Ruin Porn or Reality, Detroit is ripe for either a consolidation or an artist / food truck renaissance

This article is full of links.http://www.nytimes.comThe latest link is about a bankruptcy manager for the city.


 If its purple or blue feel free to check it out.
http://www.forbidden-places.net/explo1.php


Detroit has been the subject of two movies  that got  press in the Oscar selection for best documentary.

 One is Waiting for Sugarman. The other is Detropia. www.detropiathefilm.com

Not being about ruin porn, but we have lost a whole section of entrepreneurial america- so musch for brownstones and mansions in Detroit...see    This has been torn down, others have been restored... pix here ; see Brush Park, Detroit Historic Neighborhoods


Modernism reversed the 19th-century relationship of public and private: in the 19th century, public buildings were horizontally expansive for a variety of technical reasons, and private buildings emphasized verticality—to fit more private space on increasingly limited land.

IDA B WELLS PROJECTS UNUSUAL BECAUSE ITS NOT THE TYPICAL VERTICAL TOWERS



The Brewster Project began construction in 1935 when First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt broke ground for the 701-unit development; this first phase, consisting of low-rise apartment blocks, was completed in 1938. An expansion of the project completed in 1941 brought the total number of housing units to 941. The Frederick Douglass Apartments, built immediately to the south of the Brewster Project, began construction in 1942 with the completion of apartment rows, two 6-story low-rises, and finally six 14-story high rises completed between 1952 and 1955. The combined Brewster-Douglass Project was five city blocks long, and three city blocks wide, and housed anywhere between 8,000 and 10,000 residents at its peak capacity.


Example :Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects were the largest residential housing project owned by the city of Detroit, located in the Brush Park section on the East Side of Detroit, Michigan near the Chrysler Freeway, Mack Avenue and St. Antoine Street. The housing project is named after Frederick Douglass, African American abolitionist, author, and reformer. The complex was home to such notable figures as Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, Florence Ballard, Lily Tomlin, and Smokey Robinson[citation needed] during their early years.Motown grew from this collection of factory workers apartments. They were not initially considered “projects” until after the riots in 1967. The reasons are complex.

When new housing was needed for the movement of blacks to the industrial north in the period between the Great Depression and Brown Vs Board of Education (1930- 1954)

BLACKS WERE EITHER STEERED INTO THE APARTMENTS OF BLACK BOTTOM PARADISE VALLEY OR TO THE EDGES OF THE CITY
WHICH WAS BASICALLY UNDEVELOPED FARMLAND: THEREFORE THERE WERE NO RULES AS TO WHAT KIND OF HOUSES COULD BE BUILT – WHICH MADE THE NEIGHBORHOOD APPEAR LESS UNIFIED, BUT IT TURNED OUT NOT TO BE A PROBLEM SINCE THIS WAS THE BIRTH OF THE BLACK MIDDLE CLASS.


Not all blacks were able to afford homes initially but after white flight and redlining ceased post riots,home ownership in the cities increased to almost 90%, and the housing built for factory workers in the 30’s became populated by 1970 with the poor, disabled, and emotionally disturbed that were unable to hold a job. The retired that had only social security and the war veterans who were coming back from Vietnam unable to work due to war trauma also ended up in these structures, since they were often too disabled emotionally to hold a full time job. It took only 3 short years (1964-1967)and a recession to change the nature of home ownership and create a group that would never own a home.

The riots that occurred nationwide after the death of Martin Luther King were characterized as racial, but in reality the riots were economic protests. There were no jobs, and no easier paths to home ownership or income – it was almost easier to eke out a living on the land held by ex slaves in the south. The gap between what was possible and what was the reality of black urban workers post Civil Rights was the main cause of the riots, and if it looked racial, it was because there was a concerted effort, since 1949 to keep blacks out of certain areas. “Between 1910 and 1940 Detroit, Michigan’s African American population increased dramatically. Faced with restrictions on where they could live, many African Americans were forced into substandard housing. In 1935 First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt broke ground for the Brewster Homes, the nation’s first federally funded public housing development for African Americans. The homes opened in 1938 with 701 units. When completed in 1941 there were 941 units bounded by Beaubien, Hastings, Mack and Wilkins Streets.

