In the bleak history of America's poor, the construction of Robert Taylor Homes was a low point. Finished in 1962 and torn down just in the past decade, the project was America's biggest public housing scheme, its 28 towers home to almost 30,000 residents in Chicago's South Side. It was there that Sudhir Venkatesh found himself in 1989, as a sociology student doing fieldwork for his PhD thesis. He met J.T., a rising star in a local gang, by nervously asking him a survey question: "How does it feel to be black and poor?". Fearing a beating or worse, Mr Venkatesh instead found a source.
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