Sudhir Venkatesh
Excerpt of interview with Columbia professor of sociology Sudhir Venkatesh. Venkatesh is also author of American Project and Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor. Interview conducted with Christopher Allen and originally aired on WKCR 89.9 fm as part of Commons Radio 5.
Q: How did you begin your research into public housing?
SV: I came to Chicago as a graduate student in 1989 to work with scholars at the university that were doing studies of African-Americans in poverty and I stumbled upon public housing. I wasn’t seeking it out, but we were doing a large survey at the university of different kinds of African-American families – poor, working-class, rich, etc. – and I was sent to a public housing development and I met some young people who were in a street gang at that development. I had initially thought, well it would be really nice to try and understand what the underground economy is like from the perspective of people who are in street gangs and dealing drugs, etc., and for reasons, probably many of which accidental, I just took an interest in the community itself, in the Robert Taylor homes. I ended up living with a couple families for about eighteen months and then spending roughly five or six years [researching].
Q: You’ve been researching for over fifteen years, and you just finished your first documentary film. What are the advantages of the new medium?
SV: So I’ve been involved in this community for the better part of my young adult life. It’s been a long time and it’s been a great learning experience. I came to it through a scholastic lens – trying to understand what poor people felt about the world that they lived in. How they felt about being Americans, being citizens, when you don’t work, because we take work very seriously as Americans. It’s a key part of being an American. Over time I started to be affected by them and shaped by them in many ways, as anybody would who hangs out in a community for fifteen years. Part of the way that I was shaped was that I was able to see how people collectively act to take care of problems and issues in their lives when the government is not responsive. The classic portrayal we have of poor people is that they’re helpless, dysfunctional, pathological. They don’t have a temporal horizon. They don’t think about the future. They don’t think, basically. They’re a-global or anti-modern in a sense. Well, what I saw were people who very strongly believed in democratic discourse, very strongly believed in deliberative democratic, who worked with each other, who built consensus, addressed problems. So they weren’t waiting for Godot - or waiting for the government in fact – they were doing things themselves, all the while fighting for the government. And that’s what I tried to capture in my book. How people work collectively in an efficacious way at a local level when the government fails them and what is the implication of that for a sense of belonging to this country.
Now I didn’t have any pictures in my book because I distrust images … I distrusted images I should say. Very much so at that point. Because they overdetermine our perceptions of what poor people are like. I was trying to argue in my book that this is an American community, no different than Columbine, no different than Irvine California, the lily-white suburb where I grew up. Of course different in some profound ways but not different in the aspirations that people have to live a good life. And the problem is that when we see a picture of an African-American person in poverty we get all sorts of images conjured up and they can overdetermine our ability to just say, what’s really taking place here and how are they similar? The presumption of race in this country is always, how are they different? Not how are they similar or how are we related to one another. I wanted to get past that and so I didn’t have any pictures because I wanted people to have and image of whatever community they wanted.
Ok, so you go on awhile and you start distrusting images, and then you realize that maybe you’re missing something. And I think that’s what I did. I think there was an error in my judgment in some ways. And I met a filmmaker in New York and I decided to experiment with him. And bring him to Chicago and then look and see what happens when you try to play with narrative. Sociology, the point of sociology is to instruct and inform in the way of giving people an interpretation of what is going on in the world around them. Documentary film, in this country, has not been in that genre. It has been about storytelling, it has been about providing a historical record for what has been taking place, etc. Those things are in creative tension with one another. As a writer, I can tell you, here’s the information and here’s what you should think about it – here’s how you should think about it. Here’s what policy should be developed, etc. I can’t do that as a filmmaker. Or not so easily. My politics, my sense of how to lead you, have to be done in different ways. Through storytelling, through the relationship of image and orality, and so on. I can’t simply say, this is what this means, as I can in a conclusion of a chapter. So it’s a much different way of making a point, and to me it’s a much different way of being political. Expressing one’s political ideology. So you look at things, right? Obviously, people trained in documentary film know how to look for the juxtaposition of image, what is not there, the way of editing, and so on. So I had to learn how to demonstrate and give my political sense, or what I wanted people to take away in a different way than writing where you can just say, hey, this is what the data means.
