August 2013 – Daniel Kay Hertz

Dept. of Far-Fetched Policy Comparisons

But really, I thought the PTSD-focused mental health initiative I wrote about in Joplin, MO was super interesting, and why does CPS not have this? My new piece up at the Chicago Bureau:

“Increased behavior problems, decreased attendance—every indicator following a disaster goes the wrong way,” Huff said.

To soften the blow, the district implemented an aggressive mental health intervention strategy, hiring extra counseling staff to help students deal with the pain of the disaster and return to normal life.

That kind of support would be more than welcome in large parts of Chicago, where many students are dealing with their own traumas related to street violence, poverty, or drugs, and there are incidents of one counselor carrying a caseload of some 2,400 students.

Also, here is a Google Trends search for “Chicago most dangerous” that my wonderful girlfriend linked me to while I was working on my next piece:

Huh, January 2008. What could have happened in January 2008 that would make people so interested in portraying Chicago as a hopeless war zone? I can’t think of anything…

A few short notes

1. Coalitions to which no one wants to affix their name are in trouble. Thankfully, it appears that the anti-BRT on Ashland people are just such a coalition. (In case you haven’t heard, the CTA and Chicago Department of Transportation want to take one lane of car traffic in each direction on Ashland and turn it into an express-bus-only lane with train-style stations every half mile, which would decrease bus travel time by 80% and increase car travel time by less than 10%. It’s a good idea for all sorts of reasons, which I might elaborate on some other time.)

Streetsblog Chicago really deserves kudos for the work they’ve been doing on this; the city absolutely needs smart, independent reporting and advocacy on transit issues, and they’ve been giving us that.

2. Just like unions and taxes can’t explain Detroit’s problems – guess who else has unions and high taxes? New York! Boston! Most other successful cities in America! – neither can lots of parking lots downtown. Because, you know, Dallas and Houston and so on, which may not be urbanists’ ideas of paradise, but which are providing a lot of people with jobs and affordable places to live and are very, very far from having Detroit-level fiscal and demographic problems. We do ourselves a disservice to pretend otherwise.

3. This is a good thinker on the 25th anniversary of the first permanent New Urbanist town, from Greater Greater Washington.

4. From Greater Greater Education: test scores are up in DC, but why? Is instruction improving, or are demographics just changing? (Remember that despite hype around charter schools and innovative teaching methods, the number one predictor of academic success in the U.S. remains economic status.) Answer: unclear, but probably demographics have something to do with it. Gonna do something similar for Chicago. Watch for it.

5. Finally, this from David Holmes at The Urbanophile is pretty sweet.

What We Talk About When We Talk About “The Riots”

All blockquotes are from Making the Second Ghetto by Arnold Hirsch, except where noted.

During the first two evenings of disorder, crowds ranging from 1,500 to 5,000 persons battled police who frustrated their attempts to enter the project. Mobs broke off their engagements with the police and assaulted cars carrying blacks through the area…. Blacks were hauled of streetcars and beaten. Roaming gangs covered an area…of nearly two miles…. An “incomplete” list…included 35 blacks who were known injured by white gangs, and the Defender reported that at least 100 cars driven by blacks were attacked. Eventually more than 1,000 police were dispatched to the area, and more than 700 remained in the vicinity a full two weeks after the riot had “ended.”

The first time I saw the* ghetto – not just a poor neighborhood, or an entirely non-white one**, but the kind of place where an economic and social bomb had gone off and left its mark on the streets and the buildings and everything else – I was fifteen and taking the train to Michigan. From my seat, out the window, I saw something like this:

I think I was mostly confused. I suspect that’s the case for many Americans, of all kinds of backgrounds, who have grown up in a country that has its problems but which, at some fundamental level, works, upon seeing parts of that country that so clearly do not work. It may be paired with pity, or revulsion, or fear, or anger, but at the bottom is confusion, because nothing we know explains what we’re seeing. How can a neighborhood be so poor, so isolated, so different, in a rich country where people regularly move and mix themselves from city to city and state to state? If the ghetto we’re seeing is populated mostly or entirely by black people, which it generally is, we may think about slavery and other forms of racism, but do we really believe there has been enough of that – even since the 60s? – to account for this? And in the North? To see that kind of poverty in rural Mississippi, near farms worked by sharecroppers, is terrible, but produces very little cognitive dissonance. But in Chicago? In New York***?

