60 pages • 2 hours read
Thomas J. SugrueThe Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1996A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Arsenal”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary and Analysis: “Arsenal of Democracy”
Chapter 1 focuses on Detroit before the urban crisis. A thriving center of labor and technology, the city epitomized American economic might and the primacy of global capitalism. Automobile plants and related industries accounted for 60% of the city’s economy, while oil refineries, steel mills, salt mines, food-processing factories, breweries, and the world’s largest pharmaceutical plant accounted for the remaining 40% (18). Raw materials arrived at the factories by train, while the Detroit River provided access to the Great Lakes, allowing for the easy transportation of goods and the disposal of industrial waste. Five major arteries crisscrossed the city, facilitating transit in and out of the urban core. Art Deco skyscrapers dominated the city center, while residential neighborhoods comprising wood-frame and brick houses spread out for miles around it. In contrast to other American cities, early-20th-century Detroit lacked high-rise apartments and tenements. Although Sugrue’s study consists largely of meticulously researched facts and figures, the writing retains some descriptive narrative quality. The historian does not simply argue for a theoretical viewpoint—he is telling a story, and these early chapters set the stage for a dramatic turn in plot events. By painting this lively and detailed portrait of the booming city, Sugrue contextualizes the urban crisis and highlights its drastic nature; this prosperous Detroit is a foil to its later self.
Detroit’s history is nonfiction, but Sugrue often teases out some semblance of a literary narrative, and rising action emerges in depictions of the city’s economy: Detroit’s growth exploded during World War II. Automobile manufacturers, led by Ford, converted their assembly lines to produce tanks, airplanes, and military hardware, earning Detroit the nickname the “arsenal of democracy.” Wartime production virtually eliminated unemployment in the city, reducing the number of jobless to a mere 4,000 (19). The city’s factory workers formed powerful unions, including the United Automobile Workers (UAW), which negotiated relatively high wages and some job security for its members.
Despite these successes, however, race and class conflicts permeated the unions, whose members split between leftist and centrist factions. The fraught relationship between race and unionization that played out in Detroit was part of a larger dynamic taking place nationwide. In his book Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South, Duke historian Robert R. Korstad interviews a Black worker who explained companies’ strategy for undermining unions by pitting white and Black workers against each other:
The company preached to that white worker. They would take them in the office, they would hold group meetings with them in their homes, the white preacher was advising the people: “You’d better stay out of that union. They’re going to turn that thing into open violence. You’re going to have to eat and sleep with them black men, your wife and daughter” (Korstad, Robert R. Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. 2003).
As with critical plot developments in many works of literature, a major curve in Detroit’s plot arc corresponds with a shift in tone—and a shift in the figures’ identities and relationships. True to form, Sugrue ties these identities and relationships to material forces, detailing how race and class divisions in the unions mirrored those of the city. Formerly split along ethnic lines, Detroit’s white residents forged a new identity centered on whiteness. Affluent white people lived in large homes near the city center, middle-class white people settled to the north, and working-class white people lived in bungalows in blue-collar neighborhoods. Black people lived in a large neighborhood east of downtown, a trend that started in the early 20th century during the Great Migration from the South. This migration changed Detroit’s racial topography, expanding the city’s Black population and creating a distinctly Black neighborhood. Threatened by the newcomers, white working-class residents refused to do business with Black people, using threats and violence to keep them out of white enclaves. Sugrue cites the example of Ossian Sweet, a prominent Black doctor, to explain this point. In 1925, Dr. Sweet was tried for murder after shooting into a crowd of angry white people who surrounded his newly purchased house in a white neighborhood. The text is populated with other such illustrative stories. As Sugrue charts the course of this urban crisis, the narrative becomes partly a mosaic of many smaller narratives, which lend a human quality to the study and keep it from becoming too abstract.
