High-Rise Housing

Historical Background

High-rise housing has been regarded as a type of public housing ever since the first low-income public housing appeared in the United States during the 1920s. It had multiple units, each sharing one building entrance with the other households, and repetitive unit layouts with limited unit sizes. In fact, the first type of multifamily housing with the appearance of high-rise housing was developed in the 19th century. Called tenements, they were not necessarily high-rise housing, but in many metropolitan areas, such as New York, Chicago, and Detroit, tenements were high-rise buildings. Tenements were very popular among laborers working in downtown areas at the time. Later, tenement designs evolved to include various types of multifamily housing, such as apartment hotels.

In 1949, Congress revised the public housing program under the Housing and Redevelopment Act of 1949. This legislation encouraged urban renewal that replaced obsolete low-income housing located in inner cities with a new type of modern high-rise housing. Public housing authorities took a leading role in supplying more rental housing units for low-income families who wanted to live and work in inner cities and provided high-rise housing that offered more housing units in limited lots. In New York City, a great number of high-rise housing superblocks for low-income families were constructed in this period.

In the 1950s after World War II, federal and municipal governments actively planned to supply a greater quantity of housing stock for returning veterans and low-income households. High-rise housing was considered the best option to achieve this goal. The choice of high-rise housing seemed to work well until one of the notorious high-rise public housing complexes was found to be a place of extreme vandalism. The Pruitt-Igoe apartment complex in [Page 263]St. Louis, consisting of 33 11-story buildings, was at first highlighted as an innovative design that showed French architect Le Corbusier's vision of the “tower in the park.” In fact, this project design, completed in 1950 by architects George Hellmuth and Minoru Yamasaki, won several design awards. During construction of this complex, however, the public housing authority reduced the original budget, and a lot of site amenities were removed from the plan instead of decreasing the number of housing units. Consequently, the completed apartment complex ultimately provided minimal amenities for residents and looked like a dehumanized gray superblock. Furthermore, there was no consideration of the children living in this superblock. For instance, there was no restroom accessible from the playgrounds.

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