Great American City

Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect

Robert J. Sampson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226733883
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

For over fifty years numerous public intellectuals and social theorists have insisted that community is dead. Some would have us believe that we act solely as individuals choosing our own fates regardless of our surroundings, while other theories place us at the mercy of global forces beyond our control. These two perspectives dominate contemporary views of society, but by rejecting the importance of place they are both deeply flawed. Based on one of the most ambitious studies in the history of social science, Great American City argues that communities still matter because life is decisively shaped by where you live. To demonstrate the powerfully enduring impact of place, Robert J. Sampson presents here the fruits of over a decade's research in Chicago combined with his own unique personal observations about life in the city, from Cabrini Green to Trump Tower and Millennium Park to the Robert Taylor Homes. He discovers that neighborhoods influence a remarkably wide variety of social phenomena, including crime, health, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, leadership networks, and immigration. Even national crises cannot halt the impact of place, Sampson finds, as he analyzes the consequences of the Great Recession and its aftermath, bringing his magisterial study up to the fall of 2010. Following in the influential tradition of the Chicago School of urban studies but updated for the twenty-first century, Great American City is at once a landmark research project, a commanding argument for a new theory of social life, and the story of an iconic city.

PART I SETTING AND THESIS

1 Placed

Imagine a world where distance has died, where globalization and high-tech wonders have rendered place irrelevant, where the Internet, Blackberries, and planes are the coin of a global realm, not local difference. From the North End of Boston to the North Beach of San Francisco, imagine cities where neighborhood difference is an anachronism, a victim of “placelessness.”

On the surface this thought experiment matches common experience. Who doesn’t know a teenager wired to everything but her neighborhood? It seems everyone nowadays is traversing the urban metropolis while chatting away on a cell phone, plugged into an iPod, or perhaps even “tweeting.”¹ As for the idyllic urban village said to characterize communities of yesteryear, few of us have the time or energy for dinner with our neighbors anymore. Americans are notoriously individualistic and roam widely, so what then is the relevance of place? Globalization is everywhere triumphant according to the dominant narrative, rendering us “elsewhere” rather than placed. Thus according to the social theorist Anthony Giddens, we need not imagine at all, for the very essence of high modernity and contemporary conditions can be captured in the idea of place as “phantasmagoric.”² Neither does the public intellectual Thomas Friedman need a thought experiment, because for him the world is already “flat,” or at the very least, flattening.³

These influential thinkers and this common wisdom about the effects of technology are right at some fundamental level. Universal forces create places that are similar no matter where we go. The strip malls that line cities and suburbs across the country come quickly to my mind, uniformly ugly in the same way no matter where they alight. Even cities as a whole are thought by many to be interchangeable; if we can be anywhere, then nowhere in particular stands out. And even if we cannot literally be anywhere, we can be elsewhere aided by profound advances in technology.

Setting aside the suspicion that only the privileged elite enjoy a global playing field, there are also good empirical reasons to take seriously the questioning of place and concepts like neighborhood or community. Social-network theorists have shown us that urbanites create nonspatial communities that cross-cut geographic ones. Metropolitan dwellers might not know their neighbors on an intimate basis, but they are likely to build viable sets of social relations spread across the city, state, country, and increasingly the world.⁴ In an influential paper in the late 1970s, Barry Wellman referred to this as “community liberated,” or what might be thought of as community beyond propinquity.⁵ Perhaps place is phantasmagorical and community lost.

With all the emphasis on new forms of alienation from traditional forms of community, it may come as a surprise to learn that intellectual and public concern with the decline of community is longstanding and finds vigor in every historical period. Today’s manifestations might be unique but not the perceived problem. In the most abstract version the theme of declining community and yearning for renewal finds its roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition: Eden became sin city and salvation still awaits. Karl Marx was secular but the promise of community after the overthrow of capitalism was unmistakable and launched societal revolutions. The entire discipline of sociology, in fact, was founded on the upheavals of the late nineteenth century widely thought to have frayed the social fabric of “Gemeinschaft” (community).⁶ The presumed decline of traditional forms of personal association in small towns besieged by the advance of widespread urbanization and industrialization became the central problematic for other noted scholars such as Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber. Louis Wirth later expanded these concerns by arguing that large population size, density, and ethnic heterogeneity were socially disintegrative features that characterized rapidly changing cities. Wirth famously asserted in 1938 that these defining elements of urbanism made social relations “anonymous” (like Internet surfing? blog comments?) and “superficial” (like texting? Face-book?), with estrangement undermining family life and ultimately the bonds of solidarity thought to reflect community.⁷ One can read Wirth today, insert technology as the villain, and get a familiar result.

