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There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Th

william julius wilson richard p. taub

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A stunning, long-awaited book that looks at the (still) shocking truths of race, ethnicity, and class in America today.

William Julius Wilson, among our most admired sociologists and urban policy advisers, author of When Work Disappears ("Profound and disturbing," Time; "His magnum opus," David Remnick, The New Yorker), and Richard P. Taub, chairman of the Department on Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, spent three years with a group of researchers studying four working- and lower-middle-class Chicago neighborhoods: African American, white ethnic, Latino, and one in transition from white ethnic to Latino.

Their focus: to understand how and why certain urban residents react to looming racial, ethnic, or class changes, and what their reactions mean in terms of the stability of their neighborhood.

Using first-person narratives and interviews throughout, There Goes the Neighborhood gives voice to attitudes and realities few Americans are willing to look at. Their findings lay bare a disturbing and incontrovertible truth: that the American dream of racial integration, forty-two years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, still eludes us - and, in fact, may not happen in the foreseeable future.

The authors examine the ways in which forces that contribute to strong neighborhoods work against the idea of integration. They explain why residents of neighborhoods with weak social organizations often choose to move rather than confront unwanted ethnic or racial change. Finally, the authors make clear that the racial and ethnic tensions that have become all but inherent to urban neighborhoods have urgent implications for Americans at every level of society.

Groundbreaking, authoritative, eye-opening, and certain to rekindle, and permanently alter, the discussion of race relations in our time.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,2006

This edition

Format
240 pages, Hardcover
Published
October 17, 2006 by Knopf
ISBN
9780394579368
ASIN
0394579364
Language
English

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william julius wilson

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Rating(4 / 5.0, 28 votes)
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28 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
TheRedo
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Interesting account of change and stability in four Chicago neighborhoods. Is it possible to have a neighborhood that people care enough to fight for, that is stable and is still racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse? This book provides no examples of it, if it is. A pretty sobering account of neighborhood life in Chicago.
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zedim
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Fascinating read - I have guesses for the neighborhoods, but since all of these studies took place when I was in elementary school, I'm not quite sure. Fellow Chicagoans - read it and confirm!
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psydrow
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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A field study about the racial demographics of four neighborhoods in Chicago. Although the study was completed in the late 1990s, many of the research cited in the book is outdated. Interesting parallels like social programs needed to support lower end communities still sadly apply today.
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eoes
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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You gotta love Wilson. This books describes 4 neighborhoods in Chicago with different racial make-ups and different levels of resident turnover. The book focuses on how residents choose to react to neighborhood change in terms of two options- voice or escape.

I wish I could say I was surprised by anything in this book, but our country's attitude toward race appears to be the same as it has been for decades. But it's always good to check in with the individuals who make this country, just to see if anything is changing. The book includes lots of quotes from residents, providing a look at their perspective in their words. It brings the situation to an individual level that reveals much about race relations and why there are so few racially integrated neighborhoods.
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Dianime
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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The authors are particularly focused on what causes a neighborhood to reach the "tipping point" of racial turnover. An interesting study, but unfortunately they have little to say about what conditions might lead to successful integration and coexistence (and, in fact, are somewhat pessimistic about it). Please write more about how to achieve my NPR-listening latte liberal fantasies next time.
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PrakharMathur
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Interesting study of changing neighborhoods in Chicago - not exactly riveting, but defintely worth reading if you live in Chicago & social issues are important to you.
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lubu42
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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It skimmed the major generalities but didn't really dive deep. It all boils down to this... people want to be around like minded people.
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The_Arbitrator
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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This is a quick, reasonably well-written, often very disheartening read about well, racial and class tensions in four (Southwest Side) Chicago neighborhoods. I definitely want to read Wilson's other works, but my rating of this one may be unduly harsh because I truly don't understand why it took the researchers so long to publish this work. I've lived in Chicago a long time (12+ years) and many areas (South Loop, Maxwell Street, much of East Village/West Town) are incredibly, almost unrecognizably different from when I moved here. Yet the research for this book was done before that (1993-95), and several of the researchers had long-ago published their own books based on this research by the time this one came out in 2006. I'm used to sociological books being based on work done years before publication, but it just seems so extreme in this case. The SW and NW sides of Chicago tend to change more slowly than the North Side and central areas, but still...

I'm also someone who gets extremely cranky with the convention among some sociologists of giving neighborhoods/cities fake names. It's not too hard to figure out these four, but I still found it an unnecessary contrivance. So many works of sociology/history/oral history don't change names: Black on the Block (Oakland-Kenwood); The South Side (Calumet Heights); The Near Northwest Side Story (Humboldt & Wicker Park); Back of the Yards (uh...).

Forgive me if these complaints are petty, but I couldn't get past them. There's real value to this work; I'd just like a comparison of what these neighborhoods are like NOW, 10+ years later.
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