Q: I think there are some misconceptions about what public housing is. To the point of getting information across, could you give us a definition?
SV: Public housing as we know it today developed out of programs in the New Deal era under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and they were designed to give poor families and mothers with children and soldiers returning from the war a place to live as they were making transitions and stabilizing themselves. Initially public housing was not meant for the poorest people in America, it was a program for a diverse set of classes that were on a precipice. Responding really to the realities of the Depression. So there were two programs of public housing actually, one for seniors and another that they call family housing, which encapsulates a range of subsidies from large high rise projects, so-called projects, to section 8 subsidies, to even first time homeowner programs – those are also considered public or subsidized housing. So it’s a range of programs intended to subsidize shelter or to give people actual shelter in the form of government housing.
Q: And was there historically a negative viewpoint of public housing? Has that grown or diminished over time?
SV: Initially there was not a lot of stigma attached to public housing. The main criticisms came from industry, from the captains of industry who felt like this was a socialist experiment, that any kinds of subsidies for government was taking away from the private market and reducing the capacity of private investors to take care of problems, meet the demands of consumers, etc. So that was where the main source of criticism came from, it wasn’t the sort of criticism of the kind we see today that public housing is really fit fro the people who are unable to belong in society. I mean the fact is after the Second World War, many soldiers came back to public housing developments. Even the infamous ones that we know of today, Cabrini Green in Chicago for example, that was a classic home for soldiers, white ethnic soldiers, who were coming back and needed a place before they moved on to home ownership and family formation. The stigma really arose after the Second World War when public housing started to be populated by African-Americans and African-American poor families. That’s where much of the criticism, the critical look at public housing arose.
Q: Have you seen a change in that perspective with the rise of hip-hop music and the glamorization of living in the projects?
SV: I think one of the interesting themes that I pick up in the representation of public housing in hip-hop is the amplification of a certain set of tendencies already existent in the American consciousness, which is the drive for money, the overt misogyny, the “outlaw” lifestyle. I mean, I say this is in the American consciousness because if you look at any of these three, particularly the outlaw lifestyle, that has been very much a part of what we think about American identity. The idea, whether it’s Horatio Alger and you did it by yourself and that kind of pull yourself up by your bootstraps is figured very prominently in hip-hop music. Or it’s the kind of distrust of society, distrust of social institutions, and one is turning either to friends, to community, to more informal and peer-based groups. Those kinds of images in hip-hop, again, speak to a kind of American identity. And hip-hop, as we know, tends to amplify, because they’re speaking from the margins. But just because they’re speaking from the margins, I don’t think they’re outside the mainstream. In a sense, they’re just taking up particular issues central to this society and giving it a very interesting, racialized voice.
Q: To take it back to Robert Taylor, specifically, can you talk about the management structure in the building? What kind of tenant participation was there and how was it supported and/or discouraged?
