Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 239

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit," by Thomas Sugrue.




These inequalities—and a host of deeply held misunderstandings about their causes—led me to write The Origins of the Urban Crisis. The book explains the transformation of American cities—through a case study of Detroit—as the result of a combination of three forces that occurred simultaneously. Any one of them would have had devastating consequences, but the combined effect of all three reshaped American cities in ways that still affect us today. First was the flight of jobs, particularly the relatively well-paying, secure, and mostly unionized industrial jobs that dominated the postwar urban economy. Second was the persistence of workplace discrimination, despite remarkable legal and political gains accomplished by the struggle for black civil rights. The third was intractable racial segregation in housing, segregation that led to the uneven distribution of power and resources in metropolitan areas, leaving some places behind while others thrived. Sociologist Charles Tilly describes “resource hoarding” as one of the major contributors to historical inequalities—and the story of American metropolitan areas, like Detroit, is a history of the ways that whites, through the combined advantages of race and residence, were able to hoard political and economic resources—jobs, public services, education, and other goods—to their own advantage at the expense of the urban poor.  

Origins uncovered a largely hidden, forgotten history of actions by policymakers, large corporations, small businesses (particularly realtors), and ordinary citizens that created and reinforced racial and class inequalities and perpetuated the political marginalization of African Americans in modern American life. The transformation of Detroit was not the “natural” inevitable consequence of market forces at work. At a political moment when Americans have a deep faith in the market—a faith that has strengthened since I wrote Origins—it is difficult for many readers to see that racialized inequality is, at core, a political problem. Still widespread is the assumption that blacks and whites live apart solely because of personal choice, not because of the enduring effects of public policies that have encouraged racial segregation. 

It was in this context of wartime strife that Detroit experienced one of the worst riots in twentieth-century America. The trouble began when nearly one hundred thousand Detroiters gathered on Belle Isle, Detroit’s largest park, on a hot summer Sunday. Brawls between young blacks and whites broke out throughout the afternoon, and fights erupted on the bridge connecting Belle Isle to southeast Detroit in the evening. In the climate of racial animosity and mistrust bred by the disruptions of World War II, the brawls were but a symptom of deeper tensions. Rumors of race war galvanized whites and blacks alike, who took to the streets near Belle Isle and in the downtown area, and launched fierce attacks against passersby, streetcars, and property. Blacks in Paradise Valley looted white-owned stores. The following day more than ten thousand angry whites swept through Paradise Valley, and rampaged along nearby thoroughfares. Many Detroit police openly sympathized with the white rioters, and were especially brutal with blacks; 17 blacks were shot to death by the police, no whites were.

The process of housing segregation set into motion a chain reaction that reinforced patterns of racial inequality. Blacks were poorer than whites and they had to pay more for housing, thus deepening their relative impoverishment. In addition, they were confined to the city’s oldest housing stock, in most need of ongoing maintenance, repair, and rehabilitation. But they could not get loans to improve their properties. As a result, their houses deteriorated. City officials, looking at the poor housing stock in black neighborhoods, condemned many areas as blighted, and destroyed much extant housing to build highways, hospitals, housing projects, and a civic center complex, further limiting the housing options of blacks. Moreover, the decaying neighborhoods offered seemingly convincing evidence to white homeowners that blacks were feckless and irresponsible and fueled white fears that blacks would ruin any white neighborhood that they moved into. Finally, neighborhood deterioration seemed definitive proof to bankers that blacks were indeed a poor credit risk, and justified disinvestment in predominantly minority neighborhoods.

Racial restrictions were a blunt tool for maintaining the exclusivity of neighborhoods. Other types of covenants were more effective, and immune to court challenges. Restrictions that determined architectural standards, regulated lot size, and prohibited multiple-family occupancy subtly preserved social homogeneity. Covenants that banned the taking of boarders or the division of homes into apartments effectively kept away the majority of blacks who could not afford to rent or buy a whole house, or who needed to supplement family income by renting out rooms. Lot size and architectural restrictions preserved large sections of the metropolitan area for wealthy landowners. In effect, middle-class and wealthy homeowners could stem much racial change without the legal cost or stigma of racial restrictions. 

