a place for big and tall apartment complexes and areas for single-family houses.

At 4:01. You can see my apartment in the very far upper-right hand corner of this video! That's pretty cool! :D Also, these high-rise housing projects in Two Bridges in Manhattan are not dangerous--the vast majority of the inhabitants there are harmless elderly people. I cross these green parks all the time when I need to go grocery shopping, so Le Corbusier was correct on that count. Having such large swathes of greenery in the middle of the busy, gray city is nice, especially for the old folks who like to while away the time on benches.

This just shows you no matter how much you give and help out others refuse to help themselves nothing will ever change

Thank you for : 1. Not putting terrible dubstep/music over everything. 2. Being clear in speech That is all. Video is great! I live in Denmark, so why should I give a F' about this topic? I don't know! You made it interresting and I feel wiser after seeing this video - so thanks :)

1:59 It's official, 1949 had the best neckties.

Honestly, having 4 stories or 5 floors (ground level + 4 levels above that, optionally another level below to make it 6 floors/levels, with 1m tall windows on the top of the wall, for the building's utilities to get some natural light, for when maintenance and repairs are needed) is the best, because you don't need an elevator. Sure, an elevator helps, but even without it you can still get from the top level to the bottom level. Also, they should have a thick metal roof (which should be either aluminium or weathering steel, with the weathering steel much cheaper than the aluminium and they're both rust-resistant). A few buildings should be allowed to have 10 or 15 stories (levels above the ground) The roof doesn't even need to be big enough to fit underneath it, but you can make it as the 4th level if you want, and sell less units due to reduced space, but instead give those at least one of those units a view of the whole city and the rest of the units a view of two halves of the city with the side parts not visible. Ideally have the balcony with windows from half the height of the wall to the top of the wall near where the wall meets the roof, and have them open and have clothes lines so you can dry your clothes in the sun, have the balconies larger so people can sunbath there or stay under direct sunlight while still staying inside your house, and so people can grow food there with room to move between layers of crops on both sides. Oh, and use reflective-metal pipes going from the side walls to the inside of the rooms with frosty plastic and a slider which can cover the frosty plastic, to have "sun tunnels" or use natural sun to light up the interior when its sunny outside, to save up on lighting inner rooms like the toilet or the hall, and for the stairway used by the whole building you can have a large plastic lens and a large pipe going from the roof top to the underground, with the same system of frosty windows on each level illuminating from the top of the stairway and from right underneath the stairway for the other stairway. At most, you might need 2 such sun tunnel pipes for the stairway, one for each side, to make sure both sides get enough sunlight to not need other lights during the day, and you can have a tiny solar panel which to keep the electric lights turned off at night and which to turn them back on when it gets dark. And you can also zone the ground level as a commercial area, or at least zone an area right around the building as commercial area while still allowing the commercial area to be technically part of the same building or using the same wall even if you need to have a thicker wall to have both the thickness of the residential area and the thickness of the commercial area added together, so you can have shops on the ground floor so people can buy their groceries from there, so they don't need a car to get the daily necessities. Oh, and all commercial structures which require heating or baking things would require to have two heat pipes going to the top floor, one outside the city block for use in the summer, or when hot-enough, and another one inside the city block for use in the winter to also heat up some rooms passively. And the air going inside the building should be filtered, including using a water filter (using a pump to send the gas through a pipe spiraling inside a bucket and with tiny holes angled slightly clockwise and towards the outside, to get the gas bubbling, and having it at an angle helps with mixing the gas and water together, to make a sludge which can be harvested and turned into tar or something else, as a byproduct of keeping the inside pipes and the air around the building clean. And use cement formed in molds to make the facade (outer shell) of the building look fancy and welcoming, as opposed to a flat wall of the concrete jungle. And the facade doesn't even need to be thick, it can be at most 5 cm or 2 inch in thickness, if using plastic fibers to keep it together (i.e. a plastic-wire mesh acting like an armature), for the bigger pieces (i.e. the whole level or more), or half of that (2.5 cm or 1 inch) for smaller pieces (i.e. strips around 2x4 yards or 2x4 meters or smaller). Each building can have a different set of facades, even if the only difference between two nearby buildings is one of the molds for the facades having a different model, or part of a mold being different (if the molds are modular, i.e. screwing them together before the waxing/oiling/vaselineing/lubing before the pour). This is how city blocks could be made to feel welcoming again. And they could still be made to look unique, by varying the colors of some parts, without altering the structure by much. i.e. one building could have the accents made with cement which looks like granite, another one with cement which looks like marble (including the marbling in both), yet another one made to look like dolomite, another one made to look and add a bit of cement pigments to the mixture, and you get even more possible variety. And if you use different cement mixtures for different depths of the mold, and let them cure (at least partially) before adding more cement, you can get even more color variety, especially if you also angle the molds to get some other parts colored, like adding highlights and shading to the pieces (i.e. a brighter color towards the sky and a darker color towards the ground). And being able to customize the outside of the building could help give the residents a sense of belonging, a sense of being part of a community, and maybe encourage them to help make or maintain the outside of the building. Getting the whole building re-painted every decade or so wouldn't cost that much, and repairing the broken parts would help spot problems before they become too big.

