Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect

by Robert J. Sampson

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, History, Cities, Urbanism, Urban Planning, Urban Studies

552 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2011

Reviews

[Sheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very methodologically heavy book about the PHDCN work in Chicago. Sampson does a great job setting up his theoretical framework, describing the dataset and the many layers of analysis that have been done over the years, and then unifying it in the end, but it is a pretty dense read.

Ultimately, Sampson provides an argument for collective efficacy as different from individual agent and stratification/structural theories of poverty and segregation. He found collective efficacy to be stable across time (even as neighborhood composition changes..people move). He also found prior measures of collective efficacy to be more strongly related to negative outcomes (teen pregnancy and homicide) than even current measures of disadvantage.

Some of the findings are very common sensical, but the methodological advances (of measurement and data) allow for different policy interpretations (rejecting authoritarian police interventions of the "broken windows" in exchange for more non profit, individual agency, and community building activities).

Overall it dense, but a thorough justification for a new theory and measure.

[Dave · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have no doubt that many readers find this book completely fascinating. To me, parts of it were indeed extremely interesting. But, it is dense with academic prose, process, and descriptions of statistical regressions. That's just not what I want to read on the way to and from work.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

When you moved to college, you more than likely moved to a city. Or if not, you moved to one shortly after. More Americans than ever live in big cities, and if you're like me, you were a little too scared of New York City's rent to move there. So more than likely, you moved to a place like Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, or my own choice, Chicago. But the culture shock of the leftover segregation in a supposedly "post-racism" world is overwhelming. How can we walk a mile in a city and move from upscale homes to a ghetto? The stronger question: Why do we see only one kind of person in each neighborhood?

My own family drew a sharp breath when I told them I was moving to Chicago and warned me to stay away from the bad neighborhoods on the South Side. And to be fair, they weren't entirely wrong. Only this past weekend, when we were supposed to be celebrating how great America is, more than 80 people were shot in violent neighborhoods in Chicago, the majority of them on the South Side. We can draw assumption on the people who live in those areas simply by their zip codes.
How can this be?

That is the main question in Robert J. Sampson's heavy sociological exploration of the modern neighborhood effect. He uses Chicago as an example simply because of its obviousness, but he could have used any city in the nation, if the Racial Dot Map is anything to go by. (By chance, if you haven't had the opportunity to check that out, please do. It takes awhile to load, but it is really powerful.) Sampson starts with a theoretical walk through Chicago, ranging from the posh districts of the North Side to the dilapidated, violence-plagued residential streets of Bronzeville and the gang-riddled alleys of Lawndale and Englewood. The overwhelming differences in these areas, only a few miles apart, can be marked by a host of binaries: Education disparity, income, access to public transit, healthcare, even political influence. Instead of chalking this up to the tired "rich versus poor" argument, Sampson decided to stage an elaborate study of the actual neighborhood differences.
What he found was striking. There are not only two Chicagos: There are as many as there are neighborhoods. One can memorize the 77 community areas, but within each of those is mini-neighborhoods, block clubs, housing units and the fractured pieces of what still calls itself a city. The neighborhood effect is everywhere, all around use, isolated but whole all at once.

One of the main points that Sampson makes is the wellbeing of the community relies on its strength for collective efficacy-- otherwise known as community action. He uses the example of President Barack Obama's history of community organizing to benefit his South Side community as something that drew together more votes and support for him when he swept the entire vote of the black population on the South Side, something that had not happened since Chicago Mayor Harold Washington was elected in the 1980s.

Many of Sampson's findings are fascinating and seem at their core like well-explicated common sense. He walks readers through the very basic trenches of sociology and the methods that he and his team at the University of Chicago used to study the demographics of the city, how it was relevant, what its implications could be and how the Chicago model applied to other cities worldwide. However, his downfall is also his expertise: He is so obtuse and overloaded with sociology-speak that the book is incredibly hard to digest. It took me nearly two weeks to finish, and even then I had to take frequent breaks just because the prose was so dense. (And to be completely up-front, there were some chapters I had to skim because I was running out of time on my library rental.)

