The public housing units themselves have frequently become slums and hotbeds of crime, especially juvenile delinquency. The most dramatic case was the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis—a massive apartment complex covering fifty-three acres that won an architectural prize for design. It deteriorated to such an extent that part of it had to be blown up. At that point only 600 of 2,000 units were occupied and the project was said to look like an urban battleground.