This post was originally supposed to be pegged to the Detroit bankruptcy postmortems, but I’ve been busy, and in any case the phenomenon at hand is hardly that specific.

The following weekend, one hundred and fifty white teens armed with metal rods and bottles rampaged through the park, injuring thirty black picnickers. “Hoodlums” broke the windows of more than twenty-five cars…. Officers refused to escort victims into the park to retrieve their belongings, left several black women and children stranded in a park building as the mob attacked, and again rebuked the picnickers for using the “wrong park.”

But that was a particularly stark moment, since it called on all sorts of people to recount a narrative of northern urban decline. And pretty much every single one I read said something like this, from the Boston Globe: “Detroit’s deterioration, which started in earnest after the 1967 race riots were among the most violent in the country’s history, has accelerated in recent years.” Or this, from NPR: “In the 1950s and ’60s, the car companies started moving factories from the urban core to the suburbs. Many white families followed, but discriminatory practices blocked that option for black families. As a result, Detroit got poorer and blacker, while the suburbs got richer and whiter — especially after the city’s 1967 riots over race and income disparities.” Searching for Detroit AND bankruptcy AND riots gets you over two and a half million hits on Google.

This sounds familiar, if you’re a Chicagoan. Chicago Magazine, in fact, published a post in the aftermath of the bankruptcy entitled “How Highways and Riots Shaped Detroit and Chicago,” which declares that the 1968 riots in the latter city “didn’t have the effect of Detroit’s (much deadlier) riots on the whole of the city, but it did permanently damage whole swaths of it while changing the commercial and racial makeup of the city.” It quotes another article: “Marie Bousfield has worked for Chicago’s Planning Department…for 15 years. ‘It’s my view that the riots were the cause of what you call “white flight,”‘ Bousfield told me recently, though she was quick to add that that’s only her personal feeling…. She is certainly not alone in believing that the riots were at least partly responsible. There’s no doubt that there was a dramatic increase in white flight…during the early 70s.”

The 1971 school year opened with the bombing of ten Pontiac[, Michigan] school buses, followed by mass protests…. [White] antibusing activists…vandalized school buses, puncturing radiators with sharpened broomsticks, breaking windows with stones and bricks, and forcing the district to create a high-security parking lot, complete with a bulletproof watchtower. Sweet Land of Liberty, Thomas Sugrue

This is something like a Big Bang theory of urban violence. There were always problems in American cities, the theory says. There were pressures. The seeds of disaster. But the riots of the 1960s, when black people looted and burned entire neighborhoods – their own, but no one at the time could be sure they would stay there – was the catalytic event that actually delivered chaos and unchecked violence. It was the moment when ghettoes like Detroit, or the West Side of Chicago, were born. The things I couldn’t explain from the other side of my train window – those are the “scars” (as the preferred metaphor goes) of the riots.

Monroe Anderson [Tribune reporter] It was almost a riot. When Harold [Washington] showed up and the press entourage showed up, there was this angry– people were approaching the car. People were out of control. I thought that we were in physical danger. And then we get to the church, and somebody spray-painted, on the church, graffiti that said, “Die, nigger, die.”

Ira Glass On a Catholic church?

Monroe Anderson Yes.

This American Life, Harold, describing events at a campaign stop by Chicago’s first black mayor, in 1983.

To get to the point, this is a theory that is tenable only because we have decided to eliminate all other forms of racialized violence from our collective history. When we talk about “the riots,” context is unnecessary: it is understood that we are talking about blacks, in the 1960s (or, maybe, the early 90s in LA), burning and looting the neighborhoods where they lived. As a result, we don’t even have a word for the things that we don’t talk about. We don’t have a word to talk about white mobs burning buildings in Northern cities, or beating or killing innocent people, who wanted to move into their neighborhoods. We don’t really have a word for this:

Estimates of the Englewood crowds varied from several hundred at the riot’s inception to as many as 10,000 at its peak. “Strangers” who entered the area to observe the white protestors and innocent passers-by…were brutally beaten.

Or this:

A crowd of 2,000 descended upon the two-flat bought by Roscoe Johnson at 7153 S. St. Lawrence…. They started throwing gasoline-soaked rags stuck in pop bottles. They also threw flares and torches.

