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The Origins of the Urban Crisis

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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.

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.

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.

This is quite a remarkable book. It attempts to explain the riots that occurred in Detroit in the late 1967. These riots were racially based and some of the most brutal in America.

The book basically is about racism. It describes the history of racism in Detroit between the 1930's and the 1960's. Unlike other books that tend to be anecdotal this book attempts to look at the mechanics of the process and to provide empirical material to illustrate and validate the material in the text.

The story of the book is that racism is a complex phenomenon. Detroit in the 1940's had a vast appetite for labor. This lead to it being a city in which Afro Americans could be employed. Large numbers began to migrate and to fill the more lowly paid jobs in the auto industry. The book explains the sorts of mechanisms, which governed this process. How employers would discriminate against blacks, to keep them in lowly paid positions and the fights that some unions engaged in to overcome such practices.

The book goes on to explain how housing was one of the main ways in which blacks were able to be limited to certain areas. The widespread use of housing covenants permitted blacks to be excluded from more affluent areas. This meant that blacks became concentrated in small areas which subsequently became ghettos. The action of courts and legislatures to overcome the use of discriminatory covenants was opposed violently. The book shows how populist politicians would ply the race card to gain election at the expense of the more principled. How they would exploit the fear of residents about the alleged nexus between Afro Americans and crime. This in turn led to violence being unleashed on those Afro Americans who were able to afford housing in more affluent areas.

With the 50's and 60's came the widespread use of automation. The number of jobs in the auto industry began to decline. As the jobs dried up the position of Afro Americans eroded further. As employment fell away the areas they lived in began to run down and become the stereotypical ghettoes, wracked with decay and unemployment. This decay occurred against a background of a society which battled hard to exclude Afro Americans from good housing, employment and the political process. The violence of 1967 was thus hardly a surprise.

The book is extremely good. Often books dealing with such subjects can rely on cliché and assertion. This book consists of fact after fact and it is full of tables and maps. It is one of the more interesting studies to come out in years. No wonder it won a prize.

As a resident of the metro Detroit area for the first 30 years of my life who finally fled last year, I write this review with a bit of nostalgic sorrow. What happened to Detroit - formerly the fourth most populous city in the U.S. and once considered the "Paris of the Midwest" - is nothing short of a very sad, sad tale.

The Origins of the Urban Crisis does an excellent job at going all the way back to examine the causal factors, with a decidedly un-biased eye. The sad reality is that there's more than enough blame to go around on all sides, and the book details this without stooping to broad-sweeping generalizations; instead, it presents the facts & supporting arguments for your review.

I will warn that it's a bit over-whelming in that one constantly asks themself "what could have prevented that" and "would X have worked" as they read tale of riot after riot, and injustice after injustice.

Sugrue's thoroughly researched and documented history of racial segregation in Detroit is an essential tool for anyone working on behalf of America's cities. Detailed GIS maps show the razor sharp lines that have divided the city decade after decade in what is still the most racially segregated metropolitan statistical area of over 1 million people in the United States and the only one to get worse over the past 20 years. Sugrue does a good job of examining how racism distorts free market economics. As a result, free market approaches, critical to urban recapitalization, have received a much more cautious acceptance in Detroit than in many other cities that are coming back, such as Cleveland, Baltimore and Portland. David Dworkin Director Fannie Mae Detroit Partnership Office

There's quite a bit of repetitiveness in this sprawling, scholarly work, but despite its excessive thoroughness (the bibliography alone comprises almost 1/4 of the book) it's actually quite readable. The factual, dispassionate approach does lean heavily on the side of black Detroit, but does justify itself and unlike some black power/black pride diatribe, this didn't make me feel defensive (as a white person). Instead, I came away from this book armed with an improved understanding of the complex systemic factors which exacerbated inequality between blacks and whites in postwar Detroit- and by inference other rust belt cities.

