Urban puzzle

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, a professor at Columbia University, and the author of Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, reviews three books by William Julius Wilson and Richard P. Taub, Lance Freeman, and Mary Pattillo, about changing neighborhoods in the inner cities, in the Boston Globe book review "Urban puzzle: The gentrification of rundown city neighborhoods conjures an image of well-off whites displacing poor minorities. What's actually going on is far more complex, and the winners and losers can be hard to predict."