SV: When the Robert Taylor homes were built, which was in 1962, they were created in a modernist vein, which was really about trying to build what the French called towers in the sky, right, parks in the sky, right, all these sorts of words, so they were built as isolated little worlds. So a building was really its own sort of social ecosystem in a way. What the initial urban planners did not really think about was how people would organize. They just assumed if you built there would be wonderful - people would have wonderful experiences, they would live together harmoniously, etc. When they first started building a lot of places like Robert Taylor, they really realized, we have to figure how to include tenants in the daily course of life and in daily affairs. So they set up local newsletters and local organizations for gardens and parks and things like that. One of the problems that arose was they were building a high rise living, public housing residences for a population that was itself growing alienated from the broader society, right – this was the post-Civil Rights era in which there was a lot of urban unrest, a lot of distrust of the government and so residents did not just want to be involved in public housing, they wanted, they demanded a say in how the money was spent, were the money was going. They wanted accountability, they wanted governance. And it was cathected in a racialized and politicized kind of way. So public housing management changed from people simply participating in the daily affairs of life by again, by kind of mundane activities like sports and recreation and gardening and leisure, to I want to know what money is being spent in my community, I want to have a say in who gets hired, who gets contracts, etc. So in 1971 the federal government issued a memorandum of accord that said that in all public housing developments, you had to formally include tenants in the management of their own communities. And after that, there had been elections before, but really after that date you started to see elected tenant leaders in public housing. And they became bosses of the same stature of ward bosses or city council persons in their own little worlds, they controlled the vote, they had patronage, they could choose which apartment got fixed, which stairwell got fixed, what light in the hallway got fixed. Little things to probably you and I because those things get taken care of in our own development or where we live or we can afford to take care of them. But these are poor people. So those little things became very important, politicized goods. And so you started to see on the one hand a formal system of ward politics, of local political bosses emerge in public housing that on the one hand were doing very well for their constituencies, on the other hand were holding them hostage. Because they could say what resources came.
That was one thread of self-management. The other interesting thread of management was the informal, outside of the government, out side the elected system kinds of self-management. A great example, you still see today in public housing, because public housing tends to be populated by women, and with children, at least on the books anyway, there’s, like in any American community, there’s problems with domestic violence. One of the interesting ways in which public housing communities responded to domestic violence and sexual harassment was that they would force men in Chicago, they would force men who were living there illegally to respond and punish a potential abuser, a person who was treating women badly in a community. So a local, again, one of these local ward bosses would say to a group of men, look, I know you’re all living here illegally. If you don’t help Mary, by going out and telling Mary’s boyfriend, John, to stop beating her up, or if you don’t go and beat up John, and tell him to leave the community, I’m going to go and tell the government that you’re living here illegally.
So in other interesting ways there was an informal system of management and regulation, social regulation as it were that developed at the same time.
Q: What were the limits of the informal management structures?
SV: Well, generally, whether it’s in an Italian-American community in Canarsie, or in an African-American community in East New York public housing, informal regulation only takes you so far, unless you can transfer the kind of political capital that you have to the mainstream of society. By that I mean, there are often parallels drawn between Mafia communities and public housing, in the sense that there’s gangs that run public housing, there’s Mafias, organized criminal entities that run Italian-American neighborhoods – these are myths, I’m just using these myths as examples. One of the interesting things that differentiates the immigrant experience and the African-American experience is that in managing their own communities ––– Irish, Italians, Jews, Lithuanians, etc. –– have always been able to form a tie to the central government, to the central political machine, so that if they were informally policing their own communities, they also had a tie to a police officer or police commander who they could call, whose resources that they could avail themselves of. African-Americans have never really had that kind of capacity. So if I’m helping to police and create and order in my community, that’s all I have. And that leads to alienation in the long run, that leads to less engagement with civic institutions. Because I can’t say to somebody, look you better shape up and stop abusing your partner or I’m going to get Officer Jones to come over here. Whereas that tended to happen in white ethnic communities. They could draw on the resources of the state, even though they were doing things informally. The African-American communities have been alienated in that way, so they’ve never had that kind of connection, so there’s a limit, to what self-management can do. And it depends really on the relationships that one has to mainstream society, actually.
Q: Where do you see promise in public housing?
SV: Well in the last decade, since the beginning of the early 1990’s, there has been a systematic effort underway to raze public housing, demolish public housing and replace the land were public housing once stood and in many of the large cities anyway, with mixed income communities. So the federal government has basically decided that it is not capable of either building or managing public housing and we’re leaving it to the private market. And so we’re selling off incredibly valuable, publicly owned lands, or you know, via 99 year leases which are the same thing really, giving them at cheap rates to private developers and creating mixed-income communities where some of the units that are built are for low income families, some are what are called affordable housing which are for working class, working families and some at what are called market rate which could be 200 … 300… Four hundred thousand dollar townhouses, etc.
