42 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well researched, well written, January 2, 2004
The Detroit metropolitan area today is arguably the most racially segregated region in the United States, with a primarily African-American, largely abandoned and dilapidated urban center surrounded by layers of primarily white, affluent suburbs. This book is essential reading for anyone who lives in southeast Michigan as well as other cities that have similar histories of industrialization, urban decline and concentrated poverty such as Cleveland, Gary, Philadelphia, and South Chicago.
Thomas Sugrue provides a thoughtful, well-researched, and fascinating analysis of systematic racial inequality in Detroit during the post World War II automotive industry boom of the 1940s through deindustrialization and "white flight", and ending with the catastrophic race riots of 1967. Sugrue avoids the current, common oversimplifications of blaming Detroit's urban crisis on the '67 riots or Mayor Colman Young by weaving together a complex story of human behaviors, fears, and incentive structures backed by data, references, and personal accounts: "By the time Young was inaugurated, the forces of economic decay and racial animosity were far too powerful for a single elected official to stem."
Sugrue's analysis provides insight to understand major groups of stakeholders and their interactions: Workers flocked from the southern states to Detroit seeking relatively high-paying automotive jobs. In the free market, resulting housing shortages allowed landlords to divide properties into tiny apartments and charge premium prices, protecting their investments by being selective in their choice of "low risk" white tenants. Bankers also preferred "low risk" clients, resulting in unequal access to funds. White home owners, wanting to protect their families and financial investment, resisted neighborhood integration to avoid declining property values and perceived dangers. Real estate agents capitalized on fears of mixed neighborhoods by buying property from fleeing whites at junk prices and selling immediately to blacks at premium prices. Labor unions protected seniority, which unequally benefited whites, and tended to compromise on racial issues in order to gain bargaining ground. Store owners avoided hiring black workers, wishing to avoid offending or frightening mostly white, mostly female, customers. Suburban tax incentives and new technology made large, flat assembly plants more efficient than the old multi-story plants. This drove automakers away from Detroit, where the rail and riverside real estate was largely developed, and contributed to unemployment and race and class polarization.
Racial inequality in Detroit stems from complex social systems of incentives and categorical isolation caused by systematic inequality in access to employment, housing, networking and other resources. Recognizing the complexity of this social system helps the reader understand how individuals who fail to actively oppose racism actually support it, and why official "race-blind" policies fail to stop the polarization caused by chain-reactions of systematic, historic, self-reinforcing racial inequalities and the ruthless self-interest of capitalist culture.
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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
VERY IMPORTANT URBAN HISTORY, November 26, 1999
Sugrue's work builds on that of other urban scholars, notably Arnold Hirsch and Raymond Mohl. Sugrue challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decay is the product of the social programs and racial problems of the 1960s. He looks beneath the surface prosperity and social consensus associated with the 1950s and finds the rise of hidden racial violence, a new ghetto (sim. to what Hirsch and Mohl term the "second ghetto"), discrimination, and deindustrialization. Sugrue seeks to rectify the lacking historical perspective that has hindered "underclass" studies. His work suggests that the intersection of race, economics, and politics in the 1940s-1960s paved the way for a social and economic disaster in modern cities. Sugrue argues that in the wake of Detroit's World War II boom, the city fell on hard times. As a result, a shrinking pie (so to speak) became highly contested by blacks and whites, particularly in the workplace and in marginal neighborhoods. Sugrue examines the racism associated with federal and local collusion to keep blacks confined in low-rent districts. Further, urban slum clearance and freeway construction worked to the detriment of the black community. Sugrue also shows how industries and businesses deserted the city in a mass exodus as whites went to the suburbs. The result? A spatial mismatch between jobs and the jobless. In the interest of space, I neglect numerous important aspects of Sugrue's seminal work. THE ORIGINS OF THE URBAN CRISIS should be mandatory reading for anyone who is too quick to blame "liberalism" and the Great Society for our urban ills. Essentially, Sugrue confirms for Detroit what Arnold Hirsch found true of Chicago in the 1940s and 1950s -- that the conservative backlash does not spring completely from a sense of a failed Great Society.
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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A comprehensive look at postwar Detroit, November 15, 2002
By A Customer
This book is essential for anyone who really wants to understand the roots of urban decline in the United States since World War 2. Too many books focus solely on the debilitating effect of the welfare state. Urban decline is far too complicated to blame factor alone. The author of this book does an excellent job in examining the combined effects of housing and job discrimination, deindustrialization and the racist attitudes of many white Detroiters. To his credit, the author tells all sides of the story, so that no one side garners all the sympathy or hatred. Neighborhood associations are not mobs of angry, unthinking whites motivated solely by hatred of blacks; nor are blacks criminally-minded characters too lazy to find work. Once you look at everthing, you realize how intractable Detroit's problems were in 1970 and how they remain so today.
Although this book is about Detroit, this book also sheds light on the fate of other American cities (i.e. Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Newark, NJ) that also experienced massive deindustrialization and population loss in the last third of the century.
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