“Instead of calling it ‘eminent domain’, now we call it ‘lofts’.”
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this movie all week.
People who know me well know that 1) I’m not a big movie-goer and 2) when I do go to movies, I’m a terrible movie-watcher. However, this past Thursday I was treated to a screening of “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth”, specifically a documentary about a notorious St. Louis housing project and generally a portrait of the North American city during the past half-century. Several former Pruitt-Igoe residents spoke afterwards (to the crowd of 800 squeezed into a tiny chapel on my university campus) about this failed sociological “experiment” that continues to replicate itself on the vast frontier of hopelessness that so often characterizes our response to poverty in these United States. However, as one of the panel members was quick to point out–she had moved into Pruitt-Igoe as a child and, before its widely publicized demolition, responded to calls there as a law enforcement officer–all was not broken dreams and despair inside the walls of these gigantic high-rises. “Poverty never created immorality; poverty created want,” said a sociologist who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Pruitt-Igoe situation. I can’t agree more, and further: allowing poverty in this country is, to me, the greatest sin of all.
The title quote above is attributed to one of the professors in my department, who moderated the panel discussion following the screening. Beyond the obvious cataclysm of poverty and racism to which the movie speaks, there is an overwhelming sense–as the movie draws to a close–that nothing has really changed. That instead of addressing the real problems of class and institutionalized racism headfirst, we are attempting to put a 21st century spin on the same old shit. So now instead of white people bulldozing out to the suburbs, we have selected class of young educated professionals bulldozing into “economically depressed” neighborhoods where their very presence is enough to jack up the property values, only to leave as soon as they have kids.
The particular ways in which white flight have impacted St. Louis are also dealt with in the movie; the city–county divide is still so incredibly stark, it seems almost unreal in the 21st century. In Jonathan Franzen’s first novel, The Twenty-seventh City, he thoroughly explains the (shortsighted) historical decisions that set the stage for the Gateway City’s unique boundaries and zoning laws. Unfortunately, backroom bargains by a few corrupt politicians in the 1800s have led to a world of disastrous fiscal consequences that made things like Pruitt-Igoe possible, and which continue to affect us today.
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