What’s the Matter with Detroit?

By Francis Bartus

Posted 12/17/05

An aged and glorious grand piano lies prostrate and helpless, collapsed on its side in a forgotten ballroom. As I touch my fingers to the ivory keys stained black with the filth of seven decades, it breathes out a few faint but hopeful notes. White-paint flakes drift to the floor, dancing down from the vaulted ceilings, a snowy spectacle of bygone beauty—long since abandoned.

Once I set up my shot, the SNAP of the camera shutter rings out, cutting through the silence of the ballroom. Bathed in the diffuse light that seeps in above the cinder blocks which have long barred dancers, I reflect. This is the Lee Plaza Hotel, a beautifully ornamented eighteen-story structure that once housed the wealthiest, most fashionable tenants in one of America’s greatest cities. It stands forgotten on the corner of so-called Grand Boulevard and Linwood in the automotive capital of the world. This is the Lee Plaza Hotel, and this is Detroit, Michigan.

Like so many of the remaining monuments to Detroit’s former glory, the Lee Plaza was abandoned in the wake of changing economic times. Built in 1929 for Ralph T. Lee, one of the city’s most prolific real estate entrepreneurs, the Lee Plaza began as a so-called “apartment-hotel,” housing permanent residents who wished to enjoy the luxuries of a hotel stay. In the wake of the great depression, however, few could afford to live there, and Lee was forced to shut its doors. Much later, the city converted the structure into low-cost housing for the elderly, but due to an impending budget crisis, the hotel was abandoned once again.

So many traces of Detroit’s decay can be found in the empty rooms of the Lee Plaza. Pill bottles litter the floor of one room, while a homeless person’s clothes blanket another. Valuable bas relief terra cotta lion heads have been torn from the building along with countless bath fixtures in almost every room. Need, crime, and addiction have all made their home here. As an amateur photographer from the suburbs, I find myself attracted to images of the city, and like a voyeur or a war photographer, I eagerly peek inside and capture what many people would rather not see. My photographic opportunities emerge each time I drive into the city, crossing beneath 8-mile on M-10. Beyond this threshold, fire-ravaged houses dot an overgrown landscape like the bombed-out husks of so many shattered homes. The rusty, twisted remains of cars lay in abandoned lots adjacent to the now-defunct factories that once produced them. The visceral impact of these images reduces the complex and convoluted history of Detroit’s decay to its purest physical expression. More often than not, I know next to nothing about the faceless, empty buildings I photograph on every block, every street. Yet each one speaks volumes about the poverty and waste that has befallen the city.

According to the New York Times, one third of Detroit’s 139 square miles are consumed by vacant lots and dilapidated buildings. Each and every one of those vacant lots has its story. In fact, the same shifting economic forces that drove out the Lee Plaza’s residents almost eight decades ago have transformed Detroit into the barren wasteland that it is today. Yet simple economics do not tell the whole story—for just below the surface of every major aspect of Detroit’s devolution lurks the hidden specter of institutionalized racism.

The Herman Gardens project: 1950 (left) vs. today (right):

Unsurprisingly, Detroit’s population data plainly confirms the city’s abandonment. Today, Detroit lays claim to just over 900,000 residents—less than half of the 1.85 million people who once inhabited the city at its 1950 peak. But these raw statistics merely scratch the surface of the overall problem. Upon looking deeper, one will discover that Detroit’s de-population has a color bias. In 1950, African-Americans made up 16.1% of Detroit’s population—291,850 by raw numbers. Today, African-Americans compose 81.6% of the city’s population—which amounts to 734,561 African-Americans living in a declining city. Additionally, 47% of Detroiters are functionally illiterate and 33.6% live below the poverty line—more than in any other large city in the United States. The same factors that drove affluent whites and their businesses out of the city plague the African-Americans who remain there today. Yet it is important to examine how the city became so segregated—for its segregation, which stretches back through the city’s history, explains its present dilapidated state.

In the early nineteenth century, just as the automotive industry began to take off, Henry Ford famously began to integrate his workforce. Hiring African-Americans for countless blue-collar and even white-collar positions, he transformed Detroit into a beacon of hope for the African-American working class drawing many additional African-Americans into the city. However, in the wake of World War II, economic hardship befell the automakers and the job base began to decline. Automation began to eliminate jobs, and automakers began to relocate factories to other locations with cheaper labor. Historian Thomas Sugrue claims that in the wake of these changing circumstances, “the burden was borne disproportionately by black Detroiters.” Many of them “suffered because of seniority. African Americans, because they didn't get their foot into the door until the 1940s, were the first to be fired.” This de facto employment discrimination led to an African-American unemployment rate of 15.9%, more than twice the 6% unemployment whites faced in the 1950’s.