Click on link at end of post for purchase information

Residents were required to be employed and there were limits on what they could earn. Former residents described Brewster as ‘community filled with families that displayed love, respect and concern for everyone in a beautiful, clean and secure neighborhood.’

Detroit, Michigan Black redlined neighborhoods pre 1967 riots
• Black Bottom (destroyed)
• Conant Gardens
• Dexter-Linwood
• Highland Park


In 1968, the Archdiocese of Detroit published one of the largest shopper surveys in American history. It found that the black Detroit shopper paid 20% more for his food and groceries than the suburbanite. from Sidney Fine's Violence in the Model City

ALONG WITH DEVELOPMENTS SIMILAR TO BREWSTER, BLACK NEIGHBORHOODS WERE GROWING IN ALL MAJOR CITIES THAT HAD WORK. AMERICAN INDUSTRY WAS THE MAIN EMPLOYER, AND THE BLACK EX SLAVE HAD TO MAKE A SWITCH FROM AGRICULTURAL TO INDUSTRIAL IF THEY WERE TO SURVIVE.

BY THIS TIME, POST WAR BLACK FAMILIES WERE STILL ONLY ONE GENERATION OUT OF SLAVERY IF THEY WERE BORN DURING THE DEPRESSION. (DO THE MATH: IF YOU WERE BORN IN 1930 CHANCES ARE YOU HAD A PARENT WHO WAS BORN DURING THE CIVIL WAR.


THIS PARENT WOULD NOT REMEMBER SLAVERY. BUT WOULD REMEMBER TRYING TO MAKE IT WITHOUT THE SYSTEM LINCOLN HAD DESIGNED TO EASE SLAVES INTO FREEDOM. NO SCHOOL. NO MULE, NO MONEY, NO EDUCATION AND ONLY A SHIP OR TWO BACK TO AFRICA, WITH THE KLAN GETTING PROGRESSIVELY MORE POWERFUL.


THE PARENTS OF THIS ERA STAYED ON THE FARM AS SHARECROPPERS, HAD LARGE FAMILIES OF 10 OR MORE AND HAD CHILDREN WHO WERE YOUNG ENOUGH TO BE PARENTS WHEN MARTIN LUTHER KING WAS SHOT.

These younger parents were not college educated, but had very good jobs, and were able to make the same purchases that college students can barely make in 2011, due to the lack of work and inflation of housing prices. Again-- race had nothing to do with it and it had everything to do with it.

How?


A man making 49 K a year in 1964 could buy a house with 14K cash and PAY OFF THE MORTGAGE in 10 years WITHOUT A COLLEGE DEGREE. Conversely make 49 K in 2011 and you need 149K to put down on a house, and you will need 30 years to pay off the mortgage. The college degree is now needed to get considered for the mortgage, since it takes steady earning power to last over 30 years. Unfortunately, the graduation rate of American men and women is low when it comes to a master’s degree- which guarantees long term earning power. It is especially low for black men and women. Is this racial? Or is something else occurring?



Without answering these questions directly; the problem of economic assimilation has been tackled ever since the riots by various failed programs. Why these programs fail has to do mainly with the sheer size of the problem in terms of trying to control all the De-stabilizing factors. It is Wack- A-Mole time !
This is a history of how to create a middle class out of a group that could remain middle class if certain factors could be stabilized. Now, even non blacks have experienced instability to the level where the sectors in 2011 are questioning if there is a need for Americans to have ownership of homes, or be middle class.( Is there a need to redefine the American Dream?)


Well before we wax philosophical, let us examine why and how Government as a philosophical entity, has mismanaged the creation of the middle class in the black community. It can be argued that this class creation is not needed, but since for at least this authors lifetime, many projects have been attempted, the author will examine all of them , (especially in Detroit) before making a proposal for the 21st century.


Great Depression Detroit

Redlining began with the National Housing Act of 1934 which established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to improve housing conditions and standards, and later led to the formation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). While it was designed to develop housing for poor residents of urban areas, that act also required cities to target specific areas and neighborhoods for different racial groups, and certain areas of cities were not eligible to receive loans at all. This meant that ethnic minorities could only obtain mortgages in certain areas, and resulted in a large increase in the residential racial segregation in the United States.


