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Title: The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas J. Sugrue ISBN: 0-691-05888-1 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 13 April, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.83 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Well researched, well written
Comment: The Detroit metropolitan area today is arguably the most racially segregated region in the United States, with a primarily African-American, largely abandoned and dilapidated urban center surrounded by layers of primarily white, affluent suburbs. This book is essential reading for anyone who lives in southeast Michigan as well as other cities that have similar histories of industrialization, urban decline and concentrated poverty such as Cleveland, Gary, Philadelphia, and South Chicago.
Thomas Sugrue provides a thoughtful, well-researched, and fascinating analysis of systematic racial inequality in Detroit during the post World War II automotive industry boom of the 1940s through deindustrialization and "white flight", and ending with the catastrophic race riots of 1967. Sugrue avoids the current, common oversimplifications of blaming Detroit's urban crisis on the '67 riots or Mayor Colman Young by weaving together a complex story of human behaviors, fears, and incentive structures backed by data, references, and personal accounts: "By the time Young was inaugurated, the forces of economic decay and racial animosity were far too powerful for a single elected official to stem."
Sugrue's analysis provides insight to understand major groups of stakeholders and their interactions: Workers flocked from the southern states to Detroit seeking relatively high-paying automotive jobs. In the free market, resulting housing shortages allowed landlords to divide properties into tiny apartments and charge premium prices, protecting their investments by being selective in their choice of "low risk" white tenants. Bankers also preferred "low risk" clients, resulting in unequal access to funds. White home owners, wanting to protect their families and financial investment, resisted neighborhood integration to avoid declining property values and perceived dangers. Real estate agents capitalized on fears of mixed neighborhoods by buying property from fleeing whites at junk prices and selling immediately to blacks at premium prices. Labor unions protected seniority, which unequally benefited whites, and tended to compromise on racial issues in order to gain bargaining ground. Store owners avoided hiring black workers, wishing to avoid offending or frightening mostly white, mostly female, customers. Suburban tax incentives and new technology made large, flat assembly plants more efficient than the old multi-story plants. This drove automakers away from Detroit, where the rail and riverside real estate was largely developed, and contributed to unemployment and race and class polarization.
Racial inequality in Detroit stems from complex social systems of incentives and categorical isolation caused by systematic inequality in access to employment, housing, networking and other resources. Recognizing the complexity of this social system helps the reader understand how individuals who fail to actively oppose racism actually support it, and why official "race-blind" policies fail to stop the polarization caused by chain-reactions of systematic, historic, self-reinforcing racial inequalities and the ruthless self-interest of capitalist culture.
Rating: 4
Summary: not sure if full explanation, but worth buying
Comment: I think Origins of the Urban Crisis is the best book about deindustrialization, white resistance to open housing, and Detroit that I have ever read, but I am not sure if Origins fully explains the urban crisis. I still recommend it, but I am not sure if Sugrue proves what he sets out to prove.
In the early 1960s people had cause for optimism about Detroit. The city had a building boom and racial divisions from 1943 were supposed to be healing. Also, Sugrue never addresses the increase in illegitimate births in the African-American community. A very high proportion of the 1967 rioters were from female-headed households.
All of the following are from 1960s studies of Detroit. These quotes are from From Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence
From a U MIch and Wayne State study:
Long before the enactment of the Fed Civil Rights Act of 1964, and even while the State of Michigan adopted its own civil rights act there was much evidence that the disadvantaged minorities were beginning to break out of their ghetto patterns and establish first class citizenship in many areas.
From Fortune magazine:
the most significant is the progress Detroit has made in race relations. The grim specter of the 1943 riots never quite fadesfrom the minds of city leaders. As much as anything else, that specter has enabled the power struture to overcome tenacious prejudice and give the Negro communitiy a role in teh consensus probably unparalleled in any major American city.
Negroes in Detroit have deep roots in the community, compared with the more transient population of NEgro ghettos in Harlem and elsewhere in the North. . . . more than 40% of the negro pop own their own houses.
nor was Detroit doing so badly economically
From the National Observer
The evidence, both statistical and visual, is everywhere. Retail sales are up dramatically. Earnings are higher. Unemployment is lower. People are putting new aluminum sidings on their homes, new carpets on the floor, new cars in the garage.
Some people are forsaking the suburbs and returning to the city. Physically Detroit has acquired freshness and vitality. Acres of slums have been razed, and steel and glass apartments, angular and lonely in the vacated landscape, have sprung up in their place. In the central business district, hard by the Detroit River, severely [sic] rectangular skyscrapers - none more than 5 years old - jostle uncomfortably with the gilded behemoths of another age.
Accustomed to years of adversity, to decades of drabness and civil immobility, Detroiters are naturally exhilerated. They note with particular pride that D has been removed the the Fed Bureau of Employment Security's classification of "an area with substantial and persistent unemployment."
Rating: 5
Summary: A comprehensive look at postwar Detroit
Comment: This book is essential for anyone who really wants to understand the roots of urban decline in the United States since World War 2. Too many books focus solely on the debilitating effect of the welfare state. Urban decline is far too complicated to blame factor alone. The author of this book does an excellent job in examining the combined effects of housing and job discrimination, deindustrialization and the racist attitudes of many white Detroiters. To his credit, the author tells all sides of the story, so that no one side garners all the sympathy or hatred. Neighborhood associations are not mobs of angry, unthinking whites motivated solely by hatred of blacks; nor are blacks criminally-minded characters too lazy to find work. Once you look at everthing, you realize how intractable Detroit's problems were in 1970 and how they remain so today.
Although this book is about Detroit, this book also sheds light on the fate of other American cities (i.e. Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Newark, NJ) that also experienced massive deindustrialization and population loss in the last third of the century.
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Title: A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America by Lizabeth Cohen ISBN: 0375407502 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 21 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States by Kenneth T. Jackson ISBN: 0195049837 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: April, 1987 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Making a New Deal : Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 by Lizabeth Cohen ISBN: 0521428386 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 25 October, 1991 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Suburban Warriors : The Origins of the New American Right by Lisa McGirr ISBN: 0691096112 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 21 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
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Title: Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US Big City by Mike Davis, Roman de la Campa ISBN: 185984328X Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: July, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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