But the power of the book lingers. Chicago is on the brink of tearing itself apart due to overcrowded jails, unemployment, and just the sheer shock that we can call ourselves a world-class city yet not take care of nearly half the residents. The South and West Sides are consumed with violence and sad signs call out the lonely phrase: "Don't Shoot, I Want to Grow Up." The city officials are doing what they can, but the cause goes deeper into the roots of what keeps us separated.

But a city initiative to move people around doesn't help, either. Sampson addresses the legacy of the Chicago Housing Project destruction and the Moving to Opportunity programs, both of which relocated the most desperately poor Chicago residents to more upscale neighborhoods in the city and suburbs. Instead of the community embracing them and balancing itself, the displacement merely incited the spread of violence and the families fared no better in higher-income neighborhoods than in their own. The effect, called acute disadvantage, creates a feeling of isolation from one's community. This only solidifies the idea that we must take the neighborhoods as they are instead of reshaping them to fit our own ideas of what the city should look like.

Sampson's book is a powerful study and experiment, exposing the roots of what is wrong with our urban environments and the illnesses that must be cured. It is two years old now and can be found in the reference sections of many libraries, but if you read slower than me, you may want to purchase a copy to read over time. It is a dense read and heavy in material, so I would suggest taking it in pieces. It is available in hardback from the University of Chicago Press for $25.00 or for $9.99 for the Kindle.

Pray for Chicago.

[Ben Levin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent (and hardly dated) exploration of the role of neighborhoods in human development in Chicago. I enjoyed learning about the PHDCN and watching Sampson apply cutting-edge social theory to PHDCN data rigorously and methodically.

Everyone agrees that to know where a person lives is to know something about their socioeconomic status. What I was surprised to discover was that this type of perception (when shared by others) plays a large and empirically robust role in shaping the health of a neighborhood and its residents, even after controlling for every other factor to which SES disparities are commonly ascribed. Shared expectations of order or disorder, safety or violence, are a big deal. Violence creates a perception of violence, the perception becomes expectation, and the expectation erodes collective efficacy, contributing to future violence. This cycle is a key mechanism in the reproduction of high- and low-SES neighborhoods across time. The book also delves into the importance of city- and neighborhood-level leadership networks, the role of community organizations in growing and maintaining collective efficacy, and the reasons why programs that pay people to move to a nicer part of town are not real solutions for the movers or the communities they leave behind.

The implications are profound. If neighborhood effects are so enduring, should public policy interventions be targeted at building collective efficacy at the neighborhood level, instead of toward individuals?

[Dan Watson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Incredibly dense, dry read. Insightful and thought-provoking, to be sure, but difficult for the casual reader to engage.

The author is effective at providing evidence and building a successful narrative that calls for a re-thinking of public policy based on impacts not only to individuals but to their respective communities. The book's downfall is in its presentation, which comes across as a 400 page lab report.

A disproportionate amount of space is allocated to explanations of experimental theory and constraints, dedicating previous few pages of result summaries for the casual reader interested merely in the end results of the years of research.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this remarkable and extensively researched book, Robert Sampson makes cogent argument after cogent argument that neighborhoods are much more than the people who inhabit them--either as individuals or as groups broken down by race, class, income, etc.--rather, they're almost living, breathing organisms in themselves, organisms that react in largely predictable and repeatable ways over time. Based on what seems like one of the most far-reaching statistical studies of hundreds of different factors over a 15-year period from 1995 to 2010 (and before and after, to a lesser extent), Sampson takes those statistics and shows how remarkably stable neighborhoods are--not that the neighborhoods themselves don't change (they do), but how predictably they respond to what sometimes seem like unimportant pressures while simultaneously not responding to events that seem like they have the potential to destroy or at least greatly alter the neighborhoods for the worse.

