The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments, known together as Pruitt–Igoe (/ˈpruːɪt ˈaɪɡoʊ/), were joint urban housing projects first occupied in 1954 in St. Louis, Missouri, United States.

[1] More recent appraisals have placed a greater emphasis on St. Louis's precipitously declining population, and fiscal problems with the local housing authority.

The same anchor floors were equipped with large south-facing communal corridors called "galleries", as well as laundry rooms and garbage chutes.

[13] In 1947, St. Louis planners proposed to replace DeSoto-Carr, a run-down neighborhood with many black residents, with new two- and three-story residential blocks and a public park.

[14] The plan did not materialize; instead, Democratic mayor Joseph Darst, elected in 1949, and Republican state leaders favored clearing the slums and replacing them with high-rise, high-density public housing.

The approach taken by Darst, urban renewal, was shared by President Harry S. Truman's administration and fellow mayors of other cities overwhelmed by industrial workers recruited during the war.

[18] Pruitt–Igoe was named for St. Louisans Wendell O. Pruitt, an African-American fighter pilot in World War II, and William L. Igoe, a former US Congressman.

[19] Originally, the city planned two partitions: Pruitt for black residents and Igoe for whites,[20] as St. Louis public housing was segregated until 1955.

[21] In 1950, the city picked Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth, an architectural firm based in St. Louis, to design the new public housing complex.

The project was led by architect Minoru Yamasaki, then early in his career,[2] and performed under supervision and constraints imposed by the federal authorities.

[16] Although each row of buildings was supposed to be flanked by a "river of open space",[23] landscaping was omitted from the final plan and few trees were planted.

[26] Even under federal cost-cutting regulations, Pruitt–Igoe initially cost $36 million,[27] 60 percent above the national average for public housing; one factor was the installation of an expensive heating system.

[29] Pruitt–Igoe was officially desegregated by a Supreme Court decision in 1954,[21] and as many as 40 percent of the initial tenants were white,[30] but by the mid 1960s it had become exclusively African American.

[35] Meanwhile, the St. Louis Housing Authority was in the midst of a decades-long problem with inefficient and costly maintenance of its buildings, partly attributed to the power of labor unions.

[33] Its location in "a sea of decaying and abandoned buildings" and limited access to shopping and recreation (ground-floor businesses had been eliminated from the design to save money,[22] and the complex had no public mailbox[37]) contributed to its problems.

[41] The Recession of 1958 led to increased crime, vacancy, and rent delinquency in the development, which cut into the housing authority's revenue.

[42] Increasing vacancy rates set off a feedback loop where the loss of revenue from rent forced the housing authority to curtail maintenance, further reducing the project's desirability.

[6] After 1960, the rental income from Pruitt–Igoe failed to cover the cost of operation, forcing the housing authority to tap into its reserves and causing cutbacks at other developments, which were themselves profitable.

[44] Attempts by local authorities to improve living conditions were handicapped by lack of resources, though numerous programs, including the hiring of private security, rent incentives to attract new tenants, and grants for academic studies, were tried.

[61] The project contained isolated pockets of well-being throughout its worst years, and apartments clustered around small, two-family landings with tenants working to maintain and clear their common areas were often relatively successful.

[64] Many buildings had been practically ransacked, with broken windows and doors, walls stripped for wire and pipe, and garbage strewn about the site.

They hoped that a gradual reduction in population and building density could improve the situation; by this time, Pruitt–Igoe had consumed $57 million, an investment which they felt could not be wholly abandoned.

[27] Authorities considered different possibilities for rehabilitating Pruitt–Igoe, including conversion to a low-rise neighborhood by collapsing the towers down to a few floors to reduce the density.

[77] An urgent care center named after the former Homer G. Phillips Hospital was built in 2022,[78] but restrictions related to the construction of a new headquarters for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on an adjacent lot were reportedly stalling the redevelopment of the site.

[81] In 1951, before construction had finished, an Architectural Forum article lauded Yamasaki's original proposal,[5] praising the layout as "vertical neighborhoods for poor people",[8] and Yamasaki biographer Paul Kidder appraised it as "an amazingly ambitious effort to turn the embarrassment of tenement squalor in a great American city into something decent and good".

[85] The landscaping intended to make Pruitt–Igoe "towers in the park" was cut from the final plan, and the surrounding area subsequently turned to wasteland.

[1] Pruitt–Igoe served as a case study for Oscar Newman's concept of defensible space, in which structures are laid out so that residents have control and responsibility over their surroundings.

[92] The "mindless concentration on dollar costs" and "voracious and inefficient" local construction industry also contributed to the project's maintenance woes.