The outbreak of World War II brought new opportunities for Detroit’s Black workers, as evidenced by statistics. Before the war, most Black people worked low-paying service jobs. By 1940, almost 12% of Ford factory workers were Black (25). Wartime labor shortages forced employers to hire Black people and women for jobs traditionally held by white men. With factory work came union participation, which increased opportunities for Black workers and strengthened unions. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and other civil-rights organizations also helped Detroit’s Black workers by pressuring elected officials to combat workplace discrimination. Sugrue cites President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Act to make this point. The 1941 Act created more diverse workplaces by curbing discriminatory hiring practices in the defense industry and federal agencies, which fostered acceptance among Black and white workers. The Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), tasked with enforcing the Act, also forged an alliance between Black people and the federal government. Before the war, Black workers made the biggest gains in automotive plants, while other industries largely remained off-limits to them. Opportunities increased dramatically during the war. Female workers also benefited from wartime labor shortages, though their jobs were generally lower paying and sex-typed. Although Black women had fewer employment opportunities than white women, one-fifth had factory jobs by 1950 (28).
Interracial workplaces did not do away with racial enmity. Racial tensions reached a violent climax in 1943, when race riots erupted in cities across the US. In Detroit, 25 Black people died over the course of three days (29). Despite racial conflicts, however, Black people continued to flock to the city. The economic boom of the wartime years masked the root causes of racial inequity in Detroit’s housing and labor markets, laying the foundation for the urban crisis that later befell the city.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary and Analysis: “‘Detroit’s Time Bomb’: Race and Housing in the 1940s”
Chapter 2 addresses racial disparities in Detroit’s housing sector in the 1940s. Low-paid Black residents could not compete with their higher-paid white counterparts for housing. Demand for rentals far exceeded supply, allowing landlords to profit handsomely from renters. Homeownership also presented challenges for Detroit’s Black residents. Although the city had a large stock of modest, affordable homes, discriminatory practices by real-estate brokers and bankers shut most Black buyers out of the market. Thus, Black Detroiters were trapped in overcrowded, substandard apartments in racially segregated neighborhoods.
Housing segregation reinforced racial inequities. Black people with low incomes spent a higher percentage of their income on housing than white people. Black people were also relegated to old housing, which was expensive to maintain and repair. Discriminatory lending practices prevented them from receiving loans. Consequently, Black homes became even more dilapidated, which prompted city officials to condemn them. Decaying neighborhoods also reinforced the stereotype that Black people were irresponsible, thereby seeming to justify disinvestment. By focusing on housing patterns, Sugrue sheds light on the role that individuals and institutions played in maintaining racial barriers that marginalized Black Detroiters.
To this day, Black homeownership continues to trail white homeownership, both in Detroit and nationwide. According to NPR, Black homeownership rates have fallen precipitously in the years since Sugrue published The Origins of the Urban Crisis. Today, Black homeownership is roughly equal to what it was in 1970; that was just two years after the federal government passed the Fair Housing Act in an effort to correct racial disparities in homeownership. (Chang, Ailsa, Intagliata, Christopher, & Mehta, Jonaki. “Black Americans and the Racist Architecture of Homeownership.” NPR. May 8 2021). Lenders, working alongside the federal government, used a practice called “redlining” to label areas populated by Black residents as “blighted” and therefore too risky for home loans, regardless of whether the area was truly dilapidated or not. Some view the term “blight” as inherently racist, calling into question Detroit’s use of the term when condemning properties. University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Wendell E. Pritchett writes:
Blight was a facially neutral term infused with racial and ethnic prejudice. […] By selecting racially changing neighborhoods as blighted areas and designating them for redevelopment, the urban renewal program enabled institutional and political elites to relocate minority populations and entrench racial segregation. (Pritchett, Wendell E. “The ‘Public Menace’ of Blight: Urban Renewal and the Private Uses of Eminent Domain.” Yale & Policy Review, Vol. 21(1) 2003).
The urban crisis grows more complicated with each step of Sugrue’s exploration, and the complication consistently involves some aspect of the city’s economic structures. The implicit argument is twofold: The crisis is not a matter of Black Detroiters’ poor behaviors but a complex situation of interlocking economic and social phenomena; consequently, the crisis is not so easily attributed to a single cause. While Sugrue’s approach emphasizes material forces, he offers no totalizing epiphanies.