This classic thesis of decline—aptly described as “community lost”— thus posits the idea that the social ties of modern urbanites have become impersonal, transitory, and segmented, hastening the eclipse of local community and feeding processes of what became known as “social disorganization.”⁸ A well-known book in the middle of the twentieth century adroitly captured the collective urging of the times: The Quest for Community.⁹

The beat went on and never stopped. The contemporary manifestation of community lost is exposed by the intense attention focused on the notion of Americans “bowling alone” and “hunkering down.” Robert Putnam’s thesis of a decades-long decline in voluntary associations, trust, and informal neighborly exchange captured the imagination not just of social scientists but the public at large.¹⁰ The concept of community lost has also been frequently invoked in scholarly debates across a range of fields, including “social capital,”¹¹ civil society,¹² social movements,¹³ and in the public intellectual world of communitarians.¹⁴ As if to underscore these concerns, a widely reported and earnestly discussed finding in 2006 argued that the core discussion networks of Americans decreased by a third from the mid-1980s to the present, with notable declines for voluntary associations and neighborhood contacts.¹⁵ More recently came a warning of the “downside of diversity,” with evidence pointing to increasing immigration and ethnic heterogeneity as a potential source of mistrust in one’s neighbors.¹⁶

An interesting irony is that the placelessness and globalization critique finds an affinity with the longstanding narrative of community lost in the idea that personal ties to the local community have withered away.¹⁷ The difference is that the globetrotting modernist says good riddance (community liberated!), whereas “communitarianism” can be seen as a sort of resistance movement to counter the bowling-alone scenario of decline and inspire a renewal of community.¹⁸ Either way, the implication many public intellectuals and scholarly pundits alike have taken away is that places—especially as instantiated in neighborhoods and community—are dead, impotent, declining, chaotic, irrelevant, or some combination thereof.

Observing Chicago

Chicago is the great American city.

Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago.¹⁹

Enter contemporary and, yes, global Chicago.²⁰ Logic demands that if neighborhoods do not matter and placelessness reigns, then the city is more or less a random swirl. Anyone (or anything) could be here just as easily as there. Identities and inequalities by place should be rapidly interchangeable, the durable inequality of a community rare, and neighborhood effects on both individuals and higher-level social processes should be weak or nonexistent. The effects of spatial proximity should also be weak. And so goes much contemporary scholarship.²¹

By contrast, the guiding thesis of this book is that differentiation by neighborhood is not only everywhere to be seen, but that it is has durable properties—with cultural and social mechanisms of reproduction— and with effects that span a wide variety of social phenomena. Whether it be crime, poverty, child health, protest, leadership networks, civic engagement, home foreclosures, teen births, altruism, mobility flows, collective efficacy, or immigration, to name a few subjects investigated in this book, the city is ordered by a spatial logic (“placed”) and yields differences as much today as a century ago. The effect of distance is not just geographical but simultaneously social, as described by Henry Zorbaugh in his classic treatise The Gold Coast and the Slum.²² Spatially inscribed social differences, I argue, constitute a family of “neighborhood effects” that are pervasive, strong, cross-cutting, and paradoxically stable even as they are changing in manifest form.

