Detroit Divided

1. Introduction: Three Centuries of Growth and Conflict

1 Introduction: Three Centuries of Growth and Conflict THE CENSUS OF 1990 counted seventy-seven U.S. cities with 200,000 or more residents. Detroit, the ninth largest, ranked 76th in terms of population growth in the 1980s-it lost one resident in six during that decade. It ranked first in terms of poverty, with onethird of its residents living in households reporting cash incomes below the poverty line. It also ranked first for percentage of households receiving public assistance payments, and it was the only large city in which the majority of family households were headed by a single parent. Detroit ranked 73rd of the seventy-seven cities in median income, and 75th in the percentage of adults with college diplomas. As for the worth of its owner-occupied homes, Detroit ranked at the very bottom, with a median home value of only $25,600. The comparable figure for the city of Boston was $161,400 and for Los Angeles, $244,500 (U.S. Department of Commerce 1994, table 3). Detroit, the Motor City, was once the symbol of our national industrial prowess, the home of an innovative automobile industry that played a key role in the development of the modern middle class. Its engineers created the production line, and its firms soon dominated the world in the manufacturing of cars and trucks. Because of its specialization in the production of heavy equipment during World War II, the city earned the sobriquet Arsenal of Democracy. Thousands of trucks, jeeps, tanks, planes, and weapons built on Detroit's assembly lines helped bring the Allies to victory. Throughout the post-World War II boom, Detroit was known as a city where blue-collar workers of all ethnic and racial backgrounds could prosper, largely by working at tough, but highpaying , jobs in auto plants-jobs that came along with membership in a powerful union that successfully fought for high pay, generous fringe benefits, and good working conditions. Especially for the thousands of African Americans who migrated northward from the fields and towns of the Deep South, Detroit offered opportunities for full-time employment at good wages-and the right to vote. 1 DETROIT DIVIDED Detroit no longer symbolizes industrial might or technological innovation . Rather, the city is frequently seen as leading the nation in unemployment, poverty, abandoned factories, empty office buildings, high crime, and bitter racial strife. Instead of offering great hopes and opportunities for its African American residents, today Detroit's blacks are frequently viewed as poor and disconnected from the mainstream economy. No longer is Detroit a place where blue-collar workers of all racial and ethnic groups can prosper together. It seems to have become the quintessential underclass city, and attracts only a sliver of the great stream of immigrants now coming to the United States from Latin America and Asia. One resident of eight in metropolitan Los Angeles in 1997 had migrated to the United States earlier in the 1990s. In New York, the figure was also one in eight. In Detroit, just one in one hundred was a new arrival (U.S. Department of Commerce 1998). Nor does Detroit any longer attract migrants from the rural Midwest or South. In population terms, the city has been declining in size while metropolitan Detroit has been stagnant. The Census counted 4.2 million for its three counties (Macomb, Oakland, and Wayne) in 1970, and the Census Bureau estimated 4.1 million in 1998, or a drop of 3 percent. In the same span, the nation's population grew by 32 percent. The important counterpoint to emphasize-one that will come up again and again in this book-is that Metropolitan Detroit is not an impoverished place. When one takes into account the overwhelmingly white suburban ring, one finds that the Detroit metropolitan area is among the nation's most prosperous. In terms of the earnings of employed men and women, Detroit ranked 7th out of 281 metropolises in 1990; in terms of per capita income, it was 24th of 281. In 1997, the average income of families in metropolitan Detroit was 13 percent above the national average. In that year, families in metropolitan Detroit had average incomes of $56,000, far above the $49,500 of metropolitan New York and the $47,600 of metropolitan Los Angeles (U.S. Department of Commerce 1993, table 3; 1998). As the nation's major retailers know, Detroit's suburban ring is a good place to do business because of its highly-paid...