An inside look at life in the ghetto

In the winter of 1989, a young sociology graduate student named Sudhir Venkatesh arrived at Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes. Armed with a clipboard and a stack of surveys, Venkatesh walked into what was then the nation’s largest housing project and the hub of a booming crack-cocaine trade. Ninety percent of its tens of thousands of inhabitants were on welfare, and local gangs served as both cops and robbers by controlling the flow of drugs, overseeing the local underground economy, and meting out vigilante justice.

Members of a local gang intercepted Venkatesh before he’d knocked on a single door, and, in a scene that’s by turns hilarious and hair-raising, fought amongst themselves about what to do with him. It was touch and go until a young man named J.T. arrived. “[W]hile I couldn’t have known it at this moment, he was about to become the most formidable person in my life, for a long time to come,” writes Venkatesh in his insightful and bittersweet new book, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets.

J.T., it turns out, was the college-educated leader of a local gang faction. The two men formed an unexpected bond and Venkatesh began shadowing J.T.’s day-to-day operations. Ultimately he spent seven years deeply enmeshed in the life of Robert Taylor and its inhabitants.

The longer he stayed, the more people trusted him, and the more people trusted him, the more inside information he had access to: barbecues and birthday parties; mediation sessions between rival gang leaders, brokered by tenant leaders and local clergy; a dubious get-out-the-vote effort on behalf of Chicago’s political machine; corrupt policemen and unresponsive ambulances; gang mergers and sales strategy meetings; prostitution and crack use and domestic violence and creative ways to fix problems when the Chicago Housing Authority won’t help.

Venkatesh, now a prominent social scientist, built his early career from the data he collected during these years. Gang Leader for a Day is his opportunity to put aside the numbers and tell what happened. What emerges is a textured and complex portrait that is both affectionate and clear-eyed.

Ultimately, life in the Robert Taylor homes is both exactly what you’d expect, and exactly the opposite. It’s filthy, crime-ridden, and subject to the whims of criminals and apathetic bureaucracies. At the same time, it’s a tight-knit community where members look out for one another and do what they must to survive. The problems facing the urban poor don’t have easy answers — just how entrenched those problems are emerges vividly here — but Venkatesh takes a compelling first step by offering up names and faces behind the statistics, showing us just what we as a society stand to lose when we cordon off the projects and ignore the humanity inside them.