The Traditional “Ghetto”: Paradise Valley and the East Side
Black migrants flooded to the Lower East Side of Detroit during and after World War II. Many settled in Paradise Valley, a center for Black Detroiters since World War I. In addition to housing almost a third of Detroit’s Black population, Paradise Valley held venerable Black institutions, such as churches, jazz clubs, and barbershops. Living conditions in Paradise Valley’s crowded tenements were poor. Many buildings were badly maintained by absentee landlords. Some lacked modern amenities, such as plumbing and kitchens. Almost a third of Detroit’s residential fires occurred in Paradise Valley and other Black East Side neighborhoods. Sanitary conditions were also poor. Mounds of trash piled up in the streets, attracting vermin and giving rise to the area’s nickname: the “rat belt.”
It is worth discussing briefly here Sugrue’s use of the controversial term “ghetto” and its history. The term has its roots in 16th-century Venice, when the city relegated its Jewish population to a district of the city it dubbed the New Ghetto. (In Italian, gettare means to pour, so historians believe the term is a reference to a copper foundry that once sat in the district). Such all-Jewish enclaves began to appear across Italy. Over time, the term fell out of use until World War II, when the Nazis used the term to describe sites of forced Jewish relocation and segregation. In the US, the word rose to prominence in the post-World War II area to describe predominantly Black neighborhoods created by racial covenants which shut Black residents out of white neighborhoods. Although the Supreme Court prohibited racial covenants in 1948, a host of systemic pressures perpetuated racial segregation in American cities, and the term “ghetto” persisted to describe majority-Black urban enclaves. More recently, the term evolved to be used as an adjective to describe a place or individual as rundown or shabby. And thus, given the term’s racial connotations, its use as an adjective is fairly viewed by many as racist. In TIME Magazine, George Washington University history professor Daniel B. Schwartz describes the nuanced controversy surrounding the word:
Even as the word “ghetto” has come today to be seen first and foremost as part of the African American experience, its usage is still not without controversy. Some view “ghetto,” especially when used colloquially as an adjective meaning deviant or tawdry, as slanderous and racist. Others believe the term powerfully conveys the intractable, prison-like nature of black segregation, the reality that residence in inner-city neighborhoods remains involuntary for most, practically if not legally. (Schwartz, Daniel B. “How America’s Ugly History of Segregation Changed the Meaning of the Word ‘Ghetto.’” TIME Magazine. 24 September 2019).
Beyond the Ghetto: Black Enclaves
Around a quarter of Detroit’s Black population lived in single-family homes in racially segregated enclaves, the largest of which was the Black West Side. Upwardly mobile Black people first settled this neighborhood in the 1920s, occupying large turn-of-the-century homes. Statistics underscore the gap between the West Side and Paradise Valley: At the start of World War II, 37% of West Side residents owned their homes, compared to 10% in Paradise Valley. Similarly, only 17% of West Side houses were substandard, compared to 60% of Paradise Valley homes (38).
The strain on Black enclaves grew as more migrants settled in the city during World War II. Few families could afford extensive renovations, opting instead to renovate in a piecemeal manner. The Eight Mile Road community, one of the most underserved in the city, addressed the problem by pooling their resources, but the area remained dilapidated. One survey found that two-thirds of the structures in Eight Mile were substandard, and that fewer than half of them had a toilet and bath (40).
Conant Gardens, on the Northeast Side of the urban core, was Detroit’s most exclusive Black enclave. Populated by affluent professionals, Conant Gardens boasted modern homes, well-kept yards, and tree-lined streets. Statistics reveal that the residents of Conant Gardens were among the city’s wealthiest and most educated Black residents (41). Like other wealthy enclaves, Conant Gardens used restrictive covenants to prevent Detroiters with lower incomes from encroaching on their neighborhood; Conant Gardens opposed, for instance, the construction of public-housing projects subsidized by the federal government.
