6. Crisis in Urban Housing Projects (1978)
In the mid-twentieth century, cities across the country built giant public housing projects to house low-income residents. The goal was to replace deteriorating slums that had traditionally housed the urban poor. Notably, suburbs were largely successful in fighting efforts to build public housing outside of inner cities, and by the 1960s and 1970s, complexes were typically heavily racially segregated. Additionally, gathering the poor in high-rise apartments concentrated the problems associated with extreme poverty in one densely packed location. The problems of entrenched poverty only got worse with deindustrialization and the collapse of urban economies. As a result, housing projects became riddled with gang activity, drug dealing, and violence, and were deployed as symbols of the failure of government anti-poverty efforts. The problems in Boston’s Columbia Point Housing Project were explored in this 1978 episode of The MacNeil Lehrer Report entitled “What to Do with the Failures in Public Housing: Fix Them Up, or Tear 'Em Down?"
6. Crisis in Urban Housing Projects (1978)
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05:47 - 06:06
The changing racial composition of Columbia Point is corroborated by data from other sources. According to US Census data, 91% of residents in Columbia Point were white in 1960; by 1970, that figure fell to 39%
06:06 - 06:15
The Columbia Point projects continued their deterioration after this 1978 report. In 1986, the complex was destroyed, succumbing to the same fate as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and Cabrini Green in Chicago, other massive public housing complexes that were destroyed after they had become dens of crime, drug use and intense poverty. Redevelopment on Columbia Point included new market-rate, lower-rise housing developments, luxury apartments, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.
06:30 - 06:43
The same assertion about the practices of the Boston Housing Authority was leveled in the Boston Globe during the 1960s. Writer Richard Hurt identified “a disproportionate assignment of problem families to (Columbia Point’s) apartments. The Boston Housing Authority officially denies a policy of shunting the more unfortunate families into certain projects, but a person in a responsible position in the authority confirmed that such a practice does, in fact, exist.”
09:40 - 09:41
For more information on Columbia Point, consult Jane Roessner’s 2017 book, A Decent Place to Live: From Columbia Point to Harbor Point: a Community History.
The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; "What to Do with the Failures in Public Housing: Fix Them Up, or Tear 'Em Down?" | NewsHour Productions| April 3, 1978 This video clip and associated transcript appear from 4:19 - 9:41 in the full record.