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What's good, y'all, you're listening to Coel switch. I'm Jean Tembee.

If you lived in or near a big city in listening to Coe Switch, I'm Jean Tembe.

If you lived in or near a big city in the United States

over the last two and a half decades,

you have probably seen it, or maybe just heard it?

Today is demolition day at the crew at I go.

High-rise public housing projects being blown up by explosives.

All these buildings crumbling to the ground and giant clouds of dust and smoke,

but it wasn't just the buildings that were blown up,

but also this big audacious dream of social reformers from the early 20th century.

That dream was to make sure that poor and working people in big cities had someplace safe and affordable to live.

10 million American families.

Two-third of the human resources of American democracy are today living in slums. House in very bad conditions and infested with rats, roaches,

that's the way the United States Housing Authority described the state of affairs in the 1930s.

That short film was about the need for this then new idea, public housing, to be subsidized

by the local government and with money from Washington.

New York City was the starting point for this bold new idea.

The city had whole neighborhoods made up a squalid, dangerously overcrowded tenements.

A happy day it is for every family that can escape from the misery of a slum home and environment.

And so, New York built a lot of public housing so that people could escape the misery of

...