The Housing Shortage
Detroit’s housing shortage, spurred by a sluggish construction industry, disproportionately impacted Black people. The rapidly expanding Black population exceeded the available housing in Black neighborhoods, as evidenced by statistics. In the 1940s, 150,000 Black people moved to Detroit, but the city gained only 1,895 public-housing units for Black occupancy and 200 private ones (42). Returning war veterans exacerbated the housing shortage. Few Black Detroiters could afford newly built homes. Even if they could, discrimination by developers, real-estate professionals, and bankers barred them from homeownership. The federal government sanctioned racial discrimination by producing maps and surveys labeling Black neighborhoods risky, which dissuaded developers from building there and bankers from financing construction. Moreover, the Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934 to facilitate home financing by insuring mortgages, especially for first-time homebuyers, regularly refused loans to Black homebuilders while approving white applicants of similar economic status. Federal appraisers also gave higher ratings to white neighborhoods with restrictive covenants banning commercial activity, rental units, and multifamily homes. These restrictions effectively kept Black people with low incomes out of white areas.
This is part of a broader trend in which the benefits of the New Deal were felt more acutely by white Americans. Although Black Americans received some of these benefits, many scholars argue that the New Deal deepened racial inequities. Researcher Otis Rolley writes, “[M]any forget that black and brown workers across the country were systematically excluded from key programs like Social Security as well as protections afforded under the National Labor Relations Act.” (Rolley, Otis. “The New Deal Made America’s Racial Inequality Worse. We Can’t Make the Same Mistake With Covid-19 Economic Crisis.” The Rockefeller Foundation. 11 June 2020). Rolley goes on to echo Sugrue’s scholarship on how the Federal Housing Administration promoted segregation with its loan policies.
The real-estate industry also maintained racial segregation, even after racial covenants were deemed unenforceable in 1948. For example, the Detroit Real Estate Board’s code of ethics promoted segregation by forcing agents to pledge “never [to] 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” (46). Agents who violated the code faced penalties or expulsion from the Board, as well as harassment from white clients. Banks exacerbated the problem by declining to lend to Black buyers seeking to move to white neighborhoods, prompting some Black people to approach loan sharks.
Urban Redevelopment
Infrastructure projects contributed to Detroit’s housing crisis. For example, the city built new expressways through Black neighborhoods while avoiding white areas. These projects required razing sections of the Black Lower East Side and Paradise Valley. The expressways also cut Black areas off from adjacent neighborhoods, making homes so undesirable they were impossible to sell. Lacking incentives to invest in their buildings, owners let them fall into disrepair. Sugrue cites statistics to convey the impact of infrastructure on the city:
By 1950, 423 residences, 109 businesses, 22 manufacturing plants, and 93 vacant lots had been condemned for the first three-mile stretch of the Lodge Freeway […] By 1958, the Lodge Freeway […] displaced 2,222 buildings (48).
Displaced residents did not receive government assistance to find new housing. Compounding housing woes was Detroit’s plan to clear blighted areas in the urban core to raise tax revenues, improve living conditions, and revitalize the inner city. Once again, displaced Black residents received little to no aid finding housing, with most squeezing into overcrowded adjacent neighborhoods.
Low-Rent Housing
The dearth of affordable apartments complicated efforts to relocate displaced residents. Detroit had relatively few apartment buildings in the mid-20th century, largely because homeowners’ associations objected to the construction of “multiple housing” in their neighborhoods. Detroiters with low incomes also had to compete with migrants and returning veterans for low-rent housing. In September of 1950, the Office of the Housing Expediter of the Housing and Home Finance Agency found only 37 available rental units in the city, half of which were too expensive for industrial workers (52). One migrant reported waiting in line with 60 people to interview with a landlord for a single apartment (52). The tight housing market made landlords selective. High demand caused prices to soar. Black people suffered more from the housing crisis than did white people, spending 20 to 40% more on housing than white people in the early 1950s (54). City regulators fined landlords who failed to maintain their buildings in under-resourced, low-income neighborhoods, to little effect. Tenants lacked the resources and the long-term commitment to make their own repairs.
