Public Housing Myths, Why We Memorialize

Public Housing Myths (1:09) Public Housing Myths Guest: Fritz Umbach, professor of history and criminal justice at the City University of New York The conventional wisdom among politicians and planners across political divides is that public housing is a failed experiment. So, cities across the country are demolishing their public housing projects and replacing them with developments meant to mix people of all income levels. But the notion that "mixed-income redevelopment" is the only wait to fix failed public housing is a myth, according to a new book co-edited by Nicholas Bloom, Fritz Umbach, and Lawrence Vale. They challenge virtually everything we think we know about public housing in their book titled "Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality and Social Policy." Why We Memorialize (50:57) Guests: Jan Scruggs, founder and president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Greg Dickinson, Chair of the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University and co-editor of the book "Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials." Aaron Skabelund, professor of history here at BYU with an emphasis on collective memory and modern Japan. Scott Paeth, professor of Religious Studies, Peace, Justice and Conflict at DePaul University We hear from the man credited with getting one of the most iconic memorials in America built: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. That nearly-five-hundred-foot wall of black granite on the National Mall with more than 58,000 names of veterans engraved on it. Why do we feel the urge to memorialize moments of tragedy or events in history? What moves us to erect monuments to the fallen? Or to national heroes? Or to place flowers and teddy bears on the side of the road where an accident took place? We talk about the power of memorials and collective memory.