"Pat" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@s80g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
The problem isn't the architecture or the planning. You have to
> remember "The Golden Rule" which says "He who has the gold, makes the > rules".
That might be "The Gold Rule", but "The Golden Rule" is "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you".
> In public housing -- or almost all housing -- EVERYTHING is driven by
> the money. Want highrises, set your funding/scoring to make that
> advantageous. Don't want them, do the opposite. A funding agency
> could get purple buildings that are round have yellow ooze coming out
> of them if they set the fund priorities right. And a developer could
> find an architect to design it if he paid them. Good projects don't
> get funded, highly scoring ones do. That is why the all are the same
> and have the same problems. That is what scored high at the time.
> Now they are ripping them down -- guess why. Now there's a program
> for that (called HOPE VI). It isn't "show me the money". It is
> "follow the money".
>
> Okay Don, you can now rant about your tax dollars being hard at work.
> But that's life.
>
>
> Michael Bulatovich wrote:
>> >
>> > Tim wrote:
>> > Here's some reading:
>> > American Project . The Rise and Fall of Modern Ghetto
>> > ISBN 0-674-00321-7
>> >
>> > Preface begins, "The idea for this book began taking shape in 1990,
>> > when I was conducting interviews for a research project...I came to
>> > the University of Chicago to begin graduate studies in the
>> > department of Sociology." Author is Indian, born in Madras.
>> >
>> > I, myself, am not surprised your social worker doesn't like public >> > housing.
>> > I've worked as an architect around housing projects by Davis Brody,
>> > Charles Moore, Louis Sauer, and the nameless. The more successful
>> > dense solutions were for upper income types. Scattered site housing
>> > seemed to work best for lower income folk.
>>
>> Amen. I can't believe we're still having this discussion. The motives
>> of the architects, and anybody else involved, are ultimately
>> unknowable, and probably not very important, unless it's part of a
>> plea agreement.
>>
>> Almost all the slums we have in TO are institutionalized slums run by
>> the government. That they thought they were doing a good thing back
>> in the 50's or 60's doesn't change the fact that they were disasters.
>> The architecture was only a part of the problem. The planning was the
>> bigger part, IMHO.
>>
>> Once public, there was no way for the market to change the pattern of
>> poverty and crime, and it looked like we were stuck with them
>> forever. In a confession of the failure, local government has now
>> approved the systematic demolition and re-development of our biggest
>> and oldest, publicly owned slum to mixed use (private-public,
>> residential-commercial) *on* the city grid :
>>
>>
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