I guess I didn't know this because I'm still relatively new to town but I was reading a bit about Pruitt-Igoe on wikipedia and then this image caught my attention, particularly the neighborhoods around the projects.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... USGS02.jpg

And then I suddenly realized what this area looks like now:
http://goo.gl/maps/ZEGKN

I thought oh my god this is what we lost? There was an incredibly dense European style neighborhood with great rowhomes once and now there are just suburban style housing projects and barren land. This is the type of housing that would be incredibly desirable today but we cannot restore it because its gone forever. And we let it all be demolished?

And then I remembered the recovery that can be made too. Think Hiroshima:
After the war: http://inapcache.boston.com/universal/s ... h19_35.jpg

Approximately the same area 50 years later:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... aNight.jpg

This is really how one must think about it. Some great social and economic force came and nuked north city, because you honestly can't tell the difference in outcome from one vs the other. Now what are we going to do about it going forward?