Needless to say, racial disparities in employment had a profoundly negative impact on the economic standing of African-Americans, which in turn worsened their overall housing situation. Economic circumstances provided only one of the many obstacles to equitable housing among African-Americans; overt race-based discrimination within Real Estate agencies and government regulatory agencies sealed the deal. Much of the responsibility lies with the Federal Housing Administration and Home Owners Loan Corporation, a federal agency which subsidized housing developments. The rules governing the organization dictated that loans could not be made for so-called “risky properties,” which, by the Federal government’s standards, included both older homes and racially heterogeneous neighborhoods. Thus, while whites could obtain loans to build or to purchase a home quite easily, African-Americans faced a multitude of barriers. Often, Real Estate companies exacerbated racial divisions, steering African-American home buyers to certain neighborhoods and white home buyers to others. This perpetuated a segregated, economically disparate environment in which African-Americans had little upward mobility. More often than not, they were unable to move into white neighborhoods, so they remained trapped in lower-income African-American neighborhoods, which bore the brunt of crime and racism. When African-American families did manage to integrate into white neighborhoods, they were met with hatred and violence: prior to 1967, over 200 incidents of violence against African-Americans moving into white neighborhoods were recorded. It was practically assured that these families would have their homes pelted with stones and their windows broken—in one case, an angry white neighbor threw a tree stump through the window of an African-American home.

To this very day, Detroit bears the scars of housing segregation. While taking a casual stroll through modern-day Joe Louis Park, one might wonder about the six-foot-high, one-and-a-half mile long concrete wall that separates it from a nearby neighborhood. Conjuring images of the Berlin Wall, the silent barrier—known as the 8 Mile wall—speaks volumes of the city’s segregation. Detroit Historian Lowell Boileau recounts its story:

After World War I, some black residents of Detroit moved into a then rural and vacant area… In 1940, a developer sought to build homes for middle income whites in a nearby area. However, the Federal Housing Administration's policies of that era precluded their approving loans in racially mixed areas. To secure FHA approval, this developer put up a wall… to clearly demark the white and black areas. His wall led [the] FHA to approve loans for his project.

The persistent practices of Real Estate agents, encouraged by the FHA’s racist policies, divided the city into concrete white neighborhoods and black neighborhoods. More often than not, these racial boundaries doubled as socioeconomic barriers. African-American neighborhoods faced predatory lending, low property values, and high crime rates. All of these factors contributed to the perpetuation of poverty and economic inequality in the city. This outright segregation left many African-Americans feeling angry and disillusioned as racial tensions approached closer and closer to the breaking point.

And when the bulldozers came, flattening African-American neighborhoods, businesses, and cultural centers, they laid down two major freeways: Interstate 75 and M-10, or “The Lodge.” These freeways cut through African-American neighborhoods, displacing countless people and destroying one of their most important cultural centers: Paradise Valley, or “Black Bottom.” Historian Max Herman sums it up well:

[The] neighborhood that black migrants and white ethnics had struggled over during the 1940s was buried beneath several layers of concrete. As the oldest established black enclave in Detroit, “Black Bottom” was not merely a point on the map, but the heart of Detroit’s black community, commercially and culturally. The loss for many black residents of Detroit was devastating, and the anger burned for years thereafter.

But the freeways did more than feed the flames of racial tension; they also opened the door for whites who worked in the city—and the businesses they worked for—to leave. White flight was born.

As the racial pressure continued to mount, it was only a matter of time before the explosive mixture erupted. It began with a seemingly routine raid on an after-hours bar at 12^th and Clairmont in an African-American neighborhood. Detroit police expected to round up a few patrons, but instead discovered an 82-person party celebrating a friend’s return from Vietnam. After arresting all 82 patrons, the police were forced to wait for a “clean-up crew” to transport them to jails. While they were waiting, a crowd gathered and began to protest. As the last police car left the parking lot, a small group of men broke the windows of a nearby clothing store. This tiny spark ignited the city, and for five days, the city burned. Rioting, looting, and widespread vandalism spread from the city’s Lower West side all the way to the Upper East Side. After 48 hours of destruction, 8,000 National Guardsmen were called in to the city. Unable to control the violence, Governor George Romney asked President Lyndon Johnson whether he could send Federal troops without declaring a “state of insurrection.” Eventually, Johnson mobilized the 82^nd Airborne, and tanks rolled into the city.

