Before Gentrification: The Robert Taylor Homes and the Failure of the City | QDaily Annual Book Recommendations ⑲

Racialized concentrated poverty and joblessness come out of the broad economic restructuring of deindustrializing central cities — the same cities where low-income minorities are disproportionately concentrated.

A year has passed, and China and the world, society and the state, the economy and our own lives have all been swayed by large questions. In the middle of that bewilderment, the voices of intellectuals have gone missing, or been drowned in noise, which only deepens the confusion. Or perhaps a turning point is about to show itself. In any era, clear thinking is scarce, and people with insight are our best guarantee of seeing the road ahead.

So in our "2018 Annual Book Recommendations" we want to introduce as wide a range as we can of books we think are worth your time.

As in past years, our editors have read every book that came within our view, and they introduce each one to readers in good faith.

We also had help from contributing writers, who catch new currents first and see further than we do. Our thanks to them.

This is the fifteenth piece in our nonfiction book recommendation series, and it is about gentrification. The author, Liu Zhizhen, is an editor at QDaily.

Robert Sampson walked along South Federal Street — empty, silent, lifeless. "A Chicago police officer sat in a squad car parked about 100 yards away, on what had once been a bustling street," Sampson records in his book. "As I wandered around, he watched me carefully. Though what lay before me was an unbroken expanse of green grass, my behavior clearly did not belong to the ordinary routine here. This space is marked by a turbulent history, and the mark plainly has not faded."

Sampson, a Chicago School sociologist, is the author of Great American City. The ground he stood on was the site of the famous Robert Taylor Homes — once a Black enclave in Chicago and the city's most notorious slum, thick with drug dealing and gun crime, a place the police would not, or dared not, enter…

Great American City studies Chicago's working-class neighborhoods and the theories of social disorganization, disorder, and collective efficacy. "Social disorganization" means a state in which a community can neither realize the shared values of its residents nor keep up effective social control — the collapse of a city after society loses the function it is supposed to serve.

By the time Sampson walked there, the Robert Taylor Homes was already an empty lot.

1. The Middle Class of the City

Every city feels ancient, but the modern city is nowhere near as old as we imagine. It was born after the Industrial Revolution.

The modern city depends on manufacturing. Manchester, London, and Liverpool in mid-nineteenth-century England; New England, New York, and later Chicago and Detroit in the United States — all of them grew out of manufacturing. Put simply, large, intensive factories turned masses of industrial workers into the main body of the city's population.

After 1870, three things shaped the material conditions of working-class life: during the so-called "Great Depression" of 1873 to 1896, the cost of living fell sharply; a mass domestic market was discovered, made up of consumers who were themselves workers employed in industrial production or in processing factories, workers with decent terms or at least steady jobs; and, after 1875, so-called "housing built to code" (under the Public Health Acts) — rows of houses packed along the outskirts of old city centers — in effect created much of the working-class living environment. All of this meant that the living standards of many British workers improved, bit by bit, one way or another — an improvement beyond doubt; or, put the other way around, these developments rested on the rising living standards of workers.

Eric Hobsbawm, Uncommon People, Chapter 5, "The Formation of the Working Class"

That passage comes from "The Formation of the Working Class, 1870–1914," a chapter in the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm's Uncommon People. Marx lived in the era when the modern city was born — and, by his class theory, also the era when the working class was maturing, growing, and looked about to break every chain.

Reality was not entirely like that. The working class — most of them first-generation city dwellers — was at first crammed into shabby, poorly equipped housing around the factories, walked to work, and put in ten-odd hours a day. But it had a steady income, enough to bring poor relatives in from the countryside, to send for a wife, and to have children one after another, the whole extended family packed in together. Living conditions were certainly bad, but on the whole there was hope.

Oscar Lewis's The Children of Sánchez is set in Mexico City, but in it we can see the real world of an industrial worker at one stage of industrialization, shaped by class mobility and city life.