That is the move now. That’s one of the two moves in America’s approach to public housing. The second is for the poor families that can’t come back because there may not be enough units on these lands or they may be built ten years from now, they have to have somewhere to live, they give them rent vouchers. And they subsidize their rent. Again, government feels that it really has no responsibility providing this good and so we turn it over to the private market.
So in both cases, privatization, which we have seen in welfare reform, in the medical industry, what have you, is coming to public housing. And it’s exerting in some ways a useful impact in the sense that it’s creating efficiency, which the market does, etc., it’s promoting diversity in the sense that it’s providing mixed-income communities, but the problem is that in the last 40 or 50 years, public housing has been a safety net, perhaps as it always has been, actually, and that function is gone. So we don’t think about public housing as providing safety and security for the poorest and the neediest anymore and that’s a significant change.
Q: On the one hand, residents of Robert Taylor Homes and other high-rise public housing developments are extremely isolated from social services and opportunities, as you make particularly clear in American Project when tenants approach the surrounding community for help in periods of extreme gang violence. I though that was a really interesting moment in the book. On the other hand, you’re very careful to emphasize the fact that life inside the projects didn’t develop separately from the mainstream. Could talk specifically about how social structures in Robert Taylor are connected to and are even reflections of wider mainstreams structures and trends?
SV: I think at a couple of different levels it’s important that we recognize that public housing communities are both alienated but yet at the mainstream of America society. The first perhaps is simply in terms of work. The common impression is that public housing residents don’t work. Which if you look at the statistics, the available statistics, that’s true in that to live in public housing you have to have a limited income so a lot of people are saying officially that they’re unemployed. But if you go into any public housing community, and talk with people for five minutes, what you’ll find out is that families in public housing are made up of not only their own parents and children, but friends and kin who live in the home, who work, and who simply can’t afford to pay rent. So in that way there’s a very real connection and a very real place for public housing in this world, in that it is a shelter for the working class, it provides housing for people who work. These people work in the service sector most often, they’re working in low wage jobs, menial work. But you know in New York – New York is always an interesting case because many middle class people live in New York City’s public housing developments.
So at one level, just simply in terms of working people, public housing is very much at the core of American social structures. At another level, just in terms of what people aspire to, ask anybody in public housing and you’ll get a variation on some very American themes of what is the good life. Having my own home. Living in a safe neighborhood. Having a car. A garage. These sorts of emblems of making it in American society. I want my kids to do better than I did, right. So even in that sense, at the ideological level, we’re not talking about people who don’t value work, who don’t value the same sorts of things that we all do. Who aren’t driven by the same fears and anxieties, etc.
And on e of the things that I’ve learned making this film is that they approach change in the same way that we all approach change. Fear, some do better than others, some rely on others, some decide to do it by themselves. Some can’t do it by themselves. Etc. And so even something that I didn’t – I mean I spent most of my life trying to convince people to not look at these places as totally outside the American social fabric, but as woven into that social fabric – it even happened in the process of demolition. Even as their community was being demolished I realized how American this community was. Just at the level of individuals who have to deal with a very important period of change in their lives. Even there you could see how at the core of American society they really are.
Q: How has the demolition of the Robert Taylor Homes affected the rest of community – the surrounding community – not the public housing project residents?
SV: The effect of demolishing a public housing community, because it’s a very poor community, speaks to the contradictions of urban development in modern America. On the one hand, these are poor communities, they need resources, so when you demolish public housing you afford an opportunity for city governments and local leaders to bring in businesses, bring in new residents, increase the tax base, etc. And you know, you ask any public housing resident, they’ll more than likely express an opinion for better stores and these sorts of things. So it’s not as though they’re entirely opposed to change. In fact many want change. They’re living in conditions that really need to be changed. On the other hand, we’re talking about businesses that catered to public housing communities. We’re talking about families that developed relationships with businesses, that had credit with businesses, that knew that if they didn’t have money they could go down to a mom and pop store and run up a tab. Which is very important for poor families. So the business community is affected severely. The wider community is affected because those families are sending their kids to schools, they may have relationships with families outside public housing. So the social structure of the community has changed. A church may find that its congregation has gone down 80%, 50%, and so it’s facing, it needs to rethink where it’s going, so a lot of institutions are being changed. You know, if you just think about in Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, we’re talking about thousands and thousands and thousands of people in these cities that are moving. Changing completely the geography of poverty and changing completely the neighborhoods. So we have to think about it in that way and in all of these ways – buildings, civic institutions, families. All of them are impacted.
