Midtown Detroit

Heather Jiles
Dr. Peter Olson
EN 1113-501 English Coposition 2 Online
March 28, 2016
Redevelopment Beyond Downtown and Midtown Detroit Thomas Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis, said that Detroit’s comeback depends on whether the city can improve the lives of working class African Americans and I couldn’t agree more. With the gentrification of downtown and midtown Detroit showing many recent successes for those in its realm, it still isn’t providing benefits for the majority of its surrounding residents which are predominately African American. In the neighborhoods outside the downtown area, the physical environments are still deteriorating with high unemployment rates and widespread poverty. There is little evidence that
Most agree on two factors that aided in Detroit’s fall. Scott Martelle of The Los Angeles Times describes one of the factors in a 2011 report saying “The collapse of Detroit has roots in intentional de-industrialization by the Big Three Automakers.” He wrote “Their flight was augmented by government policies in the 1970s and 1980s that helped companies profit at the expense of the communities.” The second attributes to another large scale abandonment involving the Detroit’s white residents leaving the city in the 1950s and 1960s after federal courts struck down any and all policies protecting segregated housing and school districts. Reverend Bill Wylie- Kellerman explains in a blog post Gentrification and Race: Can We Have a Real Conversation, how the suburbs were created post-war by guaranteed GI Bill and FHA loans that were only available for new housing and only for whites. Restrictive covenants (explicitly forbidding sale to blacks) built into title deeds were legally enforceable until the mid-fifties and were still effective past the . This “white flight” overlapped with the flight of Big Auto. “White Detroiters followed the auto industry out of the city because the good jobs moved there, because the land was plentiful in the suburbs, housing and schools were newly built, and because they wanted to get away from their black neighbors and buy homes in the racially
Housing is crumbling. There are 150,000 vacant or abandoned buildings. In some areas, just one or two houses keep entire blocks from reverting to grasslands. Separated by as little as a city block, the new Detroit and the rest of Detroit feel like two completely different cities – physically close, far apart in everything else: education, income, outlook on their future.
With a population of 82% African American, Detroit is blacker than any big city in America. But black people are not being helped by revitalization. The strategy to attract young creative professionals, who will bring about economic transformation maintained by many urban theorists, only helps a select few while leaving everybody else no better off than before, argues Thomas Sugrue. Developers argue that it’s just a matter of time before other neighborhoods rise up too. “Folks want to move from zero to investable project, and it just doesn’t work that way,” said David Blaszkiewicz, the president of Invest Detroit, a development company that works with nonprofits and corporations to funnel money into the city core. “You start with the best neighborhoods and you migrate to the most challenged neighborhoods.” However, there is not a lot of evidence that trickle-down economics works. Motor City is