The 1972 demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe projects in St. Louis was really key to cementing this pathologized view of public housing in the American imagination. The value put on reducing land costs led to a super concentration of units in a single neighborhood and all of this was at odds with what was happening in the neighborhood surrounding it. So you have this rather contrary and ironic outcome of people who are upwardly mobile being forced to move out of public housing to make room for for others. If you look at some of the photographs the aerial photographs of Pruitt-I goe before it was torn down it looks as if aliens could have just essentially placed this right in the middle of an