In 1956, the federal government opened thirty-three eleven-story towers in St. Louis. By 1972 the city was dynamiting them on live television. Sixteen years. That is the lifespan of one of the most celebrated public housing projects in American history, a complex that won an architecture award from the same profession that designed it.
Pruitt-Igoe cost about $36 million to build, funded under the Housing Act of 1949 and the dreams of planners who believed you could engineer the poor into prosperity by stacking them in concrete. Minoru Yamasaki drew the towers (he later designed the World Trade Center, which also came down on television, though that is another story). The men who approved the project answered to no price signal, no profit, no loss. They spent other people's money on buildings nobody chose to live in voluntarily, then acted surprised when the tenants treated the property accordingly.
Here is what central planning cannot solve: nobody owned the place. Not really. The residents rented from a housing authority that collected rents capped by law and below the cost of maintenance. So the elevators stopped working. The heating failed. Windows broke and stayed broken. By 1971 occupancy had collapsed to roughly 600 people in buildings designed for 10,000. You do not need a degree in economics to understand a building where the toilets back up and no one is responsible. You need only to have read Mises on property without owners. When the bureaucrat spends appropriated funds, he can never replicate the discipline of an owner facing a balance sheet.
The planners diagnosed the failure as a design problem. Too many high-rises, they said. Not enough community space. They never asked whether the entire model of subsidized, politically administered housing produces exactly these results, because asking that question puts the planner out of a job. Charles Jencks called the 3:32 PM demolition on March 16, 1972 the death of modern architecture.
It was the predictable end of property without owners, paid for by taxpayers who never set foot in St. Louis and were billed anyway.