While indeed in desperate straights, the city was not to be utterly abandoned. A great many vital functions were still performed there. Recognizing this, the Federal government was involved in alleviating housing shortages in the city, and with huge redevelopment projects that were often intended to "shore up" institutions rooted in the city.
	One form of federal involvement was in the misguided construction of housing projects. Again, this can be seen as an attempt by a seemingly-omnipotent post-war Federal government, brimming with optimism and tax money, to redress complex, sedimented problems. It was convinced it could build its way out of the historical legacy of slavery and refashion the place of blacks in American society. It attempted to do so by, in many cases, condemning housing that it perceived as "slums" (often labeled that only because the color of the inhabitants) and building "projects" -- a term which we know today to be synonymous with what they were to replace. Erroneously perceiving "density" as a precipitant of "poverty," these massive government housing projects housed fewer people than they displaced -- and left countless blacks to fend for themselves, further crowding the ghetto's confines. The Federal government also held the belief that the projects would encourage racial mixing, ending the segregation that so marked the city. Yet this too was mistaken for they failed to realize how entrenched white preferences for segregation were. In the end, the public housing that went up from the 1940's through the 1960's failed on both counts: the black community is still extremely segregated and concentrated, and at the time, the projects failed to alleviate the housing shortage.
The circumstances of the black community also suffered heavily from government redevelopment. As previously mentioned, freeways often cut through black communities, invariably displacing thousands, only some of whom were accommodated in the projects. In other situations, as in the case of the University of Chicago and Hyde Park, or San Francisco's Yerba Buena Gardens, or the area just east of the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles, redevelopment was an attempt to "shore up" areas around key institutions. It did this by putting in a combination of housing (often luxury or senior apartments), commercial or institutional buildings "consonant with the controlling interests' desires."(6) As more and more of these insular nodes of redevelopment got put in place (increasingly in the 1980's as the central cities underwent a building boom concomitant with the new prominence of activity in finance capital and information/service industries), the city became increasingly cellular. The result is the uniformly cold shoulder the redeveloped areas give to their neighborhoods; to move between these cells is to move in a no-man's land. As Mike Davis notes, "the occasional appearance of a destitute street nomad in Broadway Plaza [one of downtown L.A.'s earlier redevelopment nodes] or in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art sets off a quiet panic; video cameras turn on their mounts and security guards adjust their belts."(7)
	The city's redevelopment has also spawned, or at least provided a spawning ground for, some rather unattractive architecture. Modern buildings are not, like their early-century predecessors, statements about longevity or confidence in the future. Instead, "the neo-military syntax of contemporary architecture insinuates violence and conjures imaginary dangers."(8) It is an architecture for a paranoid, tumultuous, temporal, insecure time. Where buildings had once stood for ideals, as testaments to the men who built them, their confidence in the future, or the worth of their enterprise, today's buildings are, at best, fashioned for value and efficiency like high-end athletic equipment; at worst, they could be described as "Legismo,"(9) the progeny of designers raised not on Froebel blocks but Legos. It is telling of our epoch that the only kind of enduring statement this society can think about creating for future generations is a way of marking radioactive waste sites so they will be recognizably dangerous 10,000 years from now.
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