Tell the truth.. They wanted the best way to keep “minorities” condensed in one area and from reaching/spreading into the suburbs… So it’s better UP than OUT…. Same pattern in most big inner city low income developments..

Modernism isn't so bad, but modernist buildings have never been maintained very well. And unlike older buildings, they do not age well.

Good history lesson, but you make it seem as though the new “mixed income” developments that replaced them solved all the housing problems. In essence, developers eyeing the prime real estate the projects were sitting on were able to make huge profits by leasing apartments to upper middle class white families, while only a fraction of the original, poor, black families living there were able to re-integrate into the buildings. Most of them fell through the cracks and had to relocate to other parts of the city.

I always wondered why the projects very rarely have fire escapes? Its almost as if they want them to be unable to get out in emergency situations... smh

So the problem is not « Corbu », “modernism” or whatever style. But the lack of funding for public social housing. Thanks for the clear demonstration.

At 6:14 thanks for including the Hawthorne Park area in Philadelphia in this video. It's an excellent example of what the original public housing should have been. There used to be high rise public housing on this site but like all of it's day, it fell to neglect and crime and was demolished in 1999. Planners built new homes to match those of the houses already in existence and mixed both public and private housing to mix up the classes. That neighborhood is beautiful and you'd never know most of those homes were public housing. That is how it should have gone in the early 1900s.

I found this video to be quite informative. I have recently for the first time found it necessary to move into public housing and yes I agree that it is intended for middle class people who are struggling thankfully I qualified because up to that point I and my six-year-old was sleeping on the floor at of my adult children's home until I was able to get back on my feet so I very much appreciate this opportunity for a fresh start... God Bless America 🇺🇸

Am I the only one that’s gets chills when I think about Cabrini greens

New Orleans just finished knocking down the last of the low rises and replaced them with really nice looking townhouses. The old ones looked pretty bad and you tended not to want to walk back there. The new ones appear to be inviting. Hope they stay that way.

theres still hundreds of housing projects throughout the 5 boroughs of NYC and I doubt they're going anywhere. It helps keep the homeless rate down

High rise public housing still is around in New York

University of Oregon has always (since its founding in 1914) had its School of Architecture and Allied Arts (now the College of Design) "under one roof".

Holy sh*t! Can you imagine if Le Corbusier's plan for Paris had gone through?

I'm so glad they didn't build that in Paris.

I've always liked the idea of a super-efficient megaplex that mimics the luxuries you might find on a cruise ship, but it would take a lot of QUALIFIED PEOPLE, such as hospital staff, police, garbage, utilities, engineers, etc. to maintain, plus an ultra-robust monorail system that can transport people, garbage, goods, etc. It'd also need a large solar farm with batteries, as well as parking for all those people, which means it wouldn't be as land or money-efficient as you'd initially think. Advantages: Less travel distance to work if you're a specialist, monorail can do the work of hundreds of trucks and hundreds of cars, cars see less use, meaning they break less and chew up less gas, utilities are ultra-efficient, no lost water pressure or electricity due to distance traveled, emergency response times would be SECOND TO NONE, distance to education = phenomenal, parks, etc., all walking distance. Projects don't have ANY OF THESE specialists or facilities. Imagine a game of Sim City where all you did was zone residential and give it power and water. No wonder projects became slums. It's inevitable.

I grew up in a high-rise or as we call it in Sweden "miljonprogramsområde" that was planned in a such way that the streets between the apartments were car-free filled with only pedestrian routes. The apartments were built on an evelated ground so the underground section of the apartment was really a huge garage to fit in all 7k residents' cars and motor vehicles. Eventhough I'm not a fan at all of high-rise housing projects I must acknowledge the fact that the area where I grew up was planned in a great way to allow people to meet and greet and socialize everyday. Between each row of apartment blocks, parks and recreation areas were available. You could cycle through the entire apartment complex area without having to cross a single automotive road and just to the outskirts of the complex were forests and a local shore with a marina. The area is called Fisksätra, it lies on the outskirt of Stockholm and was built in the 70's as a part of the Swedish government's million programme intitiative with the intended purpose to build 1 million residential apartments within 10 years. This area does not ofc have a great reputation after all since it's a social housing area, but now after watching this video i realized how well-planned it was in terms of accessibility and maintenance.

Fantastic video. They are all simple to understand, plus educational, and I'm very interested in learning about all these topics that you talk about. Great job

I disagree. We need to bring them back BUT they need to be for more than just the poor. They failed because concentrating poor people into a small area destroys the local economy. Without money to spend business can’t stay open. Without tax revenue local government can’t fund public services. You need to mix the wealth.

