American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto

Abstract

In American Project, the sociologist Sudhir Al ladi Venkatesh recounts the history of one of the nation's most infamous public housing projects, Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes, and pierces the veil of racial and class stereotypes that obscures the way such places function. Employing the somewhat unfashionable method of participant observation, Venkatesh interviewed residents, gang members, police officers, and managers of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA). A sympathetic yet objective listener, Venkatesh differentiates among the residents and their viewpoints. He shows that, despite danger and poverty, the tenants of Robert Taylor Homes were able to construct a community that for a time held together. When it opened in November 1962, Robert Taylor Homes—twentyeight sixteenstory buildings containing 4,300 units on Chicago's South Side—was considered the world's largest public housing project. The managers of the CHA at first tried to work with the tenants but were quickly overwhelmed by the task of maintaining the enormous physical plant inhabited by thousands of children. The tenant applicant screening committees of managers and tenants eventually stopped meeting, the population grew steadily poorer, and by the 1970s single mothers on welfare made up the majority of the adult residents. The young men of Robert Taylor joined gangs, which the adult residents tolerated as an understandable response to their environment. Over time the CHA and the police department largely forsook the project as unmanageable and dangerous.