Some of the results will be familiar to most people: poverty is a strong predictor of poor health, safety, and economic outcomes; most neighborhoods in Chicago are largely racially segregated; and income inequality remains stubbornly intergenerational. What's more surprising, however, is that when controlled for certain features, poverty's deleterious effects can be countered by collective efficacy, sometimes to the point where an extremely poor neighborhood with strong collective efficacy has better outcomes than a middle-class neighborhood with low collective efficacy. Also surprising, at least to me, were the ways in which social connections among different neighborhoods often have very little to do with geographic proximity. I guess this should make sense since I'm aware of this phenomenon in L.A. and San Francisco, places where I've spent a lot of time, but I always thought those cities were outliers in this regard. Sadly, having strong social ties among and within neighborhoods seems to have little effect on improving those neighborhoods or responding to specific negative changes. It's all about collective efficacy and, to a lesser extent, the relative density of community groups and nonprofits and the connectedness of the leaders of a given community with various other community leaders all across the city.

The sections on the importance of perceived disorder were really eye-opening, because I tend to think of those perceptions as purely negative, largely racist stereotypes that come solely from the outside; but Sampson argues, rather persuasively, that those perceptions, while often based on racism and classism and unfair stereotypes, nevertheless take a toll on the communities internally, and they are replicated and reinforced socially by the community members themselves, creating self-fulfilling prophecies of physical decay and blight and moral and legal cynicism, both of which militate against community engagement, causing conditions to worsen. It's also fascinating that certain neighborhoods retain many of the same measurable characteristics even when they change almost completely over just a few decades. So, for example, a neighborhood that was more than 70 percent White and middle class in the 1970s, may now be more than 70 percent Black, but it may still be largely middle class and have the same or stronger features of collective efficacy. Similarly, some neighborhoods that have higher percentages of immigrant residents than just 20 years ago may be largely similar even if the residents look different.

As interesting and thought-provoking as this book is, it's extremely dry and seems aimed mainly or solely at the author's fellow social scientists, and that's tragic, because this is an important book. The first, penultimate, and final chapters all contain really interesting anecdotes about Sampson's firsthand experiences of particular neighborhoods, spaced out over the course of his study. Unfortunately, while the intervening chapters mention plenty of neighborhoods statistically, they contain almost no narrative, so it's really difficult to get excited about these neighborhood effects, with the only break in the monotony coming from visually boring diagrams, figures, and maps--and I love maps!

The study ends in October 2010, and Sampson has some interesting ideas for effective ways to understand all these statistics in furtherance of truly effective public policy. He's cautiously hopeful about Chicago neighborhoods' future, especially when it comes to reducing violence; but sadly, the past few years have only shown an exacerbation of some of the uptick in crime he details anecdotally in the second-to-last chapter. I'd love to see how those statistics have tracked over the past 10 years, not only related to gun violence but also to the other ways Chicago neighborhoods did (or didn't) come out of the Great Recession.

One of the really cool altruism experiments the author describes has researchers dropping stamped letters on the sidewalk and recording what percentage of them are eventually placed by residents into the mail system. The author even personally conducts his own smaller-scale follow-up "lost letter" study in 2010, and most of his predictions are correct even though some of the neighborhoods have changed. In short, collective altruism isn't always lessened by the worsening of poverty or an increase of violent crime, which gives me some hope in humanity.

[Thomas Sadler]

Great explanation of the neighborhood effect in Chicago.

[Art · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whew. This five-hundred-fifty-page academic book may appeal to political scientists, social science researchers and similar others. This is not for the merely curious urban dweller who wants to better understand the city as an organism. The subtitle about the neighborhood effect motivated me to special-order the book.

From 1994-2001, the author led massive research that collected big data for examining the three-hundred-forty-three neighborhoods of Chicago, with a special interest in disadvantaged communities. A nugget: The author found that the density of nonprofit organizations makes a difference in a neighborhood, regardless of other challenging social factors there.

The book begins well enough by discussing a sense of place. The research showed, for example, that residents connected to the Internet are more involved and connected to their neighbors than their disconnected counterparts.

Precise words contrast with vague maps. A popular edition of this book lives within. The right editor can sculpt such a book from this academic tome.

Norman Mailer's long quote of 1969 inspired the name of this book. The quote dismisses fourteen other cities before arriving at Chicago. "Perhaps it is the last great American city," wrote Mailer forty-five years ago, commenting on the 1968 Democratic National Convention held in Chicago.

