American Project : The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto

by Venkatesh, Sudhir Alladi; Wilson, William Julius

• ISBN13: 9780674003217
• ISBN10: 0674003217
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-09-01
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

High-rise public housing developments were signature features of the postÐWorld War II city. A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive housing for all Americans, the ÒprojectsÓ soon became synonymous with the black urban poor, with isolation and overcrowding, with drugs, gang violence, and neglect. As the wrecking ball brings down some of these concrete monoliths, Sudhir Venkatesh seeks to reexamine public housing from the inside out, and to salvage its troubled legacy. Based on nearly a decade of fieldwork in ChicagoÕs Robert Taylor Homes, American Project is the first comprehensive story of daily life in an American public housing complex. Venkatesh draws on his relationships with tenants, gang members, police officers, and local organizations to offer an intimate portrait of an inner-city community that journalists and the public have only viewed from a distance. Challenging the conventional notion of public housing as a failure, this startling book re-creates tenantsÕ thirty-year effort to build a safe and secure neighborhood: their political battles for services from an indifferent city bureaucracy, their daily confrontation with entrenched poverty, their painful decisions about whether to work with or against the street gangs whose drug dealing both sustained and imperiled their lives.American Project explores the fundamental question of what makes a community viable. In his chronicle of tenantsÕ political and personal struggles to create a decent place to live, Venkatesh brings us to the heart of the matter.

Author Biography

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Director of Research at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University.

Table of Contents

Foreword	ixi
Preface	xiii
Introduction	1	(12)
A Place to Call Home	13	(52)
Doing the Hustle	65	(45)
``What's It Like to Be in Hell?''	110	(43)
Tenants Face Off with the Gang	153	(38)
Street-Gang Diplomacy	191	(47)
The Beginning of the End of a Modern Ghetto	238	(43)
Author's Note	281	(8)
Notes	289	(30)
Acknowledgments	319	(2)
Index	321