"Venkatesh 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...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."
--Kirkus Reviews
"A fascinating and rigorous explanation of a how a model of urban subsidized housing, which succeeded for
20 years, declined into disastrous conditions for its inhabitants...[American Project] 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."
--Paula R. Dempsey, Library Journal
Publisher Web Site, January, 2003
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 "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.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Introduction
1. A Place to Call Home
2. Doing the Hustle
3. "What's It Like to Be in Hell?"
4. Tenants Face Off with the Gang
5. Street-Gang Diplomacy
6. The Beginning of the End of a Modern Ghetto
