I just came across this chart from Axios, which relies on data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the Kaiser Family Foundation. It compares median household income against the average cost of employer health insurance (in the United States).

What it is saying is that, after adjusting for inflation, the median household income has only increased by 2% from 1999 to 2017, whereas employer health insurance costs have increased by some 121% over this same time period.

The takeaway: Rising healthcare costs are believed to be eating away at take-home pay in the US. As of 2017, health insurance costs were estimated to represent about 30% of the average household income. That feels like a big number to me.

In 1956, a large 57 acre urban renewal project was completed in St. Louis. It consisted of 33 apartment buildings, each 11 storeys tall. The entire complex was known as Pruitt-Igoe.

Early residents seemed to really like the buildings. The first tenant, Frankie Mae Raglin, called it the “nicest place she’d ever had.” 

But 16 years later in 1972, the first 3 buildings within Pruitt-Igoe were demolished. And in 1977, architectural historian Charles Jencks proclaimed that the day Pruitt-Igoe was demolished was the day that modern architecture had officially died.

The modernist dream had failed. Architecture had failed us. Segregated “towers in a park” was not the way to socially engineer away poverty and slums from our cities. 

This is the narrative that we have told ourselves, not only in St. Louis, but in cities all around the world.

But was it really all architecture’s fault?