University of Chicago Press published the paperback edition last year. Almost ninety pages of notes, sources and index.

For a different viewpoint of Chicago from the 1950s to today, try the excellent Planning Chicago, which includes a section telling how planning can respond to neighborhood changes.

[Mickey Hoffman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since I grew up on the S. side of Chicago, I had more than one reason to read this book which summarizes and explains about 30 years of urban study. One main point is that neighborhoods develop their own reputations and expectations about order, violence, and the amount of caring the residents will show toward one another. He shows that where people think their voices and wants will be heard and that they can act together have the best qualities, while a sense of disorder, even if that is completely contrary to fact, leads to increased crime and violence. Naturally, Chicago being the most segregated large city in the USA has a lot to do with the quality of the neighborhoods, but income level and race, in the studies provided, do not wholly determine outcomes. The book is really fascinating.

[Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is very informative but also VERY dense! Be prepared for it to take a while. Once you've committed to it, you will enjoy the depth of research and knowledge Sampson brings to the reader. As a person who works with neighborhoods I found many of his concepts enlightening--Collective efficacy and perception being two of the main factors in neighborhood effects. Worthwhile if you have the time and energy to push through.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5. After reading this book for two lengthy months, I am finally free. Overall, Sampson's Great American City is a sweeping study of neighborhood effects using Chicago as its primary subject. Sampson debunks myths like the "broken window theory" and argues that neighborhoods are not just settings in which individuals choose to autonomously follow their own life paths, but that they are social productive and have huge importance in the quantity and quality of human behavior. He shows how neighborhoods are defined by many factors such as poverty, child health, public protest, collective efficacy, and the density of elite networks. Neighborhoods thus cause certain outcomes and are the consequence of certain factors themselves.

My main critique was that by the nature of the book being an academic text, it was often very dense and thus felt convoluted at times. Although it covered many different important ideas and the study was super fascinating, without the human elements of storytelling the ideas and conclusions didn't feel as powerful to me (even as someone who resides in Chicago and is very interested in its history and learning about its very evident hypersegregation).

A quote I liked from the conclusion:
"[...] what is truly American is not so much the individual but neighborhood inequality.

--I will post a full review after I gather my thoughts on ig @persimmonsandpaperbacks

[Spicy T AKA Mr. Tea · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an amazing work of social science. I first ran into Sampson in grad school when I read a study by him and Raudenbush that examined conditions of the fronts of buildings in Chicago to see if there was a correlation between disrepair and crime, as suggested by broken windows theory (hint: there is no correlation!). This book describes the social science research (called the Project for Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods) that Sampson and his colleagues worked on for decades. There were many questions posed; the PHDCN examined many metrics to better understand the social processes within neighborhoods. Does individual choice matter more than the collective makeup of a neighborhood? What is the impact of collective efficacy when a neighborhood is overpoliced? Which neighborhoods are the most altruistic and why? Are neighborhoods steeped in concentrated poverty able to escape and become safe and thriving locations? The sheer number of questions, the findings, and the conclusions are fascinating. No social science degree is required and you are not going to need to know advanced stats to get the point. Robert is a scientist who shares the insights of the PHDCN in an explanatory way. Definitely recommend.

[Erin Weil · Rating 3 out of 5]

First half of this book has a few incredibly interesting and provocative passages but the book shortly just becomes explanation of experiment after explanation of experiment. Obviously I don’t have the experience or knowledge to comment on the effectiveness of these experiments but I did find myself asking, “what is this even trying to prove?” for a few of them. Also I’m sure this author is on the same side politically as me and I don’t think there’s an easy way to write about some of these topics but there were a few chapters that felt a little off-putting in the way they described Chicagos impoverished black communities in the south side. Idk just rubs me the wrong way reading wealthy academics describe rigorous experiments conducted to draw conclusions about people raised in poverty.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sampson offers groundbreaking and fascinating ideas in a huge sociological study, but the writing is quite difficult and technical most of the time. It's very thorough in explaining the effect of neighborhoods on people's outcomes and why it's as a meaningful unit to measure for understanding cities. However, this is probably not an average book for leisure reading on the topic. If you're interested in the content, I would highly recommend searching on YouTube for one of Dr. Sampson's presentations about the topic before deciding if you want to dedicate your time to reading a 500-page book with lots of statistics, methodology, and academic jargon!

[Rolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

True confession, I bogged down in the middle because it felt like I was reading one journal article after another instead of a book with a narrative arc. Many details in many fine chapters, but it added up somehow to less than the sum of its parts.

[Holly Sieving · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book helped me win a grant that allow me to study the town I was living at the time. Learned alot about mapping and geo points.

[Erika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very dense --- very well researched ---

[Avi Moorthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ugh I wish I did sociology

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interessantes Buch über die sozialen Prozesse auf der Nachbarschaftsebene, nur Die Darstellung und Visualisierung der Ergebnisse ist etwas dürftig

[Adamson Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good overview of this super interesting & comprehensive project

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely geeked. Thank god for Utica, NY

[B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heavy on methodology and exhaustive in data analysis, this one is oftentimes a bear to get through. In 400+ pages, the book points out several notable patterns in community trajectories related to such metrics as per-capita-nonprofit activity, legal cynicism, and collective efficacy, but as a layman, I found the message was best digested when the author was narrating his personal observations as he hit the Chicago neighborhoods on foot. This book is clearly academic in nature, and now, having roughed it out to the end, I realize how much I appreciate anecdotes that help illustrate the statistical analysis.

Sampson did a good job reintegrating his main points over and over again: Context and individuality both matter; communities tend to retain their character from one generation to the next despite constituent turnover; neighborhoods affect bordering neighborhoods. He has some memorable passages that concisely sum up his findings. For example, he points out that "race is not a distinct or credible cause of violence or other social behaviors, for that matter - rather it is a marker for the constellation of social disadvantages and resources that are differentially allocated by racial status in American society." If you're like me, not an urban studies student, I'd recommend either finding a syllabus that can shepherd you toward the best pages/paragraphs, or skimming the methodology jargon and hunting down the results at the end of each section.

[Ammalia Podlaszewska · Rating 3 out of 5]

the book is a counter argument to the mainstream claims that community is dead. By utilizing hard datas such as the mobility pattern, poverty, crime, unemployment, civic engangement and direct observation, the author explores how an individual´s state of deprivation is affected by the spatial context given by its particular neighbourhood context. It proves the interdependence between factors of neighbourhood effect with neighbourhood´s social connections and interactions.
It´s a powerfull and ambitious piece of work!

[Birdy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great American City, while dense, is full of important information for sociologists, criminologists, and policy makers. I am a huge fan of Dr. Sampson's work overall, and this book did not disappoint. Most important, this book outlines how structural features of a neighborhood are both endogenous and exogenous variables, and how social processes, such as collective efficacy, work to bridge macro- and micro-level variables into "neighborhood effects." Very inspiring and changed the way I think about neighborhoods.

[Sekar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really like the idea that "People don't choose neighborhood. Neighborhoods choose people." A must read reference to understand the nature of neighborhoods. Sampson presents a number of methods and theories that he claims are applicable to any city in the world, not only Chicago.

[Douglas · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're interested in the whys and wherefores of how Chicago's neighborhoods have stayed the way they are in relation to the distribution of wealth and poverty, crime, health, infant mortality, civic engagement, teen births, altruism, immigration, home foreclosures, etc, this is your book.

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really broad and impressive study of neighborhood effects. Disappointed that it lacks attention to gender/sexuality and space. Loved the author's stylistic flourishes. My favorite was the reference to "magnificent mile" as a phantasmagoria.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this was an informative read, especially since I live in the Chicagoland area, it was way too "I need to pull out my dictionary" at least once a page. Not a light read and had to take several breaks and come back to it.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting exploration of how neighborhoods impact individuals. Most of the research occurs in Chicago in the mid 90s and early 00s. There were many interesting sampling methods, I particularly liked the lost letter experiment.

[Mackenzie Brooks]

Moving this over to the not-finished shelf. Had to return to library. Data is cool, just not my style.