Or this:

In Calumet Park, as dusk fell on the scene that saw whites attacking cars occupied by blacks, white handkerchiefs appeared on the antennas of cars driven by whites so that, in the diminishing visibility, the rioters would suffer no problems in selecting their targets.

Or this:

A mob of 2,000 to 5,000 angry whites assaulted a large apartment building that housed a single black family in one of its twenty units. The burning and looting of the building’s contents lated several nights until order was finally restored by the presence of some 450 National Guardsmen and 200 Cicero and Cook County sheriff’s police.

Or this:

When a black family moved to suburban Columbus in 1956, whites greeted them with a burning cross and cut telephone wires.

Or this:

From May 1944 through July 1946, forty-six…residences were assaulted [in Chicago] (nine were attacked twice and one home was targeted on five separate occasions)…. Beginning in January 1945 there was at least one attack every month…, and twenty-nine of the of the onslaughts were arson-bombings. At least three persons were killed in the incidents.

But they all happened, and they deserve to exist, at least, in our collective memory.

And more than that, the white riots – the 48-hour flash-bang ones, and the slow-burn, once-a-month terrorist bombings – deserve to have as prominent a place in the narrative of northern urban decline as the black riots currently enjoy. Not to make white people wallow in guilt, or even to “blame” them (although those who participated, many of whom are still alive, probably should feel pretty bad about it, if they don’t already), but because any discussion of “what went wrong” that doesn’t mention white violence is just woefully incomplete, and yet that is pretty much the only discussion that we have. It’s like analyzing the causes of World War Two without having heard of the Treaty of Versailles.

And it’s why I, and so many other people, are so confused when they see a ghetto for the first time. Without this context – without the knowledge that the advent of black people to previously all-white urban neighborhoods caused a total breakdown of public safety pretty much immediately as a result of these white mobs – none of it makes sense. So we have to invent a narrative to explain it, and we tell stories about how black people burned down their own homes and businesses, and maybe, depending on our politics, about a “culture of poverty” or “welfare dependence.”

We also, of course, tell a story about economic devastation wrought by de-industrialization, automation, and offshoring jobs. But we never explain why black neighborhoods seem to be overwhelmingly the ones that are decimated, while the white ghetto, as a northern urban phenomenon, is practically unknown. True story: cross-racial comparisons of social indicators like teen pregnancy and street crime that control for neighborhood poverty are impossible in most large American cities, because there are no white neighborhoods as poor as the black ghettoes.

But if whites were so freaked out by the arrival of black people that they bombed their houses and even the buses that their children went to school on, maybe it makes sense that they (consumers and bankers) also pulled every dollar out of the commercial life of their neighborhoods when they decided they had lost the battle against their black neighbors. Maybe it makes sense that these places became as shunned and isolated as they did.

With this context, the black riot-Big Bang theory of urban violence becomes absurd. In the 1950s – years before Watts, or Detroit, or the King riots – Philadelphia lost a quarter of a million whites. Chicago lost 400,000. Detroit lost 350,000. The scale of the abandonment, as with the anti-black violence, was massive from very, very early on.

The web of political and economic and social causes that brought about that abandonment is, of course, extremely complex. I am not suggesting here that white violence was the only, or even overriding, cause. I am suggesting, however, that a conversation about urban decline without it is impossible, both because it was important in its own right and because it illuminates so many of the other causes.

As I said previously, this is emphatically not about white guilt; it’s about getting the story right both for its own sake, and for the sake of getting the remedies right. I’ll take up the remedy side at a later date.

* I vacillated here between using “a” and “the”; obviously, poor, segregated neighborhoods are tremendously diverse in a large and diverse country, and I don’t wish to portray them as homogenous. On the other hand, especially for the purposes of this post, I wanted to talk about the ghetto as an institution, which exists with certain important commonalities in almost every city in the U.S. So “the” it is.

** Of course, originally the word “ghetto” meant exactly that: an entirely segregated neighborhood of an ethnic minority. But in the American context, it has such distinct economic and social connotations that it’s obviously unfit to describe place like Chatham, even if it’s almost entirely black. This, for example, is not what Americans mean by a ghetto:

*** These rhetorical questions are meant to be from the perspective of someone who isn’t familiar with the relevant histories of these places, which I think covers most people. But obviously if you grew up in one of them, you are not shocked to find that there is desperate poverty there.

