ABSTRACT
The Pruitt-Igoe projects were planned in the early 1950s and first occupied in 1954. Originally the city's plan was to build two segregated projects, Pruitt for Negroes and Igoe, across the street, for whites. The description of Pruitt-Igoe which follows is not offered as typical of the lower-class world; no other public housing project in the country approaches it in terms of vacancies, tenant concerns and anxieties, or physical deterioration. Despite the world of troubles that Pruitt-Igoe and the ghetto generally present to their inhabitants, systematic observation of family life in the community impresses the observer also with its ordinariness. The basic pattern of life is simply the ordinary American way of family living. Pruitt-Igoe has a rather unusual demographic structure. The principal methods of research in Pruitt-Igoe were participant observation and intensive, repetitive, open-ended interviewing. The bulk of the data was collected from the summer of 1963 through the summer of 1966.
