Cracks in the Pavement: Social Change and Resilience in Poor Neighborhoods (review)

This book, a 2008 C. Wright Mills Award winner, is not (contrary to what its subtitle might suggest) about social change that might alleviate poverty or increase socioeconomic equality. Instead, the book argues that people who live in poor urban neighborhoods develop value orientations and social practices that allow them to cope in material conditions of deprivation. While useful in allowing low-income people to make the best of their circumstances, this cultural adaptation makes social change that might alleviate poverty unlikely. The study is based on a stunningly ambitious participant-observation study of two neighborhoods in Los Angeles and three in New York City from January 1991 to December1999, and the author aims to contribute to the growing project of revisiting and revising the role of culture in poverty.¹

Sanchez-Jankowski is also engaged in a conversation among a list of notable sociologists who have long debated the social organization or disorganization of low-income neighborhoods. He argues that the neighborhoods he studied are strongly organized in ways that allow poor people to deal with otherwise unbearable conditions of scarcity, deprivation and violence. At the same time, it is this very organization — "the life the urban poor have made for themselves"(10) — that poses profound barriers to improving those conditions. This is not to "blame" poor people for their poverty. Rather it is to say that efforts to undermine the culture they have constructed in order to survive (and make life sometimes enjoyable) necessarily calls forth powerful expressions of cultural affirmation. Progressive policy makers only hope is to fundamentally alter the material circumstances that cause this culture to be necessary, and then, apparently, wait a very long time for that culture to gradually decline.

What the author defines as a "subculture of scarcity" consists of two main value orientations: security and excitement. These values play out in two different types of poor neighborhoods: one fragmented in terms of values used to establish status hierarchies, the other ethnically contested, both in a constant state of tension between change and preservation. The book discusses local institutions (housing projects, neighborhood stores, schools, etc.) that make up social organization, applying the same conceptual framework to each in turn. In contrast to most qualitative participant-observation research, the author describes his approach as positivist in terms of deriving more from existing theory instead of theory emerging from data. Some readers may find this rather formulaic and lacking in the rich narrative common in urban ethnographies.

In explaining poor peoples' actions, Sanchez-Jankowski tries to make rational (or at least "functional") what may seem irrational or simply off-putting to middle-class people. Living in an extremely noisy environment makes speaking loudly a reasonable accommodation. When living in crowded conditions where many share one bathroom, urinating in elevators becomes understandable and almost mandatory. When space in apartments is limited, space away from home — corner stores, streets, hangout areas — becomes contested territory worth fighting over. When faced with violence and police seem disinterested, seeking quasi-protection from gangs seems sensible. When jobs don't offer status and respect, then being a fast talker, having a distinctive personal style and displaying material goods one can't really afford become important. With little money for entertainment, frequent sex is both free and readily available, and verbal bantering is ripe for a laugh.

Sanchez-Jankowski makes a convincing argument for the importance of "attempting to explain how poor people have produced a life for themselves within structural conditions of material scarcity,"(346) a life "that is in many ways more functional than dysfunctional."(347) He successfully counters portrayals of poor people as passive victims of their fate, and pictures them instead as active agents who construct a culture that allows them to get along in the face of abject circumstances — a culture that is not static but shifts and is negotiated and re-negotiated (the kind of social change referred to in the title).

Still...