Q: I think there may be a common perception that public housing are places for transients. You use the word a public housing community – I think that a lot of people wouldn’t even register that that’s a possibility, because it’s a place that people are immediately trying to get out of. Is this perception a choice that you see as a problem in our society?
SV: Yeah, I actually chose the term DisLocation really along the lines of what you’re saying because I think it speaks to … it’s not comfortable to envision it but I think if you imagine a shoulder being dislocated or something like that, it’s not as though you lose the power of your shoulder, it’s that it’s seeking to go back to a place where it naturally belongs. So if you take that metaphor, what I wanted to try and bring at was that there are organic and very important relationships that help people survive and give them meaning in this community. So if we’re taking a family out of this public housing development, destroying the building, sending families on their own way, we’re destroying meaning, we’re destroying people who have meaningful lives and relationships with one another. You know, and we may say for good reason, given what those relationships do, they keep them in poverty, etc. If that’s the view that we have. But nevertheless we have to admit that we’re destroying a community in the sense that we’re taking people apart from one another. I mean if you can imagine it, think of the ten friends that you have and scatter them. For us it may not be so hard getting around the city, so imagine each one goes to a different country. It could be a pretty significant kind of change, despite how regular your email is. It can really change the quality of your life, emotionally and psychically. And so we have to think about that kind of rupture for people when we move them and relocate them. It’s not just about improving their lives. It’s changing their lives in many ways.
Q: How do the Robert Taylor Homes compare to other public housing developments in the US?
SV: Robert Taylor is similar to main large, urban, central city public housing developments in that it is high-rise, concrete and steel and built according to a modernist vision. It’s 16 stories, there’s 28 of them that line along expressway – that’s common to cities like Atlanta, Baltimore etc. it is filled predominantly with the poorest families in American society, predominantly African-American, again which makes it similar to other places. It is a de facto red light district. It is a space where the white ethnic community in Chicago, truckers in Chicago, Latinos in Chicago who live in other parts of the city and the working class African-American population come to purchase drugs, to find prostitution, to get their car fixed off the books, etc. Police know this, they just don’t enforce that space. So it’s a place where there’s a lot of under ground economy.
It is dissimilar to a lot of places in that it is probably larger than most urban communities, you know, we’re talking roughly 25,000 people or so. Not every community will boast that kind of a large integrated development. It’s different because it’s in the Northeast and so it has a very very strong African-American leadership, citywide leadership with which it engages, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way, and apart from other Northeastern cities, that’s pretty specific.
Robert Taylor is emblematic of the kind of public housing that probably most large cities possess which is an alienated, disenfranchised poor population, predominantly African-American, who are underserved and neglected and relying on an alternate economy for their livelihood. That differs say from New York, and New York is exceptional, because New York has working class, poor and middle class people living in public housing of many different races and ethnicities. So New York is really the exception. Robert Taylor is probably more like other places.
Q: You’ve already mentioned that the current trend is towards privatization in the field of public housing. And I wonder, in your opinion is the concept of the public in danger of being consumed by privatization, by the cult of individuality and what today is the line between the private and commercial and pubic interest? Do you see that line being blurred?
