American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto

American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto
by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

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Book Summary Information

Author: Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
Foreword: William Julius Wilson
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2000-11-13
ISBN: 0674003217
Number of pages: 360
Publisher: Harvard University Press

Book Reviews of American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto

Book Review: Too much perpetual-victim theme; misleading statistics; lies
Summary: 2 Stars

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.

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Summary of American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto

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. (20010114)

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