According to Sugrue, Detroit’s housing crisis was not inevitable. Government policies, real-estate and development practices, and homeowners’ associations fueled the problem. The crisis might have been averted had individuals and organizations committed to integrating the city in the 1940s and 1950s. The book is as much about racism as it is about economics—and while Sugrue explores racism primarily through an economic lens, he never fully dispenses with the social dimension. His outlook still allows for human agency and character, yet he is committed to viewing those realities in the context of material forces that limit and influence people’s choices. Therefore, just as the text views Black Detroiters’ plight as nuanced and composite, the text suggests white people’s racism is multifaceted and related to more than an individual’s attitudes toward race per se.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary and Analysis: “‘The Coffin of Peace’: The Containment of Public Housing”
Chapter 3 covers the dearth of affordable housing in Detroit. The end of World War II marked a new phase in the city’s housing crisis. Tens of thousands of veterans returned to the city, pressuring an already tight market. The situation was especially challenging for Black people. During the war, the city received over 14,000 applications for public housing from Black people. Only 1,731 received apartments (58). Between 1947 and 1952, only 24% of Black applicants received government housing, compared to 41% of white applicants (58). Discriminatory practices confined Black people to a handful of housing projects in the city’s low-income residential districts. Social reformers wanting to build public housing in the suburbs faced fierce opposition from homeowners, who lobbied the government to maintain the stability of homeownership.
A New Deal in Housing
Elected officials sought to address Detroit’s housing problems in the New Deal era of the 1930s by investing in public housing. Advocates sought to eliminate overcrowding and build clean, affordable units for the city’s residents who had low incomes. New Deal liberalism persisted through the 1950s, but it coexisted uneasily with another promise: federal support of private, single-family homeownership through subsidies. Local governments determined how to implement federal policies and had the final say over how to spend federal funds. Local officials were understandably sensitive to their electorate. On one side were public-housing advocates, such as the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, whose mission was to improve conditions in Detroit’s high-density, low-income enclaves. On the other side were potential homeowners who sought to benefit from federal subsidies and mortgage guarantees. Local officials privileged the latter. Consequently, Detroit built relatively few public-housing projects. Those that were built were racially segregated. Opposition to public housing also came from community groups, developers, real-estate brokers, elected officials, and business associations who saw federal funding as a threat to private enterprise. Public housing was seen as a taxpayer handout for irresponsible people, further constraining the city’s housing reform agenda.
Black Homeownership and the Federal Housing Administration: The Eight Mile-Wyoming Area
The Eight Mile-Wyoming area became a battleground for government housing policy in the mid-20th century. Seventy-two percent of properties in the predominantly Black neighborhood were vacant. Some of the plots were owned by Black people, others by banks or the government. A marginal community in the 1920s, Eight Mile-Wyoming became a key part of Detroit’s urban-renewal plans in the early 1940s. Developers sought to build middle-class homes and commercial structures in the area, including in all-white subdivisions. Longtime plot owners banded together and lobbied the federal government to support the construction of single-family houses. Opposing them were reform organizations wanting more public housing. Debate about how to develop the area continued for years. In 1941, city officials identified the Eight Mile-Wyoming area as a desirable location for a new airport. The following year, the city sent its so-called blight committee to the area to address rehabilitation. The committee envisioned creating new housing in partnership with private developers. They considered a wide range of options, including public-housing developments and temporary barracks for Black workers. Some reformers advocated for the demolition of the area, while developers pushed to repair existing homes and build new ones. Prominent members of the Black community pressured the city to invest in public housing, but they did not agree on whether the housing should be permanent or temporary. In the end, the area became a bastion of Black homeownership, with 1,500 new single-family homes rising between 1940 and 1950. A decade later, 88% of the homes in Eight Mile-Wyoming were owner-occupied (71). This marked a win for Black homeowners, but it worsened the housing crisis for Black Detroiters with low incomes.
Public Housing on the Periphery: “Biracial” Housing in the 1940s
City planners and community groups debated where to build public housing in the 1940s. A key issue was alleviating overcrowding in the inner city. The city’s suburbs were logical places to build. Concerned about racial integration, however, and reluctant to go against the wishes of their working- and middle-class constituents, white suburban governments opposed public housing in their jurisdictions, halting government plans to build housing projects.