Being a social service researcher, I was disappointed in the relative lack of statistical rigor. Correlation often seems to be confused with causation, and in some places statistics are provided without context. For example, in one place the author notes that "of twelve proposed public housing sites in Detroit in the 1940s, only three were built"- yes, but these were just "proposed" projects, how does that rate compare to urban planning at large? In another place "37,382 black families and 56,758 white families applied for public housing. 41 percent of white applicants and only 24 percent of black applicants made it onto the waiting list"- yes, but is race the only variable here or could there other factors involved? Considering that this book probably didn't aspire to be a controlled trial or formal research study, though, those flaws can be forgiven, and in fact aren't so bad compared to most other books of its kind.

Overall, Sugrue clearly and convincingly makes the argument that the problems of Detroit today do not reflect inherent limitations of its current residents, but rather stem from "interconnected forces of race, residence, discrimination, and industrial decline, the consequences of a troubled and still unresolved past." He provides us with a powerful argument against those who say, "why don't they just get a job" by providing a detailed history of the forces of decentralization, deindustrialization, and automation stripping away the lowest rung of the economic ladder, chiefly low skill automotive jobs not requiring literacy. He attributes the burgeoning "alternative economy of gambling, drugs, and prostitution" to this lost economy. Most of us don't see this dynamic, but they should.

Though the work focuses primarily on describing policy and trends, it's at its most powerful when it's anecdotal. For example, the most enduring image for me is that of the presumably well-intentioned Easby Wilson becoming the first black in an all-white neighborhood, only to see his home repeatedly vandalized and his family harassed by literally an all-ages mob of neighbors.

In my perfect world, every student in public schools would be taught the major points of this book. Sugrue clearly explains, through statistical and anecdotal evidence, how Detroit went from the "arsenal of Democracy" during World War II to the rundown, segregated and impoverished city it has become. This book is fascinating.

Sugrue focuses on housing, employment and, to a lesser extent, politics, to illustrate the disintegration of Detroit. African-Americans flocked to the city around the time of WWII for the chance to escape Jim Crow discrimination and find employment in Detroit's thriving industries, primarily auto and defense. But they were met with myriad problems -- white employers either refused to hire them, barred them from apprenticeships and/or relegated them to unskilled jobs that left them barely able to scrape by and always afraid of a layoff; and white residents used violence, remarkably cohesive organization and political power to keep them out of the "white" neighborhoods as long as possible, fleeing to the suburbs when the barriers were finally broken.

The result? A city of poor blacks largely ignored by whites in power; industrial departure for suburbs or other regions; unfair stereotypes of African-Americans; insufficient tax money from the impoverished residents to support reasonable public schools or needed improvements. Surgrue breaks the book into three parts that are easy to follow and leave the reader fully understanding what went wrong in Detroit in the postwar years. If I have a criticism it's that the thematic approach occasionally makes it tough to remember the chronology of the major events. But it's hardly a concern. A thematic writing was necessary in this case.

I will also note that in the Kindle version of this book, the photographs are terrible. They look like somebody photocopied them from the book, spilled black ink on them, and then scanned them for publication. And it's disappointing because I think some of those photos would have been useful. But I can't detract from the rating of the book since photo reproduction isn't the author' fault.

In 2005, Detroit looks more like a city awaiting reconstruction after a series of aerial bomber raids than the dynamo of manufacturing it was at the close of the Second World War. The combinations of white flight, race riots, massive deindustrialization by the automotive industry and the industries attached to it coupled with chronic unemployment and discrimination and racism in nearly every facet of life did a great a deal to make Detroit the wasteland it is today.

Thomas J. Sugrue's short study of Detroit, from the late 1930's through the 1970's is an attempt to understand the structure of Detroit's decline in racial, political, economic, and sometimes spatial terms. Through analysis of all these factors, Sugrue creates a cogent explanation of why so many formerly industrial cities of the United States are increasingly poorer, blacker, and more hopeless about their future with every passing year.

