Run-Down Housing To Be Demolished

Scores of apartments in ramshackle housing projects will be demolished under the Clinton administration’s plan to replace buildings it says are warehouses of misery.

“This is where we’ve been in too many cities. This is community despair,” Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros said Tuesday, clutching a photograph of a nine-story St. Louis high-rise and its weedy lots, shattered windows and playground splashed with graffiti.

Hoisting a sketch of two-story brick row houses with stoops that lead to a tree-lined street, Cisneros added: “This is where we’re going. This is community pride.”

Over the next two months, 2,247 apartments will be torn down in Philadelphia, St. Louis and Atlanta and replaced with apartments or town houses “built to smaller, more humane scales,” Cisneros said.