This was followed by the Housing Act of 1937, which created the U.S. Housing Agency and the nation's first public housing program—the Low Rent Public Housing Program. This program began the large public housing projects that later became one of the hallmarks of urban renewal in the United States: it provided funding to local governments to build new public housing, but required that slum housing be demolished prior to any construction.( This primarily removed immigrant slum housing such as the tenements of the Lower east Side in NYC. )
The Great Migration was the movement of more than one million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States from 1914 to 1940. Most African Americans who participated in the migration moved to large industrial cities, such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Minneapolis, Detroit, Boston, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Long Beach as well as to many smaller industrial cities.


Populations increased so rapidly with the addition of African American migrants and new European immigrants both that there were widespread housing shortages in many cities. Newer groups competed even for the oldest, most rundown housing, as it was what they could afford. African Americans competed for work and housing with first or second generation immigrants in many major cities. Ethnic groups created territories which they defended against change. Restrictive covenant became a territorial tool, a formal deed restriction binding property owners in a given neighborhood not to sell to blacks. Whites who broke these agreements could be sued by "damaged" neighbors. Not until 1948 did the Supreme Court strike down restrictive covenants.



From 1940-1970, another five million people left the South for Northern and Western cities and industrial jobs. Violence marked some of the pressure of this migration, too, such as in the Detroit riot of 1943. Then Detroit erupted again in 1967 surpassing the damage of the New York Draft Riots of 1865 (See Gangs of NY) President Johnson authorized use of Federal troops in compliance with the Insurrection Act of 1807, which stated that the President may call in armed forces whenever there is an insurrection in any state against the government. This gave Detroit the distinction of being the only domestic American city to ever be occupied by Federal troops three times.


In response to the influx of black people from the South, banks, insurance companies, and businesses began redlining--denying or increasing the cost of services, such as banking, insurance, access to jobs, access to health care, or even supermarkets to residents in certain, often racially determined, areas. The most common use of the term, refers to mortgage discrimination. Data on house prices and attitudes toward integration suggest that in the mid-twentieth century, segregation was a product of collective actions taken by whites to exclude blacks from their neighborhoods. This meant that ethnic minorities could secure mortgage loans only in certain areas, and it resulted in a large increase in the residential racial segregation and urban decay in the United States.



To address this problem, a project called Model Cities was formed by the Federal Government.The Model Cities Program was an element of United States President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and War on Poverty. The ambitious federal urban aid program ultimately fell short of its goals. The Model Cities initiative created a new program at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) intended to improve coordination of existing urban programs. Several cities including Detroit, Oakland, Newark and Camden received funding. Smithville, Tennessee (in DeKalb County), the smallest city to receive such funding, is an example of a city that benefited from the Model Cities Project.The program's initial goals emphasized comprehensive planning, involving not just rebuilding but also rehabilitation, social service delivery, and citizen participation.
Authorized November 3, 1966 by the Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966, the program ended in 1974.


This left unresolved the issues that sparked the economic riot of Detroit 1967. Initially, according to Violence in the Model City by University of Michigan’s Sidney Fine, African-Americans felt dissatisfaction with social conditions in Detroit before July 23, 1967. After the riot, the Kerner Commission reported that their survey of blacks in Detroit found that none was “happy” about conditions in the city prior to the event. The areas of discrimination identified by Fine were: policing, housing, employment, spatial segregation within the city, mistreatment by merchants, shortage of recreational facilities, quality of public education, access to medical services, and “the way the war on poverty operated in Detroit.”


The lay of the land – jobs go – urban renewal follows?


A number of factors, including increased productivity and automation, consolidation of the auto industry, the end of World War II, taxation, and a need for manufacturing space, had caused the city to lose jobs to the suburbs, 134,000 from 1947 to 1963. Major companies like Packard, Hudson, and Studebaker, as well as hundreds of smaller companies, went out of business. In the 1950s, the unemployment rate hovered near 10 percent. Between 1946 and 1956, GM spent $3.4 billion on new plants, Ford $2.5 billion, and Chrysler $700 million, opening a total of 25 auto plants, all in Detroit's suburbs. As a result, many left Detroit for jobs in the suburbs, most of which were white-only at that time. By 1974, enough whites had left to cause emptying out of entire neighborhoods , so urban renewal could be employed to revitalize these empty spaces, especially if blacks had moved into the empty areas that were previously white.
In the 1960s James Baldwin famously dubbed Urban Renewal "Negro Removal".


