ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the living patterns and adaptive styles of the project's lower class Negro inhabitants and describes a housing strategy. In order for the slum poor to achieve their aspirations the condition of poverty itself must be eliminated, and this can be done only through an income strategy as opposed to an approach that stresses provision of special remedial services. The Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project is in St. Louis. Built in 1954, the project was the first high-rise public housing in the city. Lower-class people are forced to live in an environment in which the probability of either becoming involved in such behavior, or being the victim of it, is much higher than it is in other kinds of neighborhoods. It is in terms of two cardinal characteristics of lower-class life—poverty and a potentially destructive community—that lower-class individuals work out their strategies for living.