The reader can see at a glance that Jesús Sánchez and his children are markedly different. The difference reflects not only the divide between being born in the countryside and being born in the city, but also the divide between before and after the Mexican Revolution. Jesús was born in 1910 in a small village in Veracruz, the very year the Mexican Revolution began. His children were born, one after another, between 1928 and 1935, in the various slums of Mexico City. In the era when Jesús grew up there were no cars, no movie theaters, no radios or televisions, no free universal education, no free elections, no chance to rise, and no possibility of getting rich overnight. He grew up under traditional authoritarian rule, which stressed resignation, hard work, and self-restraint. His children were subject to his autocratic, stubborn will, and at the same time took in the various values of the post-revolutionary era, which put far more weight on individualism and social mobility. What is striking, then, is that this father — though he never aspired to anything beyond simple manual labor — climbed out of dire poverty by his own effort, while his children have only ever managed to stay at that same level.

Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sánchez

That period was also, typically, when the labor movement ran at its height — but for most people the ideal was still a steady income, children, a football match, and a quiet life.

Much of that lecture of Hobsbawm's goes to their housing and to the rise of professional football in England, which does show what leisure and entertainment did to shape this class and this city.

The working class, put in different terms, was the middle class of the modern city.

2. Building Housing for the Middle Class

Those with a stable livelihood have a stable mind.

Planners began laying out new residential districts for the working class. The first suburbs were not far off — within walking distance. A little later, urban public transit came into play and the city grew larger. The modern city, built around industry and industrial workers, took shape, and its functions gradually filled out.

Sizable working-class enclaves appeared. In the United States, the representative cases include Society Hill in Philadelphia (in The New Urban Frontier) and Camden (in Climbing Mount Laurel) — places that would become trouble later on.

The history of the modern city is shorter than we imagine, and the idea of urban planning is shorter still. America's first city-planning law was passed in New York in 1916. Before that, even as cities kept growing, there was no fixed rule for how a city should house its residents.

Before that, the cities of Britain's Industrial Revolution — including London, then the largest city in the world — were shaped by laissez-faire classical liberal economics, and "planning" was not in politicians' vocabulary. "Liberalism was defined by the government's non-intervention in public health, labor relations, factory conditions, education, parliamentary reform, and a great many other domestic matters; the outside world, and Britain's place in it, was what commanded people's attention," Ben Wilson writes in Heyday: Britain and the Birth of the Modern World.

The most memorable line came from the Illustrated London News: "We can found colonies in the remotest corners of the world, we can conquer India, we can pay the interest on the most enormous debt ever known, we can spread our name and our fame and our wealth to every corner of the earth — and yet we cannot clean the River Thames."

Ben Wilson, Heyday

As problems appeared — managing the Thames, air pollution, cities growing beyond control — the idea of planning began to take root in the minds of city administrators, architects, utopians, and all sorts of others.

Now Le Corbusier can make his entrance. He, along with Ebenezer Howard and Charles Mulford Robinson, counts as the first generation of great urban planners. Before them, the name most often invoked was Baron Haussmann, who remade Paris — room for carriages, room for department stores, room for boulevards to disperse the shopping crowds. He laid the foundation of modern Paris; though there was also room for ceremonial entries into the city, triumphal or invading, room for military parades, room for an emperor.

Not like us, who only ever had the emperor. That is a digression.

When Le Corbusier's generation began to use its imagination, it thought more about people. He meant well. He believed the city's main body was the working class, and that they should be housed together in one place.

And so this man, quite possibly the greatest urban planner in history, put forward his "Plan Voisin."

Le Corbusier's vision covered a 600-acre area on the Seine's "Right Bank," including the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Les Halles, and Le Marais; apart from historic buildings that had to be preserved — the Madeleine, the Paris Opera, the Palais-Royal, the Place Vendôme — everything else would be torn down. Le Corbusier proposed, "Imagine this rubbish, still scattered about like dry breadcrumbs; demolish it and clear it away, and put up towers over 600 feet tall, replacing it all with vast, crystalline glass." Le Corbusier planned to replace these "dry breadcrumbs" with eighteen sixty-story skyscrapers; as in his earlier plans, expressways would take the place of streets, and green space would surround the buildings. He declared outright, "The whole city is a park." If anyone thinks the "Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants" was merely a thought experiment, the Plan Voisin makes plain that the creator of this deliberately ambitious modern city was in dead earnest.

Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities

For a long time no one dared put the idea into practice.

But it stirred in the mind of every designer.

By Rybczynski's account, when Le Corbusier died in 1965, his Brazilian disciples in South America had built the brand-new city of Brasília, and the master plan he drew up for Chandigarh, India, had also been carried out to some degree. In the 1920s the Soviet Union rejected his buildings, but "the Soviet Union adopted his ideas about mass housing production and high-rise urbanism, and exported those ideas to China."