Sojourner Truth
The construction of the Sojourner Truth Project in 1941 shaped Detroit’s housing policy for over a decade. Located in northeast Detroit, the federal project comprised 200 integrated rental units designed to alleviate wartime housing shortages. The project had the support of civil-rights groups but met with strong resistance from white residents, who formed an association to oppose it. In 1941, federal officers bowed to opposition, designating Sojourner Truth a white-only project, only to reverse their decision two weeks later. Crowds of Black supporters and white opponents greeted the project’s first Black residents in 1942. A riot erupted, leading to 40 injuries and 220 arrests (74). One hundred and nine people were held for trial. All but three were Black. The Detroit Housing Commission (DHC) mandated the continuation of racial segregation in public housing in the wake of the Sojourner Truth riot. White groups used the threat of violence as leverage in housing debates, forcing city officials to bend to their will.
Suburban Resistance to Public Housing
White suburban communities limited urban reform during the war years. In 1944, for example, the Federal Public Housing Authority (FPHA) announced plans to build 400 to 1,000 units of temporary housing in Dearborn. Residents opposed the project with the support of the mayor, who promised to keep Dearborn “lily white.” The federal government bowed to the pressure, relocating the projects to the outskirts of Dearborn. The Ford Motor Company, Dearborn’s largest employer, objected to this change because the project would occupy company land. The Dearborn project underscores the challenges facing urban reformers, who struggled to find uncontroversial sites to house Black people. In this case, opposition was so strong that the federal government abandoned its plans.
The Defeat of Public Housing in Oakwood
In 1945, the DHC proposed a new housing project in Oakwood, a white working-class neighborhood comprising single-family dwellings, 64.5% of which were owner-occupied (77). Federal authorities chose the neighborhood because its residents lacked financial resources and political clout. The area was also unencumbered by racial covenants. However, residents of Oakwood opposed the project, arguing that a large influx of Black people with low incomes would threaten the neighborhood’s security and stability. Some opponents cited the New Deal’s promise of homeownership, while others were concerned that their property values would decline and expressed misgivings about racial integration. Rising crime rates and the loss of “peace and equanimity” (79) were also at the forefront of opposers’ minds. Racism, often couched in the language of patriotism, underlined much of the opposition. Community groups presented local officials with a petition signed by 3,000 area residents opposing the project. On March 20, 1945, the Detroit Common Council rejected the proposal to build public housing in Oakwood, dealing another blow to city residents who had little or no financial recourse. Wartime housing battles in Oakwood, Dearborn, and Sojourner Truth prompted Detroiters to view public housing in racialized terms. From this period onward, public housing became synonymous with Black housing.
Peripheral Public Housing after Oakwood
The battle over public housing in Detroit’s suburbs continued until the 1950s. In 1946, the City Planning Commission (CPC) issued its Master Plan, which called for the comprehensive removal of rundown, low-income neighborhoods and their replacement with public housing in the city’s peripheral areas. In 1949, the DHC identified 12 sites for housing projects. Four of these were downtown, on sites occupied by underresourced, overpopulated settlements. The remaining eight were vacant lands on the north end of the city, all but one of which were predominantly white. All the suburban proposals met with strong resistance, despite being located on vacant lands. Community groups mobilized to fight construction, while the media criticized housing-reform advocates. Tensions came to a head during the mayoral election in 1949. The conservative candidate campaigned on issues of race and public housing. By contrast, the liberal candidate supported racial equality and fair housing. Conservatives prevailed, even in predominantly liberal areas. The newly elected mayor vetoed eight of the 12 public-housing proposals and dismantled the city’s public-housing program, despite pleas by the CPC and FPHA. While cities across the country took advantage of federal funding to build public housing after the passing of the 1949 Housing Act, construction of multi-housing projects virtually ceased in Detroit.
The Strange Death of Public Housing in Detroit, 1950–1960
Public housing deepened racial divisions in mid-20th-century Detroit. Public-housing projects were uncommon and concentrated in Black neighborhoods. The city was also slow to desegregate public-housing projects, integrating them in earnest only after a 1956 lawsuit brought by the Detroit branch of the NAACP. Detroit’s housing crisis persisted through the end of the decade; even into the early 1960s, some public-housing projects remained all white. Black people remained in underresourced urban enclaves, while white people continued to oppose integration.