The End of One Thing or Another

Based on the interviews and excerpts I’ve read, the title of Leigh Gallagher’s new book seems to be one of those cases of publishers thinking a book isn’t catchy enough unless the cover oversells its thesis:

Whatever things look like in ten years—or twenty, or fifty, or more—there’s one thing everyone agrees on: there will be more options. The government in the past created one American Dream at the expense of almost all others: the dream of a house, a lawn, a picket fence, two or more children, and a car. But there is no single American Dream anymore; there are multiple American Dreams, and multiple American Dreamers. The good news is that the entrepreneurs, academics, planners, home builders and thinkers who plan and build the places we live in are hard at work trying to find space for all of them.

In other words, the suburbs aren’t “ending”; they’re just becoming less hegemonically desirable. Even the most aggressive line in her Washington Post interview (“Yes, absolutely [there will be some winning suburbs]. But it’s the end of a certain kind of suburb. I stand by that.”) really just suggests that the growth of non-walkable exurban areas may stall out, and they may become inhabited by people of modest economic means. (As opposed to, you know, actually ending, i.e., ceasing to exist.) But “The Slow, Relative Physical And Economic Decline of Many Recently-Built Exurban Areas” isn’t a catchy title. I get that.

Still, I think this points to a major problem with the communication of urbanist ideas to the general public, viz. the “urban”/”suburb” terminology. As has been pointed out by people like Alex Block, the words obscure more than they clarify, mostly because they refer both to political entities and styles of development. You can have unwalkable development within a central city (most of, say, Dallas), and walkable development in a suburb (say, Cambridge, MA). When Gallagher says “the suburbs,” she means unwalkable development. When Thomas Sugrue writes about the effects of white flight to the suburbs on the financial viability of Detroit, he’s talking about political boundaries. Different things. They need different words. (I, for example, have decided to use “walkable” and “unwalkable” here to describe the different styles of development. “Sprawl” is also common, but that’s more subjective and, I feel, inherently judgmental, whereas “unwalkable” is a simple description, even if it’s obviously on a sliding scale.)

Conversely, people like Joel Kotkin use the same terminological ambiguity to score points by describing absolute population growth in suburbs and core cities, downplaying or leaving out entirely the distinction between walkable and unwalkable suburbs. Or, for example, in his recent Forbes article (delightfully entitled “How Can We Be So Dense?”*) he points out that polls show about 80% of Americans would prefer a single family home over living in an apartment or condo. He leaves out that 60% of Americans would rather have a smaller single family home in exchange for being able to walk to local businesses and friends’ homes.

A cousin of the terminology problem – one that’s encouraged, I think, by the night-and-day implications of the fictional urban/suburban divide – is the idea that one either has to live in exurbs or a very dense, East Coast-style city. Which is of course fraught not only with all sorts of implications about lifestyle changes you would have to make in order to live in a big apartment building in a huge city, and inconveniences you would have to accept, but also with a kind of elitism and snobbery, since those things are associated with big, wealthy, liberal bastions like Boston and New York and DC and San Francisco and (to a lesser extent) Chicago.

In fact, in her Washington Post interview, Gallagher’s questioner asks:

This is a conversation between somebody who lives in a very nice portion of Manhattan and a person who lives in a pretty nice part of the District. Is it possible that the rest of the country likes driving around in cars and living in houses that are not that expensive?

Which rests on the assumption that A) walkable areas cannot also be driveable, B) dense neighborhoods have to be more expensive, like New York and DC, and C) an American who enjoys living in dense cities is probably a little odd, which, despite being on the surface a self-deprecating thing for a DCer or Manhattanite to say, is also an idea that is frequently expressed by such people and which I tend to believe is actually a form of self-congratulation and, indeed, elitism, and which in fact suggests that the very terminology problem I’ve been discussing is partially fed by the ego of urbanites who would like to consider themselves an enlightened minority, but which beyond that is probably beyond the scope of this post.

So let’s stick with A) and B).

A) is belied by evidence to the contrary from most outlying neighborhoods developed between, say, 1900 and 1940. QED.

B) is more complicated, since dense areas in the U.S. do tend to be more expensive, but suffice it to say that very few people I am aware of who study the economics of urban housing believe that density is inherently more expensive per unit. In fact, it’s usually cheaper, since you’re using less land and building smaller living spaces. This is why, for example, Houston is estimating the average cost of a new home will fall from $400,000 to around $300,000 with the doubling of density caps in its Inner Loop.