Stabilization is an issue (Money as a stabilizer): Is HOUSING affordable?



Affordable housing was an issue caused by several urban renewal projects after World War II that dramatically changed neighborhood boundaries and ethnic composition of neighborhoods. Detroit undertook a series of urban renewal projects that impacted African-Americans especially. Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were on Detroit's near lower east side, south of Gratiot. By discrimination, including then lawful deed restrictions, or by choice, from 1910 through the 1950s, these were the first places many African-Americans new to Detroit settled in. The city began planning for the massive Gratiot Redevelopment Project as early as 1946, that would eventually cover a 129-acre (52 hectares) site on the lower east side that included Hastings Street — the epicenter of Paradise Valley. In fact, Detroit was a world leader in urban renewal. The city's goals were to: "arrest the exodus of business from the central city, to convert slum property to better housing, and to enlarge the city's tax base."

Boundaries
Alter Road


Alter Road is a north-south thoroughfare of approximately four miles length in southeastern Michigan's Wayne County.
Although Alter Road itself is completely within the Detroit city limits, nevertheless it is a symbolic dividing line between the overwhelmingly African-American City of Detroit and the likewise overwhelmingly Caucasian City of Grosse Pointe Park.


Like 8 Mile Road, another well-known thoroughfare of political, ethnic and economic demarcation in Metro Detroit, Alter Road has long been considered something of a "Berlin Wall" to separate communities. In fact, quite literally, there are places at which concrete barriers have actually been erected so as to reduce interaction between the two cities. A prime example would be the intersection of Alter and Goethe, just south of Mack Avenue, at which—right where the City of Grosse Pointe Park's corporate limit commences—that municipality has closed off Goethe to thwart both vehicular and pedestrian movement. Along nearby Mack Avenue—another border between the two municipalities—the City of Grosse Pointe Park has likewise made some of its intersecting north-south side streets inaccessible to vehicles, so as to reduce the potential for criminal activity, with the intersection of Mack and Wayburn Avenues in Grosse Pointe Park constituting a prominent example.
In his 1987 book, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, author Kenneth T. Jackson describes Alter Road as "[t]he most conspicuous city-suburban contrast in the United States...".


And in reference not only to Alter Road, but in general to all thoroughfares which separate the City of Detroit from its suburbs, author Tamar Jacoby, in her 1998 book Someone Else's House: America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration declares: "Eight Mile Road, Alter Road, Telegraph Road and Tireman Avenue; though originally arbitrary—lines on a map—the boundary between Detroit and its suburbs had become a chasm between two social classes. In some places, usually where the road was wide, it divided slum from new, upscale housing development. At other spots, once similar houses on either side of the street now looked like pictures before and after a natural disaster."


As reported in the Detroit News of October 30, 2005, former Secretary of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development and former Mayor of San Antonio, Texas, Henry Cisneros, stated: "There is the perception that all the rich people live in Grosse Pointe and all the poor people live in Detroit, and Alter Road is the dividing line that not only denotes the physical border, but also a social border."

North of Jefferson Avenue, Alter Road is quite blighted—as is much of the City of Detroit. However, Alter Road's northernmost blocks, between Warren Avenue and Chandler Park Drive—most especially its intersection with the meandering Outer Drive—offer a somewhat in-between of the two extremes. In the blocks of Alter Road north of Mack Avenue, a few new houses have been built, replacing older ones which had been demolished.

Up until the late 1960s, there was little visible difference between Alter Road, and the streets immediately west of it inside the Detroit city limits, as compared with the streets immediately east of it inside the Grosse Pointe Park city limits. The southeastern corner of Detroit was majority Caucasian at the time (as was Detroit as a whole) and did not suffer the urban decay which plagues much of Detroit currently. If a motorist or pedestrian had crossed the border back in those days, he or she might not have even noticed exiting one municipality and entering the other.


