There are few sociologists in America as important as Geyser University Professor William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub of the University of Chicago. Wilson—who left Hyde Park for Cambridge a decade ago—and Taub conduct sociology in the classic Chicago style: sending well-trained graduate students into Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods to probe the city’s complex race, class, and social interactions.

“There Goes the Neighborhood” is built on deeply-reported surveys of the demographic and social changes in four Chicago neighborhoods, which are identified by pseudonyms. The short book is a splendid observational study—the research is conducted dispassionately and without favor, and the professors offer almost no solutions or policy prescriptions, realizing, it seems, that doing so substantially is the work of another book.

The four neighborhoods discussed in “There Goes the Neighborhood” are “Beltway,” a mostly white neighborhood on the southwest side that has a growing second- and third-generation Latino population; “Dover,” a Polish neighborhood that now has a significant blue-collar Latino population; “Archer Park,” a longtime bastion of Latinos, home to many recent Mexican arrivals; and “Groveland,” a South Side neighborhood of middle class black residents and a seat of historic black culture. While Wilson and Taub rarely extrapolate a conclusion for the nation or offer a normative judgment, they have chosen their neighborhoods carefully enough that their observations likely hold relevance for urban centers across the country.

To outline how the neighborhoods weather demographic changes, the professors use a simple theoretical construct—Albert O. Hirschman’s theory of exit and voice. The theory, originally developed for firms, argues that in places where loyalty is high—due to strong civic institutions, Wilson and Taub say—residents resort to “voice,” meaning that they stay and try to preserve their neighborhoods.

While the resistance longtime residents put up to change is often rooted in xenophobia and racism, the result of the resistance is actually progressive: those engaging in voice do not exit, and thus do not contribute to de facto segregation.

But though the book is well-structured, the reports by the graduate students incisive, and the authors’ conclusions and portrayals convincing, there are still a handful of problems with “There Goes the Neighborhood.”

First, the authors note in their acknowledgments that the data from the study was gathered during Wilson’s time as the head of the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Urban Inequality. But according to the biography posted on Wilson’s Harvard Web site, he left the center in 1996, meaning that the surveys are at least a decade old.

And the past 10 years have been a time of tremendous urban renewal in Chicago, both within the municipal government and among the city’s neighborhoods. While it is unlikely that any of the neighborhoods chosen by Wilson and Taub have seen significant gentrification, the references to the Board of Education—Chicago’s mayor took over the schools in 1995, appointing a CEO whose central administration is now responsible for most everything—seem antiquated, as do mentions of Chicago’s notorious housing projects, which have largely been demolished.

Second, Wilson and Taub almost completely ignore the city’s politics, something that has long been intertwined with race and class.

Consider the case of Beltway—the white neighborhood that has a growing Hispanic population. For anyone with a moderate understanding of the geography of Chicago, my lifelong home, it’s not hard to figure out Beltway’s true identity. There are only two neighborhoods that are, as Wilson and Taub say, sandwiched between Midway Airport and the city limits, and only one matches the demographics outlined in the book. (In an e-mail, Wilson said that he could not confirm the identities of the neighborhoods.)

The elected officials from this area—all Democrats—include a Polish congressman, a Polish state representative, and a Hispanic state senator, all of whom endorse one another and work together amicably, at least as candidates.

Such is the nature of today’s Chicago machine.

The Hispanic Democratic Organization—or, as some have called it, the Hispanic Daley Organization, after Mayor Richard M. Daley—is closely allied with the machine’s white ethnics. Yet the HDO is never mentioned in the book, even though Beltway, Dover, and Archer Park are all areas with significant Hispanic populations.

Many argue that the HDO is a cynical co-opting of the Latino vote by Chicago Democrats; interracial tensions within the machine are never far from the surface. Two of the clearest examples of this are the relationships between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans—the latter are a greater political force, despite their inferior numbers—and West Side and South Side black politicians—the former are jealous of the latter’s influence. These intra-racial, inter-neighborhood power struggles stand in contrast to the inter-racial, intra-neighborhood clashes detailed in “There Goes the Neighborhood.”

Wilson and Taub do an excellent job detailing the lives of the average residents of the four neighborhoods they examine. While one may have hoped for a timelier book with more cross-neighborhood, city-wide analysis, their method of zeroing in on individual residents and organizations has its strength: it makes the book more relevant to other cities, even as it misses some of what makes Chicago Chicago.

—Reviewer Paras D. Bhayani can be reached at pbhayani@fas.harvard.edu.

There Goes the Neighborhood
By William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub
Knopf
Out Now