To the extent that dense central cities are more expensive, it’s usually because they’re not dense enough, or at least not dense enough to have enough supply to meet demand. This is well-worn territory represented by various smart people with a range of ideologies, like Ed Glaeser, Ryan Avent, Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias. A large part of the solution to the problem of urban housing affordability, then, is in lifting government restrictions on supply and allowing the market to actually build more places for people to live, where they want to live.

Finally, the problems of terminology and either-or-ism also associate walkable areas with non-elite issues, such as child-unfriendliness. This is, in fact, Kotkin’s third and final attack on walkability in his Forbes article. But, as discussed previously, cities are mostly considered child-unfriendly because of bad schools and crime, and neither of those are inherent to a particular style of development.

EDIT: Plus it occurs to me that the urbanist focus on the walkable-unwalkable meaning of “urban” and “suburban,” which is important enough, obscures the fact that the political divide between urban and suburban municipalities (and, indeed, between wealthy and less-wealthy suburbs) is a terrible miscarriage of justice.

We’ve Talked About Homicide In Chicago At Least One Million Times But I Don’t Think This Has Come Up

Here are two maps:

HOMICIDE RATE BY POLICE DISTRICT

1990-1993 2008-2011

Like the captions say, the one on the left shows homicide rates by police district in the early 90s, when crime was at its peak in Chicago, and the one on the right shows the same thing, but about two decades later.* The areas in dark green are the safest; the ones in dark pink are the most dangerous. The colors are calibrated so that green areas are safer than average for the early 90s, and pink ones are more dangerous than average for the early 90s. The 2008-2011 map keeps the same calibration: green is safe compared to the early 90s, so that you can see change in the levels of violence over time.

And, indeed, the first thing that jumps out from these maps is that there’s way more green nowadays, and it tends to be darker. The city is way safer! Some areas we might consider a bit dicey today – like, say, the Lawndale/Little Village area – actually register as light green, meaning that by early 90s standards, they would be considered relatively safe.

[For those of you craving numbers, the murder rate averaged 30 per 100k during the first period, and 17 per 100k during the second, a decline of nearly 50%.]

Of course, the other thing we notice is that there are some very distinct patterns to safety. These maps are breaking exactly no news by indicating that the more dangerous parts of the city are on the West and South Sides, but it is striking, I think, to see that nowadays, basically the entire North Side is the darkest green, which translates to a homicide rate of less than 6 per 100k. In fact, the dark-green part of the city has a murder rate of 3.3 per 100k.

Three point three. In New York City, which is constantly (and mostly correctly) being held up as proof that urban safety miracles can happen in America, it’s 6.3. Toronto, which as far as North American big cities go occupies a fairy tale land where no one hurts anybody, had a homicide rate of 3.3 per 100k as recently as 2007. The North Side is unbelievably safe, at least as far as murder goes.

But there are none of the darkest green on the West or South Sides. There’s actually a fair amount of pink, meaning places that are relatively dangerous even by the terrifying standards of the early 90s.

This raises a question: Has the great Crime Decline benefited the whole city equally? Are the South and West Sides still relatively dangerous because they started from such a bad place, or because they haven’t seen nearly as much of a decline as the North Side has?

Here is the answer in another map:

CHANGE IN HOMICIDE RATE, EARLY 90s – LATE 2000s

The areas in darkest green saw the greatest decline; red means the murder rate actually increased.

So: Yes, the great Crime Decline is a fickle thing. The North Side saw huge decreases (in Rogers Park, it was over 80%) pretty much everywhere; the few areas that are lighter green were the safest in the city to begin with. The parts of the South and West Sides closest to downtown – Bronzeville, the West Loop, Pilsen, etc. – got a lot safer. But most of the rest actually got worse, including some neighborhoods that were already among the most dangerous in the city, like Englewood and Garfield Park.

This is a complicated state of affairs, and probably goes at least part of the way to explaining why, in the face of a 50% decrease in homicides citywide over the last two decades, many people persist in believing that the opposite is true: because in their neighborhoods, it is. It’s a dynamic that defies an easy narrative, and makes me slightly less angry (though only slightly) at all those journalists who have written in the last year or two about murder in Chicago without mentioning that the city is, in fact, safer on the whole than it has been in fifty years.