SV: If you live in New York or you live in a European city, you probably still have a thriving public sector, but in most American cities, privatization has really decimated the public sector. Privatization has really come far along. You know I live in New York, I rely on public transportation, I don’t have a car, you know I speak with and engaged with a very diverse community all the time. You know that’s the kind of democratic discourse that occurs here is very different than in other places and is probably more reminiscent of European cities. I think it’s a shame that we are … that we have such limited faith in government. We really don’t trust – when we don’t trust government, we don’t trust ourselves really, because the government is really nothing apart from your own desires and aspirations to act collectively. And that’s a telling statement. I ask a question to my class every time I teach, I say, if I’m a person living in your country, what do I get simply by being in your country, what am I entitled to? And they say, well you have to work. And I say, no I’m writing poetry and sitting in a café. What do I get? They’re hard pressed to give me anything frankly. Which means they’re hard pressed to really think that there’s anything public, anything that we share. And the significance of public housing is that it’s one of the last public goods in American society that’s really there. I mean apart from Medicare and Social Security, it’s one of the few goods left that we value and it’s going to the wayside. And I think we lose a lot. One thing to keep in mind is that since the early twentieth century, American communities have really drawn on either conservation or renewal as a strategy for keeping their civic sector and public sector healthy. Conservation, which most white communities have drawn on, is a way of getting resources from the government to fix roads, to stay in the neighborhood, to keep living in the neighborhood, to fix churches and schools, etc. Renewal, urban renewal, is a strategy that African-American communities have had in which the area becomes razed, the people leave, it becomes revitalized, and another group comes in. We call this gentrification. So when we think about the public, we can’t think about the public as a philosophical question outside the domain of race. Because even in the ways in which we’ve constituted the public sector, it’s already racialized. So it’s not simply that I can ride the subway, it’s also that I may live in a neighborhood that has a relationship to a government and expects government to act and indeed can foster certain kinds of action without me even thinking about it. And privatization can threaten that,can threaten all of the implicit ways in which we relate to government. And again, because we live in a racialized society, what it’s going to do is amplify racial tensions. Because it’s going to continue to make it such that communities of predominantly African-American makeup are treated systematically unfairly so that their public goods are taken away first. Their transportation nodes are gone, their subway stops are the first not to be fixed or the first let to be deteriorated, etc. So we have to constantly think about privatization, about the role of the public in racial terms in American society in the way that we might not in other places in the country.
Q: One point that you make in American Project is that social organization looks like disorganization when there aren’t resources to back it up. Could detail, very basically, what sorts of resources are necessary for a community to effectively strive to make that space habitable?
SV: I come from the perspective that the human species individually and collectively is an entropic system. Meaning that we’re disintegrating. We’re disintegrating in terms of our bodies, our minds, our relationships to other people, meaning there’s constantly change. So what has to be in place are resources, publicly endowed resources that allow people to deal with change. Whether that change is a street lamp that needs to be fixed, or a social worker that needs to be on hand because your son or daughter is having trouble at school. We’re not currently looking at communities in that way. We don’t think about society in that way. We try to stabilize, we try to avoid change, but I would prefer that we start looking, whether it’s public housing, whether it’s a suburb, etc. are the kinds of resources that enable people to reproduce themselves everyday and collectively. And that’s where we should start thinking about what’s necessary in this society, what do we need to have in place, etc. What is publicly available, what should be governed by the public, what do we do privately rather than publicly, etc. Instead of thinking about it as entitlements, instead of thinking about it as what does the, you know poor are a drain, etc. Rather, if we think about the basic fact that we’re all disintegrating and some of us manage to do a little better than others. W manage to live longer, our houses manage to stay up better, our streets are a little better maintained and so on. We’ll start I think having a different perspective on how we relate to one another and what we need in the long run. What came out of, in American Project what cam out for me was that I don’t see a lot of democratic tendencies in American society, and in fact I see them in the most ostracized community. I don’t see them where I live. I don’t know my neighbors. I don’t know the people who live on my street block. Bu you know what, I may not need to. Because I live in a wealthy community, I can take that for granted. But they can’t. And in some ways they’re more democratic than we are. So I think we need to rethink how we learn and rethink what we look at, as well. And we have to do that by beginning to look at all of these communities as disintegrating and identify what the different ways in which people stay viable and keep their places habitable.