Sugrue sees the problems of Detroit stemming from a multiplicity of conscious and unconscious decisions made on the part of local and national government officials, corporate boards, union leadership, neighborhood associations, and self-interested individuals in day to day life. This is nothing new in the study of post-war urban and industrial decline. What is new, and rather eye opening, is that Sugrue traces the beginnings of Detroit's economic woes to be nearly co-terminus with the war and not after the disastrous riot of 1967. This analysis is incredibly important for understanding how a massive black underclass with only minimal connections to the job market came into existence, and expanded, in the 1950's.

By a combination of discrimination and bad luck, a large number of black workers missed out on the relatively high paying automotive jobs that allowed huge numbers of white blue collar workers to aspire to home ownership and middle class respectability. For a small number of black workers who were able to find auto jobs immediately before or during the war some measure of job security and the upward mobility. This was not the situation of most black workers though. Without the benefits of seniority, most often confined to jobs that were made redundant by automation or plant movements and closure, black workers were most likely to be the victims of the vagaries of Detroit's labor market. The vast body of black workers most often found themselves getting the hot end of the economic poker.

Sugrue's analysis of race and the meaning of postwar liberalism is the most succinct and cogent portion of the work. One of the great conundrums post-war Detroit politics with overwhelming presence of the militant and fighting union UAW-CIO could not prevent housing segregation from becoming so thoroughly entrenched. In recounting the wartime and post war fights over public housing, Sugrue points to the dual identities that white male union members had as rank and filers and bread winning home owners tenuously holding onto newly won middle class status and their own whiteness.

The part of Roman Catholic identity is something Sugrue finds to be very important to the territorial fights that occurred in residential Detroit, as well as the grass roots neighborhood organizing which occurred in white neighborhoods--both factors he identifies as being woefully under analyzed. Through Sugrue's descriptions of neighborhood attempts to stop racial turn over, or the pernicious practice of "block busting" by opportunistic real estate agents, the reader is privy to seeing grass roots mass mobilization which would have most likely have formally adopted segregation if there had been legal means to do so. The housing battles of the forties and fifties were a grim precursor of white working class abandonment of the city proper and savage and complicated forms of inequalities that plague the rust belt today.

One of the most interesting portions of Sugrue's work is his analysis of how the automotive industry, in line with a great many other industries the country over, left the cities in the Northeast, Middle Atlantic and Midwest portions of the country--cities whose advantages laid in their location vis-à-vis lakes, rivers, or railway hubs. In line with Cold War planning which expected major metropolitan areas to be first strike targets by the Soviets, and because of the massive highway system built during the Eisenhower administration, it became possible for industry to disperse over greater distances than ever before. Facing the prospect of negotiating with militant unions in urban areas with powerful allies in public offices at every, much of the auto industry was more than happy to relocate to areas where unions were either weak or simply not organized--after 1947 the Taft-Hartley act made this much simpler as even Southern states with strong union presence enacted "right to work" legislation.

Mixing national security rationales with a great deal of pecuniary interest, Sugrue recounts how huge sections of the automotive industry simply left Detroit without the slightest concern for what their departure would mean for the future of the city. Sugure shows how the UAW and other Detroit area unions were possibly lost a golden opportunity to redefine corporate responsibility when they did not oppose shareholder and corporate prerogatives about the free movement of property anywhere they pleased. Although any union would have had a difficult time attempting to halt the movement of corporate property from one area of the country, no international union gave their support to stopping what the militant members of Detroit's UAW Local 600 called the "Runaway Shop," and we call deindustrialization. Some restrictions on the free flow of corporate property may have insured that Detroit's colossal unemployment of the late twentieth century would not be so colossal and seemingly intractable.

The Origin of the Urban Crisis is possibly the most solid book on why so many areas of the United States sit in utter ruin today. The analysis of Detroit he gives can be extended de-industrialized cities in every region of the country with their largely black and poor inner cities and their outlying more prosperous suburbs.

