American project : the rise and fall of a modern ghetto /

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the life of a famous Chicago housing project: Robert Taylor Homes. The author traces the history of the project from its construction in the early sixties to its demise in the late 1990s. In large part a product of its time, city officials intended to provide decent and affordable housing to a large population of poor black residents, and to maintain residential segregation by placing the project in the middle of a deteriorated slum. The major contribution of this book is in its focus. Most of the recent books on the life of the inner city ghetto focus exclusively on the individual behavior of poor urban residents, and stress the pathology of the inner city. American Project, however, documents continuous efforts of the project residents to create community, to pool resources and political muscle to insure the continuation of basic services, and to secure democratic representation. The ultimate failure of Robert Taylor Homes was not a lack of trying, but rather that the problems faced by the residents went beyond what they could address with limited resources. General and academic collections. G. Rabrenovic; Northeastern University

Venkatesh (sociology, Inst. for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia Univ.) began his extensive exploration of the history of the notorious Robert Taylor Homes public housing project as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. His methodology is to build a "collective history" by combining surveys, documentary research, and participant observation. This approach provides a fascinating and rigorous explanation of how a model of urban subsidized housing, which succeeded for 20 years, declined into disastrous conditions for its inhabitants. He looks, for example, at criminal activity in the project with an unflinching view of the contributions of such social structural changes as the economy and labor market, social services providers, city and state politicians, police practices, and residents. This is an important contribution to understanding urban poverty and will stand with classic work by Carol Stack and William Julius Wilson (who wrote the foreword). Highly recommended for public or academic collections in sociology, urban studies, and public policy.DPaula R. Dempsey, DePaul Univ. Lib., Chicago (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Sociological analysis condemning our public housing policies that focuses on a Chicago project Venkatesh (Sociology/Columbia Univ.) spent hundreds of hours interviewing residents of Chicago’s Robert Taylor Holmes housing project. Poorly designed, cheaply built, and isolated from surrounding neighborhoods by an expressway, the Holmes project was doomed almost from the start. City services, stores, and jobs were far away or nonexistent, and a kind of black market (run from nearby apartments) arose to fill the need for food, clothing, and various vice-related goods and services. Although there was sufficient land in the area to have permitted the construction of two-story homes with ample recreation areas, the dominant “International School” of design (heavily influenced by European socialism and its emphasis upon communal space) mandated the construction of monstrous high-rise towers spaced widely apart from one another in “parks” that soon became dead asphalt spaces (in which children would have to line up for hours to ride a swing in the playground). The population density was far above the recommended norms, and, in short order, the sanitary conditions in the project were abysmal. The Chicago Housing Authority, which managed the project, earned “a national reputation for mismanagement and patronage.” Security and law enforcement were nightmarish: gangs fought over drug turf, extorted funds from residents (the elderly were favorite targets), and paid off officials. Venkatesh describes the struggles of tenant leaders and social activists who resisted the gangs and sought to improve living conditions, but he can’t point to any wholesale reform in what was a fatally flawed system from the get-go. Sometimes oppressively academic, but a useful study all the same.