Offering employment where legitimate industry collapsed years ago, the hugely profitable narcotics trade endlessly engages police, dealers, and drug abusers in the area. Kensington is part of the First Congressional District, one of the poorest places in America.
It's also the center of drug activity in the city with more than twice the number of incidents of anywhere else, police data show.
Servicing the unslakable appetite for product is an astonishingly well-paid army of Latino dealers.
That a young man without job prospects would hustle dope in the open-air bazaars of Kensington is practically a foregone conclusion, Bourgois says - akin to small-town folks who used to go to work in the local Ford plant or coal mine.
"They are selling drugs in the shadows of closed-down factories that used to employ their parents and grandparents," says Bourgois. "You'd almost have to be abnormal not to go into the drug trade.
"Thank God I'm an overpaid professor, so I'm not tempted. You can't believe the money that's out here."
Not everyone buys Bourgois' deal-or-perish scenario. Some former dealers say it's the lifestyle, not just the dearth of jobs, that compels many young hustlers.
"A lot of young men have a home and parents who work and don't have to be out here dealing," says former Kensington dealer Edwin Desamour, who served 81/2 years in prison for third-degree murder. "They just want the hustler life. They're attracted to it."
Desamour acknowledges, however, that although a kid could say no to dealing drugs, there are few other choices.
Whatever gets dealers into the game, police say, the result is the same, and the collateral damage from the narcotics trade - the violence most of all - is what preoccupies law enforcement.