Let us set China aside for now, though it is hard not to think of Shanghai's Zhongyuan Liangwan City, or any of the "large residential community" projects scattered around the edges of Chinese cities, or the Huitian area of Beijing, home to a million people.

In the United States, the project that best captured Le Corbusier's essence was the Robert Taylor Homes. Begun three years before Le Corbusier's death, it was designed by the Chicago modernist firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill — 28 identical slab apartment blocks, "arrayed with precision in a straight line along a two-mile-long site."

The Robert Taylor Homes was where Le Corbusier's dream came down to earth.

3. The Relocation of Manufacturing

It was public housing — you could also call it affordable housing.

While the working class was still the mainstream, this did not look like much of a problem. Affordable housing, measured against experience we can relate to: even the oppressive feel of Huitian beats a shared courtyard tenement, and beats the dilapidated workers' villages of the 1950s.

America had its workers' villages too.

Building them took not only government subsidies and good intentions but also company owners with deep pockets. For a company on the way up, this was part of its investment in people — it hoped housing would hold its workforce steady, and that the children of those steady workers would form a reserve labor supply.

Armco earned this reputation by careful design. "Well into the 1950s, the four biggest employers in the Miami Valley — Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Champion Paper in Hamilton, Armco in Middletown, and National Cash Register in Dayton — all had remarkably calm labor relations. Part of the reason was that they… hired employees' family and friends, many of whom had been migrants themselves. In Middletown, for instance, the payroll of Inland Container Corporation once carried 220 Kentuckians, 117 of them from a single county, Wolfe County." Since the 1980s labor relations have undoubtedly deteriorated, but the reputation Armco and companies like it built has mostly held.

J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

Middletown grew out of the industrial boom after World War I and became famous through the Lynds' Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture. It offered not only steady work but also a head start for the younger generation, close to the source of opportunity.

But things change.

The phrase the whole world knows — the relocation of manufacturing — arrived on schedule.

The textile industry that flourished in Yorkshire and Lancashire moved, in the first half of the nineteenth century, to New England in the United States, then on to Southern Appalachia, then to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and finally to mainland China. But labor costs in China have now risen sharply, and the most cutting-edge garment makers have moved again, to Bangladesh and even Ethiopia. Monthly labor costs in China now exceed 50,000 yen, against 4,000 yen in Bangladesh and 2,000 yen in Ethiopia. For a labor-intensive industry like textiles, once a twentyfold gap in labor costs opens up, the move from one country to the next simply repeats.

Kenichi Ohmae, The Low-Desire Society

Ohmae described the global migration of the cotton textile industry in a few plain sentences, and 150 years flashed past between them. Behind those words, every one of those places went through its own rise, boom, decline, and ruin. Even where a city's transition succeeded, for a generation of industrial workers — for a typical industrial worker's family — it still meant layoffs, a precarious livelihood, spending beyond one's income, and no idea what came next.

Jennifer McGuffey, a Middletown high school teacher who works with troubled teenagers, says: "A lot of kids have no idea what the world outside looks like. Some plan on being baseball players, but they won't even join the school baseball team, just because the coach is too hard on them. Others do badly in school, and when you try to talk to them about their future they bring up Armco-Kawasaki — hey, I can get a job at Armco-Kawasaki, my uncle works there. They don't seem to connect the state Middletown is in now with the shortage of jobs at Armco-Kawasaki at all."

J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

After a generation, the workers'-village model, no longer propped up by the old factory, would usually decline as a whole. A company running its own miniature society was never an efficient economic arrangement, but when the tie between the company and the welfare housing that grew up beside it was cut, the decay of a community sped up.

"Those with a stable livelihood have a stable mind." By this point it reads more like a question.

From Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act to George Bush's "ownership society," federal housing policy has consistently encouraged people to own their own homes. But in a place like Middletown, owning your home costs too much socially: as job opportunities in an area shrink, falling property values trap people in the community with no way out. Even if you want to move it is hard to manage — the market has already bottomed out, and while your property still carries a price on paper, nobody is willing to pay that much for it. Moving costs too much as well, so many people are forced to stay put. And of course the people trapped this way tend to be the poorest, because anyone who could afford to leave already has.