More effective than restrictive covenants in maintaining Detroit’s racial boundaries were the practices of the real estate industry. Whether a neighborhood was covered by a restrictive covenant or not, if it was all white, realtors kept it that way. HOLC appraisals of Detroit neighborhoods became self-fulfilling prophecies in the hands of real estate brokers. A web of interlocking real estate interests—brokers, speculators, developers, and banks—built on the base of racial animosity to perpetuate racial divisions in the housing market. Even after racially restrictive covenants were ruled unenforceable in 1948, the Detroit Mayor’s Interracial Committee reported that “credit controls and the restrictive practices of the real estate brotherhood are holding the line in all areas where restrictive covenants previously existed.” 

The Detroit Real Estate Board (DREB) followed the Code of Ethics of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and pledged that real estate agents would “never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any industry whose presence will be clearly detrimental to real estate values.” A realtor who violated the guidelines faced penalties or expulsion from the Real Estate Board, and was denied access to the board’s cross-listing service. Gerald Lawson, president of the Detroit Real Estate Board, warned members of the Eastern Detroit Realty Association “not to sell to Negroes in a 100 percent white area.” An agent who violated the admonition “is not given access to circulating listings and is shunned by other real estate companies who comprise the membership of the Detroit Real Estate Board.” Brokers were especially sensitive to the impact of accusations of “blockbusting” on their business. Offended white customers often harassed and boycotted real estate companies that breached racial barriers. 

Lending institutions were also unwilling to challenge residential segregation. Sometimes they justified their policy in actuarial terms: they were risk-averse and did not want to make loans in poor neighborhoods where they expected a high default rate. But white-owned banks were also largely unwilling to make safe loans in areas that attracted well-to-do blacks. And they systematically refused to lend to blacks who were among the first to move to all-white neighborhoods or to developers building new homes for blacks near white neighborhoods. As an Urban League study found, investors believed “that to make such mortgages…would incur the hostility and wrath of their white depositors” and “court the great disfavor of other investors, realtors, and builders.” Because of bankers’ racial conservatism, blacks found it almost impossible to get conventional home financing. There were African American-run savings and loan associations that financed black homebuyers, but because they were undercapitalized, they made little impact. Blacks looking for their own homes were left to turn to loan sharks or to buy homes using land contracts at high interest rates.

The 1950s marked a decisive turning point in the development of the city—a systematic restructuring of the local economy from which the city never fully recovered. Detroit’s economy experienced enormous fluctuations in the 1950s. Between 1949 and 1960, the city suffered four major recessions. Because the auto industry was tremendously sensitive to shifts in consumer demand it weathered recessions badly. The unpredictability of demand for automobiles, especially in times of economic uncertainty, had serious ramifications for Detroit’s working class. A slight shift in interest rates or a small drop in car sales resulted in immediate layoffs. That the auto industry was especially vulnerable to economic vagaries was, however, nothing new. What was new in the 1950s was that auto manufacturers and suppliers permanently reduced their Detroit-area work forces, closed plants, and relocated to other parts of the country.

Yet it was not foreordained that the auto companies would construct single-story automobile plants and downsize or abandon their older multistory factory complexes, nor was it inevitable that smaller machine tool and parts firms would prefer plants in outlying areas. The assumption that companies in the postwar period had no choice but to move to sprawling suburban and rural sites, surrounded by acres of parking lots and manicured lawns, is wrongly based in an ahistorical argument about the inevitability and neutrality of technological decisions. Industrial location policy was not a neutral response to market forces or an inexorable consequence of economic progress. Corporations made decisions about plant location and employment policy in a specific political, cultural, and institutional context, in the case of postwar Detroit in the aftermath of the rise of a powerful union movement and in the midst of a shop-floor struggle over work rules and worker control.