Bolstered by successive federal legislation, including the 1941, 1949, 1950, 1954 versions of the Housing Act and its amendments through the 1960s, funds were procured to ultimately create the Detroit Medical Center complex, Lafayette Park and Central Business District Project One and the Chrysler Freeway, by appropriating land and "clearing slums". Money was included for replacement housing in the legislation, but as cited in Sidney Fine's Violence in the Model City, the goal of urban renewal was to physically reshape the city and eliminate slum lands, not the slum dweller.


As homes and neighborhoods fell, African-Americans and people of every color from Detroit's skid row, moved to areas north of Black Bottom along Grand Boulevard, but especially to the westside of Woodward, along Grand Boulevard and ultimately the 12th Street neighborhood. As Ze'ev Chafets wrote in 1990's , the area around 12th Street went from a Jewish community to a predominantly black community rapidly in the 1950s.As Jewish residents moved to the suburbs, they often retained business or property interests in their old community, thus many of the blacks that entered the 12th Street area did not purchase homes, but rented from absentee landlords and shopped in businesses run by suburbanites, which now included the other Middle eastern Countries as well as Jews. Renting did not increase the city tax base, since renters do not pay homeowner taxes . In addition, absentee landlords pay taxes where they reside, not necessarily on properties owned in other localities.

To paraphrase a reviewer of Devil's Night and Other True Tales of Detroit">Mr Chafets' book in Detroit ... "Blacks had political control, but were unable to turn it into economic self-sufficiency". Now instead of chasing the dollar in the factories that made us barely middle class (DOLLAR AMOUNT OR ASPIRATIONS NOT BEING DISCUSSED TODAY), but turned us into consumers ; could blacks in the chocolate cities (10 black cities with migrant blacks from the south)become economically self sufficient?

Yes if we hired each other, or created our own businesses. But we made it a point of pride not to start anything, but to boast who we worked for instead. The generation older than me, fresh from the south often laughed at my entrepreneurial suggestions. I was also told more than once that they were not about to hire any black people. But Jews hire other Jews I often countered with. These retro Negroes would flap their gums and say- don't I trust them, under their breath.When I asked who them were - they meant all white people, so it turns out that these migrant blacks thought I was referring to Jews when I was asking them about why blacks cannot hire other blacks. I let it go- because I was seeing a type of racism that I did not know existed . And it was internalized Being a young, naive , black northern kid just looking for a break, I saw what staying could do to me. No wonder I moved out.


It takes a village of believers, but since these villagers would not Trust Each Other, and were more than willing to burn down their own villages out of frustration or some primitive need to watch flames- (OK I will not analyze that here its been done by experts - see Black Rage - a seminal paperback by two Black Psychiatrists...)

In any case, a combination of hard -hardheadedness and ignorance, coupled with a lack of economic self sufficiency will never compensate for political power, even if every body who is in charge, from the Police Chief,or Fire Chief, to the Attorney General to the Mayor is Black. Ebony- Jet/ Showcase city,(do the dance here) but I cannot make money or hire you , and neither can you reciprocate.


The only color that matters ultimately is green.

Detroit's demise may be racially initiated , but it was the lack of green that made everybody leave, except those retirees who can be comfortable in what they have accumulated. Everybody else who is working has gone suburban. (In another blog I will discuss ethnic migratory patterns based on major thoroughfares.)

So to live in the Detroit Metropolitan area means you live in a village surrounded by other villages that border a dying city. These enclaves are ACTUALLY MARKETS http://www.claritas.com/MyBestSegments/Default.jsp?ID=20 TOO BAD THEY DO NOT PRODUCE ANYTHING...

Citizens who are not owners of their COMPANIES !!!? Who never had the training to be entrepreneurial , but were "trained to be a good worker instead...

Citizens that cannot produce information or goods within the confines of the United States?

Companies too small to go global?

Companies that cannot attract the capital and talent to grow and hire others, and cannot pay taxes.

This in my opinion does not help cities recover. No wonder Detroit, a prime example of the lack of economic self sufficiency and a monument to oligarchic capitalism , is dying. Its too 19th century..




THANKS TO ALL THOSE ANONYMOUS WIKIAUTHORS/PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO ARE LINKED THROUGHOUT THIS ARTICLE:
If it was not for you I could not have synthesized this argument so smoothly. Have fun figuring out where They begin and I end or vice Versa...





AND OF COURSE YOU CAN BUY THE SUPREMES LP HERE