Here is one final pair of maps:

RATIO OF POLICE DISTRICT HOMICIDE RATE TO CITY AVERAGE

1990-1993 2008-2011

This is slightly less intuitive. These maps show the how the homicide rate in any given police district compares to the citywide average, using ratios; for example, if the homicide rate in West Town is 10 per 100k, and citywide it’s 5 per 100k, West Town’s ratio is 2 to 1. If West Town were 2.5 per 100k, its ratio would be 0.5 to 1. (Obviously the numbers in these examples are made up.) Blue areas have ratios below 1, and so are relatively safe; red ones above 1, and are relatively dangerous.

With the help of these maps, I’m going to ignore what I said about all this defying an easy narrative, and try to supply one: Over the last twenty years, at the same time as overall crime has declined, the inequality of violence in Chicago has skyrocketed. The pattern of what’s blue and what’s red in each map is mostly the same; I count only three out of twenty-five districts that switched from one color to another. But the colors are much darker in the 2000s than they were in the 1990s. There have always been safer and more dangerous areas here, as there are everywhere; but the gap between them is way, way bigger now than it used to be.

Numbers will help this case. Imagine that for each of these two time periods, we cut the city into equal thirds: one contains the most dangerous neighborhoods; another, the safest; and the last, everything else. In the early 90s, the most dangerous third of the city had about six times as many murders as the safest third. By the late 2000s, the most dangerous part of the city had nearly fifteen times more homicides than the safest third.

In addition, here are two charts:

The divergence is self-evident. The early 90s look very roughly like a normal curve: most neighborhoods are in the middle, and there’s a clear, if slightly bumpy, slope down towards the extremes.

Today, any semblance of a normal curve has been annihilated. Or, actually, that’s not quite right. Now it looks like there might be two completely separate normal curves, one with a peak at 0.2-0.4, and the other peaking at 3.1-4. Plus a few guys who got lost in the middle.

I suppose there are many, many things that one might say about what this means, but here’s the bottom line: The disadvantages and tragedies that people in “dangerous” neighborhoods experience are both absolute and relative. The death of an innocent person** is an indescribable loss no matter what. And, on that count, things are somewhat better for Chicago’s most violent areas: the homicide rate for the most dangerous third of the city declined from 51 to 39 per 100k in the time period we’ve looked at here. That is a real accomplishment, and hundreds, if not thousands, of people are still with their families and friends because of it.

But in other ways, it does matter if other parts of the city are getting safer much, much faster. When people weigh safety in their decisions about where to live, they do so by comparing: How much safety am I gaining by living in one neighborhood versus another? The same is true of entrepreneurs considering where to open their next business. The same is true of tourists looking to explore the city. The same is true of locals looking to travel to another neighborhood to eat out or go shopping.

On every one of those counts, the disadvantages that are accruing to already-disadvantaged neighborhoods in terms of lost population, investment, and connections to the rest of the city are now much more severe. The hurdles are that much higher.

That’s bad for those physical neighborhoods. It’s also terrible for the people who have good reasons to live there, like social networks, nearby family, or the affordability of real estate.

Because I don’t have the data in front of me, but who would doubt that over these same twenty years, there has also been a growing gap between how much it costs to live on the safe North Side compared to the more dangerous parts of the South and West Sides? Who would doubt that, as the North Side reaches Toronto-level peacefulness, the cost of rent has greatly diminished the number of apartments there affordable to the poor and working class?

In other words, just as the stakes have been tripled as to whether you live in Relatively Safe Chicago or Relatively Dangerous Chicago, it has become much, much harder to establish yourself on the winning side.

So: Next time you hear someone talking about “record violence” in the city, tell them that actually, murders are down almost 50% from twenty years ago. And then tell them that what’s really alarming is murder inequality.

* Why does this data end in 2011? Because I made these maps using data from the Chicago Police Department annual reports, which are available online, and which only broke down crimes by police district in the 1990s. In 2012, the police district boundaries changed, making it not quite an apples-to-apples comparison to prior years. Maybe somewhere data exists by Community Area for the early 90s, and then I could redo all of this.

** And I think reporting like that done by This American Life at Harper High in Englewood ought to challenge conventional middle-class ideas about “innocence” in the ghetto. It is very easy for those who don’t live in the neighborhood to talk about “thugs” and “gangsters” getting what they deserve. It is also very cruel, and very naive about what exactly “gangs” are, and what kind of people join one, and how, and why.