After five days, the flames were quelled. Amidst the ashes lay 43 dead and 1,189 injured. Over 7,000 people were arrested and 1,400 buildings burned. The economic toll of the infamous 1967 race riot came to $22 million. Coleman Young, a later major of the city, reflected on the riots:

The heaviest casualty, however, was the city. Detroit's losses went a hell of a lot deeper than the immediate toll of lives and buildings. The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the rebellion [sic], totally twenty-two thousand in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic. In 1967, with less than half the year remaining after the summer explosion—the outward population migration reached sixty-seven thousand. In 1968 the figure hit eighty-thousand, followed by forty-six thousand in 1969.

The scales had finally tipped. Decades worth of pent-up anger overflowed into the streets, and when white people saw the sad result of the persistent marginalization of African-Americans, they continued to flee in unprecedented numbers.

As of the 2000 census, the Metropolitan Detroit area remained the most segregated in the country. The economic and social costs of this segregation have taken a staggering toll on the city—rendering it one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in the nation. Yet, paradoxically, many residents of the metro area fail to recognize the correlation. Tamar Jacoby, author of Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration—a book criticizing Detroit’s failed attempt at integration writes that “we used to think that kind of separatism was deplorable; now, we think it's acceptable, and perhaps preferable.” Prominent commentators echo Jacoby’s conclusion, many of whom contributed to the Detroit New’s 2002 series tackling the cost of segregation in the Metro Detroit area. Reporters interviewed both black and white families in the Metro area to find that most were unconcerned with the problem of segregation. Debbie Jodoin, a resident of Novi, which is 87.3% white and 1.9% black, said “we're Catholic, the people across the street are Jewish, there are people of Oriental descent and our kids play with the African American kids down the street.” Suburban whites and suburban blacks both seemed relatively unconcerned about the persistence of residential segregation.

Yet their predominantly apathetic attitudes substantiate the fact that the problem of segregation hits poor black Detroiters the hardest. In another article, the Detroit News interviewed black Detroiter Shannton Gaston, a day care operator spending her retirement money to send her children to private schools. “It's different in the suburbs,” she claimed, “They have the best of both worlds—their children have good schools.” According to the News, “Bad schools are among the steep costs of segregation to Metro Detroit blacks, three-quarters of whom live in Detroit. They run a greater risk for heart attacks, low birth-weight babies, homicides, stunted home values and dead-end jobs.” It seems that only those who suffer the consequences of segregation seem to care about it. Too many affluent youth in the suburbs—white and black alike—adopt the attitude that blacks and whites self-segregate on a purely voluntary basis. Though recent studies reinforce this assumption, they do not nullify the fact that blacks are suffering from their segregation—and that few would tolerate inadequate public schooling, rampant crime, and sky-high insurance rates if they could afford to do otherwise.

Thus, suburban whites and blacks alike must take it upon themselves to experience the city, rather than to isolate themselves from its problems. If our young people never cross underneath that enigmatic sign that reads ‘8 Mile Road,’ forgetting what that sign once meant to their parents and their neighbors who crossed under it when they left the city, then they will overlook the poor who remain trapped on the wrong side. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has already made the first move by sparking public discussion of Detroit’s segregation; now affluent suburbanites and poor city-dwellers must each in turn acknowledge the problem, and work to change it. For too many concrete walls still stand between suburban whites and urban blacks, and too many forgotten pianos silently bear witness to a sordid history of segregation.

(click for Lee Plaza photo gallery)

Works Cited

Boileau, Lowell. “8 Mile: The Gates of Detroit.” 2002. DetroitYES. 11 September 2005. <http://detroityes.com/webisodes/2002/8mile/021106-04-8mile-berlin-wall.htm>

Sugrue, Thomas. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post-War Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Herman, Max, PhD. The Newark and Detroit ‘Riots’ of 1967. 1998. Rutgers University. 11 September 2005. <http://www.67riots.rutgers.edu>

Young, Coleman. Hardstuff : The Autobiography of Mayor Coleman Young. Viking Adult, 1994.