Reddit mentions of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

You're 100% right!

During the whole MLK naming controversy, you'd see people jokingly say it would be most appropriate to rename JC Nichols parkway for MLK (which is true), but of course the city would never do it. But Nichols and similar people were instrumental in scaring mobilizing white flight into subsidized suburban housing tracts like Prairie Village - which was famous like Levittown at the time as one of the first major massive suburban housing tracts subsidized by the feds on the condition that blacks were excluded (it's still codified in the housing deeds, which was itself a minor controversy that's come up a couple times in the last decade).

Another great source on this is the movie The Pruitt Igoe Myth (this is available on some streaming channels for free), about that housing project in St. Louis.

It's a great story that fully explains the history on this, about how what we now think of as 'inner city public housing' was actually originally built primarily for white people in the 40's and 50's, but later vacated as whites fled to build out the suburbs.

As housing developments, they were originally well funded/subsidized by cities and managed as small commities/buildings. However, as whites left and poorer minorities in surrounding areas were forced to move in, it led to more crime and then cities de-funded them because who wants to spend money on poor/minority people? Cities left them to rot and turn into crime ridden slums that were notoriously then used to demonize poor / inner city people as welfare queens by Reagan types in the 80's.

And, actually, the whole idea of a welfare queen that was popularized by Reagan is a myth too, based on the prosecution of a con lady named Linda Taylor.