In the optimistic days after WWII, big cities built giant urban housing projects to accommodate the poor. For example, Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis was designed by Yamasaki, architect of the World Trade Center, on the most advanced principles of modernism. Obviously, taking poor blacks out of their lead paint-encrusted tenements and raising them in advanced Bauhaus designs would prove the bigots wrong.

Pruitt-Igoe went on to be home to the future Heavyweight Champs Leon and Michael Spinks, before it was blown up in 1972.

These days, big cities don’t want to accommodate the black poor anymore; they want them to leave. The powers that be prefer for poor blacks to leave town with Section 8 rent subsidy vouchers that go further in declining suburbs like Ferguson. For example, Hanna Rosin’s 2008 Atlantic cover story American Murder Mystery documented how homicide rates were declining in central Memphis and rising in inner suburbs due to demolition of old housing projects and subsidized relocation of their tenants out of the city.

Poor blacks are the biggest Hot Potato in modern America. Liberal white urbanites realize today that their ancestors made a terrible mistake in the Postwar era by ceding much of the most valuable urban land in America to poor blacks. So they are offloading poor blacks on the less powerful, such as residents of second rate suburbs and of undistinguished small towns. But for this process, in which trillions of dollars of real estate values are at stake, to proceed smoothly without complaints from the less well connected about what is coming their way, it’s important to Control Discourse, to periodically demonize various minor league white people for engaging in pattern recognition.

If you think intelligently, while everybody else had had crimestop pounded into their heads so all thought shuts down when the topic of race comes up, you can make a lot of money in real estate.

The same dynamic is at work in Ferguson in relation to St. Louis. From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (via Countenance):

Why did the Michael Brown shooting happen here? 8 hours ago • By Jesse Bogan • jbogan@post-dispatch.com Denise Hollinshed • dhollinshed@post-dispatch.com and Stephen Deere • sdeere@post-dispatch.com FERGUSON • Long before the nation rested its collective conscience on the protests along West Florissant Avenue, there was a different mobilization going on. Hundreds of people were moving out of their urban neighborhoods to this north St. Louis County suburb seeking a safe and affordable place to live. They found it in an isolated corner of Ferguson that was flush with sprawling apartment complexes. Far from Ferguson’s leafy residential streets and quaint downtown, many people didn’t even know the apartments were part of the city until young Michael Brown was shot and killed there Aug. 9. But not the police. They knew. After decades of relative calm and stability, the apartments have become a tinderbox for crime. Canfield Green Apartments and the nearby Oakmont and Northwinds complexes are a study of the slow encroachment of poverty and social distress into what had been suburban escapes. Angela Shaver has witnessed that sea change since she moved into Canfield Green Apartments 20 years ago. The state employee said she raised a prom queen there and sent her off to college. There used to be a swimming pool. Now, there’s a bullet hole in the door below her. That shooting, and many others, happened long before all the vigil candles melted in the middle of the street for Brown. Even as Shaver explained the frequency of gunfire, she was cut off by a sudden blast coming from Northwinds Apartments, a hulking spread with more than 400 low-income units. Boom! Shaver paused to listen. No screams. No more shots. She picked up the interview where she’d left off. “I hate to say I got used to them,” she said of the gunshots. Ferguson’s crime and poverty rate is lower than some of the other North County municipalities. But the small southeast corner of the city where the apartments are glows bright red on crime maps.