I feel this video tries to blame “high rises” as the source of the problem, but the high rises themselves were never the problem, the issue is how they were managed. Low income minority groups were concentrated in these buildings that were poorly taken care off creating a sense of isolation and possibly even rejection from the rest of society. If these buildings and their communities were better integrated and more diverse, ie. with a more balanced mix of black, whites and other populations, from various income levels, it would have been a very different story. This project failed because this is what happens when you try to segregate people. How tall the buildings actually are is quite irrelevant.

Damn we been done dirty always. Good video brother!

How about a video about the (possibly European style?) low-rise apartment blocks with stores on the first floor that seem to be appearing in American cities en masse nowadays?

Thank you for this video. Many white people have believed for decades that black people *chose* to live in these places. As if we don’t want safe neighborhoods and middle class living. White flight and redlining are still issues today. I did not find out until after the fact, but my elderly realtor ushered me and my husband to the black side of our suburban area. She was strategic about it. It was redlining, but we didn’t realize it.

project pat: I WAS RAISED IN THE PROJECTS, PROJECTS.🌃🌆🌇

Great vid! I want to see what else you got on this channel. I see this vid sparked a lot of convo and debate. You have a new sub

I see a lot of people immediately saying these people have affinity to crime. They don’t understand the psychological effects of placing people in such close proximity that are already at a social economic disadvantage is a recipe for destitution. This was called a “project” for a reason, people should think about that statement imagine living and raising multiple generations in these conditions.

Ah you forgot how government initially got those white families into the suburbs not their money or a want to leave the city and what really kept other races out of the suburbs. If this video is ever revamped or updated a good resource is "The Color of Law" by Richard Rothstein. Other wise it was informative.

I just discovered this channel and omg love it!! Gah I have so much to watch and learn now lol.

Everything and everyone is to blame, except for the residents themselves.

Simple, they housed high volumes of people in a relatively compact area. That's without even watching the film yet.

I love your videos, so much to learn and interesting :)

What it turned out to be, is that these towers were intended to house the low to middle classes of society but in the end, turned out to house only the poorest people who often were minorities. As they weren't maintained and policed as well as they should have been by the government agencies set-up to support them, they fell into disrepair. Couple that with crime that set-up in the towers (crime that overall is generally higher in areas where people are struggling financially) and you have a situation that turns a "government good idea" (oxymoron) into one that became blight within major metro areas. As middle and middle-upper class (mostly white) residents at the time moved to the suburbs, the tax base shrank and cities found themselves in worse shape financially. Cut the tax revenue and services get cut like funding for schools, libraries, cleaning initiatives and public housing upkeep. The low-rise "projects" of the time weren't ideal either through most of this period, consisting of boxed buildings, usually brick construction with little to no streets (because why would poor people that are living in public housing need cars to get to work) and courtyards that became hang-outs for unsavory characters. All the housing units looked the same without townhome character and they tend to look very much like playground/recreation center buildings and often were adjacent to a public park of some type. The newer designs in cities like Philadelphia are actually of nice design and fit in much better with the aesthetics of the surrounding neighborhood(s). I joked with my wife that the ones adjacent to I-76 in S/SW Philadelphia were a nicer design than other town homes being built in the region for hundreds of thousands.

Excellent vid, saw this in my feed and clicked. Subbed.

Just saw this video and I would love to see a version of this based on New York/Brooklyn/Queens models. They are one of the few places where projects are still unchanged

cool history, but i fail to see how the high rise is responsible for the crime and deplorable conditions of the PJs. i stayed down the street from a 2 story low rise PJs in my early 20s and they were just as gang infested and violent. i have been to East St. Louis in some low rise PJs and there were murders there almost daily. im curious as to the explanation that the height of the building somehow affects the behavior of the occupants. in many cities around the world people live in high rises but they dont turn to sellin dope and bangin. in New York, San Fran, Austin etc people pay top dollar to live in a high rise building. if anyone has any input on that feel free to HMU.

Id rather live in public housing than homeless.

The problem with Prewitt Igoe was loss of maintenance due to white flight. Sufficient security and maintenance staff, what a concept.

Me: sitting at my 27th floor in Russian new "ecological district" and watching this video Also me: that's fine, just don't open the window

Throughout Eastern Europe; public housing was almost exclusively high-rise, yet there are no "ghettos" to speak of.

In general don't we want to increase urban density, decrease urban sprawl, and make more compact walkable mixed use cities?

It's crazy how much racism is engrained into US society. I have watched a wide range of City Beautiful videos and I can't tell you how many times I've seen racism playing a part in city planning. It's no surprise that things still haven't changed, even today.

Meanwhile, high-rise public housing works pretty well in many countries in Asia. lol