J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

The sociologist William Julius Wilson argues that those who stayed were "trapped in these towns, with no longer enough good jobs to support so large a population," while those who left were "usually the well educated, the wealthy, and the well connected." Only the poor were left, and they were "the truly disadvantaged." Wilson wrote a book on exactly this, titled The Truly Disadvantaged.

The traditional working class lost its jobs, and at the same time the city itself changed, entering the era of the "post-industrial city." It turned from supply-driven to demand-driven, or, put another way, from a producer's city into a consumer's city — what David Harvey called the "Keynesian city," urbanization led by demand.

In David Ley's view, in the "post-industrial city," where white-collar service jobs have replaced blue-collar production work, what follows is an emphasis on consumption and amenity rather than on work. Patterns of consumption begin to dictate patterns of production: "it is the value of consumption, rather than production, that guides decisions about land use in the central city." Gentrification is thus explained as a result of this emphasis on consumption, representing a new urban geography under a new regime of social consumption. This early culturalist explanation has lately taken on fresh blood: there is a tendency to read gentrification as an urban expression of postmodernity, or, in the more extreme version, of postmodernism.

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier

For industrial workers this was a moment when job opportunities all but vanished; and with low income or none, they were even less likely to become the protagonists of the "consumer" city.

4. When the Robert Taylor Homes Reappeared

By the time the Robert Taylor Homes reappeared, it had long since lost the glow of Le Corbusier's idealism.

The buildings stood packed together, looking like tall checkerboards, rows of dull, joyless windows set into dingy yellow brick walls. On some of the windows, traces showed the apartments had once caught fire, black smoke stains climbing upward in the shape of tombstones. Nearly every building had a single entrance, and most had young people gathered around it. Naive as I was, I was not so naive that I could not tell what was going on in the ground-floor lobby of the building I was approaching. Customers arrived by car and on foot, white and Black alike, hurrying in to buy drugs and hurrying back out. I was not sure whether this was Building 4040 — I could not find a number — so I just walked in. The entryway reeked of alcohol, soot, and urine. Young people stood or crouched on plastic crates, many of them stamping their feet against the cold. I put my head down, took a breath, and hurried past them. They watched me pass with dark, wary eyes. One big young man, at least six foot six, did not step aside as I went by. I brushed past him and nearly lost my balance. Inside was a long row of wrecked metal mailboxes, many missing their doors. Water dripped everywhere and pooled on the floor. Shouts and screams poured down from the floors above, making the whole building feel like some kind of tomb for the living dead.

Sudhir Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day

In 1989 Sudhir Venkatesh began studying the Robert Taylor Homes as it stood before demolition. He too came out of the University of Chicago's sociology department; before he started, his adviser William Julius Wilson — the author of The Truly Disadvantaged, mentioned above — handed him a box of old questionnaires and told him he could borrow some of the questions and add the new ones he needed. Venkatesh wanted to understand better how young Black residents were shaped by the various factors in their neighborhoods. For instance: "Does a poor child who grows up in a housing project get less education and fewer job opportunities than an equally poor child who does not grow up in one? What is the difference between a child born into a poor family who grows up in a neighborhood surrounded by other poor neighborhoods, and one who grows up in an affluent neighborhood? Might the latter benefit from the schools, services, and job opportunities available in that affluent neighborhood?"

Venkatesh's eventual field report became a bestseller: Gang Leader for a Day, published in Chinese as 《城中城》, "city within a city," and under a second title, 《黑帮老大的一天》.

The gang leader named JT, it seems, had no use for William Julius Wilson's questionnaires.

"I'm not Black." He answered, deliberately glancing around at the others. "Okay then — what does it feel like being poor and African American?" I said, trying to sound apologetic, worried I had already offended him. "I'm not African American either. I'm a nigger." I did not know what to say. Asking him what it felt like to be a nigger made me deeply uneasy, of course. He took the questionnaire from me and looked it over more carefully. He turned the pages, reading the questions himself. He seemed disappointed, though I sensed the disappointment was not aimed at me. "A nigger is somebody who lives in this building," he finally said. "African Americans live in the suburbs. African Americans wear ties to work. Niggers can't find jobs." He looked over a few more pages. "You're not going to learn anything from this thing." He kept shaking his head, then scanned the other older men standing around to see whether they shared his doubts. Then he leaned toward me and said quietly: "How are you going to do this if you don't even know who we are or what we do?" His tone carried a note of accusation, but more than that, disappointment, and, it seemed, some confusion.