To get an initial feel for the social and physical manifestations of my thesis and the enduring significance of place, walk with me on down the streets of this iconic American city in the first decade of the twenty-first century. I begin the tour in the heart of phantasmagoria if there ever was one—the bustling “Magnificent Mile” of Michigan Avenue, the highly touted showcase of contemporary Chicago.²³ As we start southward from the famed Water Tower, we see mostly glitter and a collage of well-to-do people, with whites predominant among the shoppers laden with bags from the likes of Louis Vuitton, Tiffany’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Cartier, and more. Pristine stores gleam, police officers direct traffic at virtually every intersection throughout the day, and construction cranes loom in the nearby distance erecting (or in anticipation of) new condos. There is an almost complete lack of what James Q. Wilson and George Kelling famously termed “broken windows,” a metaphor for neighborhood disrepair and urban neglect.²⁴ As I walked south on a midmorning in January of 2006, street sweepers were cleaning both sides of an already clean street as if to make the point. Whatever “disorder” exists is in fact socially organized, whether the occasional homeless asking for money in approved locations (near the river is common; in front of Van Cleef & Arpels or the Disney Store is not) or groups with a cause pressing their case with pamphlets, signs, and petitions. A favorite blip around the holidays is charity appeals mixed with the occasional hurling of abuse (or ketchup) at shoppers emerging from the furrier. I see nothing on this day but many furs. Other warmer times of the year bring out a cornucopia of causes.²⁵ On a warm day in late March of 2007, a homeless shelter for women presses its cause alongside an anti-Obama crusader (the latter getting many glares, in this, Obama country).

As we near the Chicago River, Donald Trump announces his vision. It is not subtle, of course, but rather a symbolic shout; in the city of skyscrapers the cranes here are busy erecting the self-described world’s tallest future building, one in which “residential units on the 89th floor will break a 37-year world record held by the John Hancock Center for the world’s highest homes off ground level.”²⁶ Chicago is once again a “city on the make,” as Nelsen Algren put it well,²⁷ and so it seems perfectly fitting that Trump chose Chicago for this particular behemoth.²⁸ On a cold day in March with barely a hole in the ground, international tourists were busily snapping pictures of the spectacle to be. A year later at fifteen stories and rising, and then later at almost ninety, the shutters of the tourist cameras continued to flap. In April 2009, only the height had changed and Trump’s vision was complete. Here, status is in place.

After crossing the Chicago River from the Near North Side into the Loop and passing the clash of classic architecture and Trump’s monument to the future in its midst, one begins to see the outlines of the new Millennium Park in the distance, the half-billion-dollar extravaganza long championed by the second Mayor Daley and built considerably over cost with cries of corruption and cronyism.²⁹ Yet there is no denying the visual impact and success of Millennium Park, a Disney-like playground, all shiny and new. Even on a cold winter day there is public activity and excitement in the air. People mill about, skaters glide across the rink, and film-projected faces of average citizens stare out of the fountain’s facade. Looking west from the park the skyline and bustle of the Loop stand out in a different way than the Near North—more workers and everyday business activity against the backdrop of landmark buildings and institutions.

Continuing south along Michigan Avenue past Roosevelt Road one sees more action, but with a twist. The architecture and historical pulse of the southern part of Chicago has always been different from points north. Despite its proximity to the Loop, the community of the “Near South Side” was marked by vacant rail yards, vagrants, dilapidated SRO (single-room-occupancy) hotels frequented by transients, penny arcades, and warehouses. The latter are now being redeveloped for lofts and one old SRO building after another is being swept away for new condos and chic restaurants. Unlike the cumulative advantages being piled high atop the long-stable Gold Coast, renewal is the order of the day. Alongside and in some cases atop former railroad yards, the Near South development rose to prominence in the mid-1990s when Mayor Richard M. Daley and his wife moved there from the storied political neighborhood of Bridgeport in 1994.³⁰ Other developments soon took off and today flux is readily apparent where decay once stood. Few Chicagoans just ten years ago would have imagined eating smartly at South Wabash and 21st, the former haunts of hobos and the homeless.³¹ Whereas the Magnificent Mile has long anchored development and moneyed investment, the Near South Side tells a story of real change.³²

Further down Michigan Avenue between about 35th and 47th Streets in the communities of Douglas and then Grand Boulevard, the scene is jarringly different. The transformation of the Near South has given way to what sociologists traditionally called the “slum.” In a walk down Michigan Avenue in 2006 I saw what appeared to be a collapsing housing project to the left, broken glass in the street, vacant and boarded-up buildings, and virtually no people. Those I ...