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Summary:
High-rise public housing developments were signature features of the post-World War II city. A hopeful experiment in providing temporary, inexpensive housing for all Americans, the "projects" 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 Chicago's 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 tenants' 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 tenants' political and personal struggles to create a decent place to live, Venkatesh brings us to the heart of the matter.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Too much perpetual-victim theme; misleading statistics; lies
Customer Rating:
Sudhir Venkatesh's 'American Project' has certain strengths. For one thing, it gives an informative overview of the general conditions within the Robert Taylor Homes and how they declined between the 1960s and 1990s. For example, there are extensive quotations of Taylor's tenants, which illustrate first-hand experiences of getting along day by day and coping with deteriorating physical and social conditions. The author is able to use his field work in Chicago to bring his readers inside the housing project to a certain extent. Secondly, the book's chapter divisions are convenient for dividing the Taylor Homes' history by decade.
However, 'American Project' also has numerous weakesses.
First, there are no photos or other visuals in the entire book, making it difficult to picture the vastness of the project and what an average apartment or lobby looked like.
Second, like many sociologists, the author paints the residents of the Taylor Homes as perpetual victims of a vicious, evil, forever racist world that is responsible for all their poor living conditions. For example, in describing why some gang members decided to remain in gangs instead of working in mainstream jobs, listed among the reasons are 'white privilege that denies blacks job-promotion and career opportunities.' The author does not consider affirmative action and other programs that are designed exactly for the purpose of giving blacks and other minorities job opportunities. He also seems ignorant of the fact that during the 1980s, the unemployment rate for black teenagers fell by 21%, the number of black families earning over $50,000 per year increased from 7% to 14%, and black employment in professional and managerial occupations increased 33% (Dept. of Labor Statistics). How can blacks possibly have been systematically denied career opportunities during the 1980s given these figures? Venkatesh also writes that 'youth in this community ... have been discarded by mainstream social institutions.' Yet in these same pages he describes residents who have managed to attain college degrees and even get decent jobs working in downtown Chicago. How, then, have they been 'discarded'?
Third, the author takes a big hammer and tries to smash Ronald Reagan to pieces. The author lost lots of credibility with me on page 149 when he compares Reagan to the character played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone's movie 'Wall Street.' He portrays Reagan as a money-grabbing, heartless man who wrings his hands and chortles 'Greed is good' as the poor suffer. Contrary to popular belief, this simply isn't true.
Not only this, but the author flat out lies by stating that 'Reagan ... [refused] to direct government money to the poor and needy' (p. 149) He cites statistics that imply that the Reagan administration said 'screw the poor.' However, Venkatesh's statistics are completely misleading. According to the Congressional Budget Office ('Federal Housing Assistance and its Distribution,' Chapter 3, www.cbo.gov), national housing project OUTLAYS, which are the amounts of money actually spent on federally subsidized housing, increased steadily all through the 1980s, from $8 billion in 1981 to $16 billion in 1987 (even hitting $28 billion in 1985). Reagan is a favorite target for many people in the 'it's-always-society's-fault' crowd, yet these people themselves rarely know what they're talking about.
In short, 'American Project' seems to be a decent overview of life in a major housing project, but the trite victimization and anti-Reagan ramblings, typical of the academic Left, wear very thin.
Misguided thesis
Customer Rating:
Venkatesh is pushing the thesis that the lives of the residents in the 'projects' have been too pessimistically portrayed by other authorities, and that for long periods of time they in fact managed to get along pretty well, through various informal and often criminal survival mechanisms they developed.
That is, as I say, his thesis. I am reminded of a story of a man who fell out the 40th story window of an office building. Mid way down, with his eyes firmly closed, he imagined himself flying.
"So far, so good," he said.
This author records comparable delusions, and the state of free-fall that of necessity must end. He thinks he is recording something better than that.
A sociologist explores life in a public housing high-rise
Customer Rating:
Venkatesh has done a superb job of describing the interrelationships between tenants, and the relationship between tenants and management, as well as chronicalling the changes in these relationships since Robert Taylor was constructed in the early 60's. Anyone who wants to move beyond the headlines, and find out more about the strengths and weaknesses of life in a public housing development should read this book.
That said, the author's background and training as a sociologist comes through loud and clear, and ultimately limits his book. While Venkatesh does a good job of detailing the social relationships among the players, he virtually ignores the larger political issues. Why was management so inept as to be virtually non-existent? Why did the drug/crime culture take hold, and how did the gangs transfor themselves into multi-state corporate enterprises? Most importantly, given that CHA is now in the process of demolishing virtually everyone of the buildings which form Robert taylor Homes, how do we avoid creating the same problems in the next generation of public housing.
Excellent bibliography, by the way. A very good place to dig for resources for anyone wanting to study the history of the Chicago Housing Authority since 1960.
likinstik
Customer Rating:
"American Project" started out with the best of intentions, but along the way ,the author became a little repetitive. He should've explored the lives of the tenants a bit more. I think that would've made their situation a bit more understandable for the unaware. But, I give the author credit for trying to explain the lives,situations and forces, which keep the people disconnected from the rest of Chicago.
Fighting for Control
Customer Rating:
American Project is the story of the Robert Taylor high-rise housing project built in Chicago in the 1960s for lower income blacks. Ultimately, it is a story about social control; that is, the attempt to control various criminal and delinquent acts in order to make Robert Taylor a livable community. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh traces the struggle of the residents to do so, despite poor security provided by the Chicago Housing Authority and inadequate police protection. For the first ten years efforts by the residents to maintain some sense of order worked to varying degrees but after that it was all downhill.
Most problematic was the emergence of gangs like the Blacks Kings who became more than just an ordinary street gang -- they became an organized criminal group devoted to making big money through drug deals. A significant part of book is devoted to analyzing attempts to deal with the Black Kings. Some within the community wanted to cooperate with the group conceding that there was no way to stop them from selling drugs. Hence, the only viable policy was compromise. Appeals were to the Black King's leadership to increase public safety, and these efforts worked as long as Kigs benefited. For instance, it's easier to sell any product in an atmosphere of calm rather than chaos. However, when policies were not in the interests of the group they failed, as did Robert Taylor which was eventually torn down.
I find two major weaknesses in the book: First, since social control is the primary theme of the book one would expect more that just passing references to single-parent families in that numerous studies show that when single mothers raise boys by themselves criminal activity increases. Indeed, at Robert Taylor there appears to be a relationship between the rise of gangs and increasing numbers of single parents. It is unfortuante that the author pays more attention to sexual harrassment of women by the Black Kings than single-parenthood, as if harrassment were more important to the quality of life at Robert Taylor than the impacts of single-parenthood.
The second shortcoming of the book is the fact that little attention is paid to the effects of drug taking by the residents of Roberet Taylor who were buying $45,000 worth of drugs per week from the Kings. It seems obviuous that ingesting these amounts of crack and heroin had a detrimental impact on Robert Taylor but for some reason the author largerly avoids the issue. In short, American Project is an interesting study of an urban ghetto, it is unfortunately an incomplete one.
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