Sudhir Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day

To keep industrial workers in the city, people tried a range of approaches:

The Robert Taylor Homes — public housing funded through housing vouchers or other government subsidies; middle-class suburbs built in bulk for industrial workers and served by government-provided public transit; enclaves, even whole towns, built around a single large company; communities designed to mix races and income levels in order to build a new, harmonious society…

Almost none of it worked.

Along the way, another hard problem the U.S. government had to handle was that racial divisions — African American, Hispanic, and others — often ran between generations of industrial workers. In early Philadelphia and Boston there was an Italian-American dimension as well.

Robert Sampson points out that the failure of the city includes an awkward outcome of community-building against the backdrop of manufacturing and globalization:

In Chicago, not a single neighborhood that was more than 50 percent Black in 1960 had become white-majority forty years later. By contrast, a great many white neighborhoods became Black neighborhoods, and polarization — purely Black and purely white neighborhoods — remains the dominant pattern. Over time, neighborhoods also generally tend either to stay at their original level of poverty or to move to a higher one.

Robert J. Sampson, Great American City

After analyzing the Black population of inner-city areas in The Truly Disadvantaged, William Julius Wilson reached a conclusion: genuinely low-income white communities essentially do not exist — not just in Chicago but across the whole country. His analysis of the social transformation of the 1970s and 1980s holds that:

Racialized concentrated poverty and joblessness come out of the broad economic restructuring of deindustrializing central cities — the same cities where low-income minorities are disproportionately concentrated. These shifts include the move from goods production to services, the steady polarization of the labor market into low-income and high-income sectors, and the relocation of inner-city factories, all of it tied to global economic trends. Wilson argues that the departure of middle- and upper-income Black families from the inner city also cost the city an important social buffer, one that might have softened the impact of long-term joblessness and industrial change on low-income Black communities.

Stratification among Black neighborhoods keeps increasing, a fundamental break from what inner-city neighborhoods were like decades ago. Wilson argues that in decades past the Black ghetto neighborhood was mixed in income, whereas in today's communities inequality is far sharper, because middle- and upper-income Black residents are increasingly separated in space from low-income Black residents. The result is the "social isolation" of the Black ghetto poor from mainstream American society. (Great American City)

In Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond sums up the city's failure in public housing.

Public housing was meant to replace the slum. Nobody expected it would slowly become the slum's successor. As politicians choked off funding, public housing fell into worse and worse disrepair, year after year without maintenance. Windows broke, pipes clogged, elevators grew more and more decrepit. Outside the front door, sewage outlets sat open in broad daylight, and uncollected garbage piled higher and higher. Any resident who could move out did; what remained was the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. Before long, public-housing communities were mired in chaos and violence. Take St. Louis: the famous Pruitt-Igoe housing project was dynamited on live television in its eighteenth year. Why? Because the place had become so frightening that even the police would not set foot in it. Across the country, wrecking balls and dynamite also visited many other notorious public housing projects, places like the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago and the McDaniel-Glenn Homes in Atlanta — lifeless public housing casting long shadows over segregated, deserted corners of the city. Given how these projects had turned out, blowing them up was not only cheaper but more humane. It is the same logic as: something so unspeakable happened in this house that you might as well bulldoze it.

Matthew Desmond, Evicted

5. The History of One Building

In The New Urban Frontier, Neil Smith traces the winding history of a New York building called Christodora House:

Built in 1928 as a settlement house, sold to the City of New York in 1947 for $1.3 million.

It served various municipal functions over the years, and ended up as a community center and youth hostel, home at times to Black Panthers and Young Lords members. It fell into disrepair in the 1960s.

Put up for auction in 1975, it drew no bids.

It was later sold for $62,500 to the Brooklyn developer George Jaffe. Jaffe tried to get federal funding to convert it into low-income housing and failed. So he had the doors of the now-empty building welded shut.

In 1980, Jaffe began having the building appraised.

In 1983 it sold for $1.3 million to another developer, Harry Skydell.

A year later, valued at $3 million, it went into a joint venture with the developer Samuel Glasser.

In 1986, the new company put 86 condominium units on the market.

In 1987, a four-story penthouse with a private elevator, three balconies, and two fireplaces sold for $1.2 million.

Today we call this gentrification.

Cover image: a still from the film I, Daniel Blake, via Douban.