The Beginning Of The End Of A Modern Ghetto By Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

U.S. cities experienced rapid growth and change, and also faced new challenges following the end of World War II. The consolidation of ghettos in the inner city and the rise of suburbs are two of the characteristics and problems that consequently arose for U.S. cities. One of the biggest projects created as a solution was the public housing project. These public houses however, although in paper they seemed like a great idea, in practice they actually proved not be such a great project because they brought several tensions and problems to cities and neighborhoods.
Public housing was designed to liberate the city and streets of vagrants and paupers; however, in spite of strong support and investment, in practice it did not achieve that feat. The article The Beginning of the End of a Modern Ghetto by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh discusses the racial and class stereotypes that obscured the way Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes functioned. When it opened in November 1962, Robert Taylor Homes, were twenty-eight sixteen-story buildings containing 4,300 units on Chicago's South Side, and was considered the world's largest public housing project. This demonstrated how much space and money was invested into this public housing project. The managers of the Chicago Housing Authority at first tried to work with the tenants but were quickly overwhelmed by the task of maintaining the enormous physical plant inhabited by thousands of children. The tenant applicant screening committees of managers and tenants eventually stopped meeting, the population grew steadily poorer, and by the 1970s single mothers on welfare made up the majority of the adult residents. This was the beginning of a failed experiment because after this things only worsened. The young...

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...on that was created among suburbs, which was not the ideal everyday life that suburbs were designed to create.
Furthermore, the consolidations of ghettos in the inner city, as well as the rise of suburbs, are just two of the characteristics and problems that consequently arose for U.S. cities following the culmination of the Second World War. Ghettos in the inner cities were not as successful as they were envisioned to be, because in practice they suffered from overcrowdings, poverty, racial tensions, and violence and drugs. Additionally, public housing projects (created to solve problems with poverty and vagrants caused by the rapid growth of cities) ultimately also suffered from the same fate. As for the emergence of suburbs, they also proved not to be quite as successful as envisioned either, because in practice they created segregated cities and communities.