This was required reading for a graduate course in American history.
Thomas J. Sugrue attempts to prove that resistance to the civil rights movement had much deeper roots than the white backlash of the 1960s and 1970s. The author contends that resistance to the civil rights actually emerged as opposition to the New Deal coalition. Urban, anti-liberal, northern whites, as well as corporate leaders, unionists and politicians limited the possibilities of reform. Sugure maintains that northern urban white workers initially were the "backbone" of the New Deal coalition. And they found a common cause as the New Deal unified varied constituents in America. Yet, Sugure argues that underneath the seeming unity of the new coalition, were unresolved questions of racial identities. These unresolved issues began to fester, and were then exacerbated by liberal policies, specifically, public housing. And it is here that Sugure places the ''white rebellion" against the New Deal and liberalism, in the urban north.

From the 1940s until the 1960s, Detroit's racial geography changed dramatically. Sugure refers to Detroit as a "magnet' for African Americans after World War II, due to the lure of the defense and
automobile industries. When increasing numbers of African Americans began to search for housing in the predominantly white sections of the Detroit, racial tensions began to increase. Post World War II was described at "dark ages of Detroit." Riots and white flight occurred, coupled with a decline in the Detroit's post war economy. As layoffs mounted, and a national housing shortage, white homeowners feared foreclosure on their homes, as the economic ability to own home became increasingly precarious.

Sugure claims that race and housing became inseparable in the minds of white Detroiters. Basically, he contends that white homeowners feared that the influx of blacks would ruin their fragile economic security. Familiar racial fears and myths emerged; blacks were associated with crime and vice. White Detroiters even cited Jim Crow as a model for "successful race relations." In response to the "black invasion" and their increased economic stability, working class whites began to form neighborhood associations. Essentially, these associations were political organizations aimed at stymieing black constituents from moving into white neighborhoods. Sugure contends that these associations espoused the notions of values, protection, achievement and tradition, and were aimed at paternalistically protecting the neighborhood from vice-ridden blacks. They also served to foster a sense of "whiteness" among members (silent majority etc). These organizations corresponded with public officials and real estate agents (who played to both black and whites) to block African Americans from certain neighborhoods in various ways, including violence and intimidation.

By examining this, I believe the author uncovered a very prominent theme in American history and politics. What should be the level of government assistance in a capitalistic society? In this specific case, should the government have supplied urban housing for its poorer constituents, or should it have upheld the rights of privacy and association of its more affluent constituents? The affluent white constituents criticized the government when it tried to "force people" (blacks) down their throats," they cried for their freedoms of privacy and association, yet they called on that same "tyrannical" government to aid them in blocking the settlement of African Americans in their neighborhoods. Sugrue hits on this contradiction but does not pursue it. Which constituents should the government help and when should it help them? When is the government infringing on the rights on its citizens, and when is it fighting to uphold their rights? A fine line is drawn and illustrated by the struggle in post war Detroit.

I think the author is extremely misleading when he discusses the "black invasion" of Detroit. He presents blacks as a stifling, crime-ridden, vice infested monolith. I understand the aim of the article was to examine the position of the urban white class, but nonetheless, the quotes the author uses to describe migrating blacks is extremely derogatory, and in some cases, the author makes the white backlash almost seem justified. The black race is not a monolithic entity, no race is. I believe Sugrue should have at least written a few sentences dispelling the notion of the "black invasion" as a monolithic entity.

In summation, Sugure challenges the historian to probe deeper when trying to locate the backlash to the civil rights movement and liberalism. Instead of just viewing it narrowly as southern whites, Sugure contends that resistance developed among a very unlikely group, a group which initially formed the "backbone" of the New Deal coalition. Yet, as the housing shortage pressed, old racial tensions flared up and urban, working class whites banned together to resist liberalism and the "black invasion" in the 1940s and 1950s, a generation prior to the civil rights movement.


Recommended reading for anyone interested in American history, civil rights history.