Centering Place Within Detroit's Black Gentrification by Stephanie Peña BA in Political Science University of Michigan An

Home , Decline of Detroit, Riverfront Towers, Syndicate

(Re)Centering Place within Detroit’s Black Gentrification

Stephanie Peña

BA in Political Science University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan (2016)

Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master in City Planning

at the

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

May 2020

The author here by grants to MIT the permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of the thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created.

Author______Stephanie Peña Department of Urban Studies and Planning May 20, 2020

Certified by ______Ceasar McDowell Department of Urban Studies and Planning Thesis Supervisor

Accepted by______Ceasar McDowell Professor of the Practice Chair, MCP Committee Department of Urban Studies and Planning

(Re)Centering Place within Detroit’s Black Gentrification

Stephanie Peña

Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning on May 20, 2020 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master in City Planning

ABSTRACT

Detroit’s 1940s industrial boom began to falter in the middle of the twentieth century as foreign competition and automation spurred deindustrialization. Employment scarcity and a growing black population ignited white flight that cut Detroit’s population dramatically and cemented the region’s persistent segregation. In efforts to augment the local tax base, cycles of mayors at the turn of the century initiated revitalization efforts to attract and retain talent to Detroit’s shrinking city.

Declining infrastructure and federal funding pushed Detroit leaders to seek private funding to support city improvement projects that ultimately exhibit exclusionary practices towards the broader lower-income populations of Detroit. As residents see persistent reinvestment outside of their central-city neighborhoods primarily benefiting newcomers, frustration grows. These emotions create what urban geographers Mark Davidson and Loretta Lees refer to as “emotional geographies,” that ultimately construct a sense of displacement without residents being physically displaced. The following thesis aims to analyze the limitations of Detroit’s revitalization efforts that overlook the importance of place when implementing anti-displacement and equitable development initiatives.

Thesis Supervisor: Ceasar McDowell Title: Professor of Practice

I’m gentrifying too, right?

No because you understand the culture.

Excerpted from Gentrifier, an exchange between Marc Lamont Hill and filmmaker Spike Lee about Lee’s native Forte Greene, Brooklyn.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... 3 PART I – INTRODUCTION ...... 7 PART II – POSTWAR DETROIT ...... 11 The Growth and Fall of a Black City ...... 11 Black Suburbanization ...... 14 PART III – BLACK GENTRIFICATION ...... 22 Literature Review ...... 22 PART IV – DETROIT TODAY ...... 26 Policy and Community Reinvestment ...... 26 Detroit 2020: A Call for Black Gentrification ...... 30 PART V – RE-SPATIALIZING THE THEORY OF DISPLACEMENT ...... 32 Loss of Place in the Face of Revitalization ...... 32 Personal Reflection ...... 36 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 39

PART I – INTRODUCTION

Often oversimplified as a black-white racial dichotomy, the general public views

gentrification as white higher-income residents moving in and displacing black lower-income residents from their neighborhoods. Urban economist Devin Bunten expands the complexity of gentrification by defining it as:

“the territorial expansion of a wealthy community into a disinvested neighborhood, the installation of the social and legal regimes of the newcomers, and the deployment of new physical capital, both on a small scale—by homeowners undertaking renovations—and on a larger scale, by landed capitalists and public-sector officials keen to raise revenue. It is the disruption and displacement of the original residents and their spatially realized social networks.” (Bunten 2019)

Bunten pushes against the notion that gentrification is a singular action and examines the complexity of gentrification to occur on multiple scales, across a spectrum of space and place. For policymakers and business owners, gentrification goes by the names of reurbanization, redevelopment, and revitalization

(Davidson + Lees 2010). These efforts aim to socially mix communities, meaning to ‘diversify’ lower-income communities by introducing middle- and higher-income populations, as a set of helpful tools to address changing cities. Municipalities perceive the spatial proximity of higher socio- economic groups with lower socio-economic groups as aiding in not only augmenting the city’s tax base but as assisting the social upward mobility of vulnerable populations. At the other end of the spectrum, vulnerable communities, planners, and those grounded with social justice ideals view gentrification as an extremely harmful phenomenon whose effects culminate in the displacement1 of

communities (Davidson + Lees 2010; Arcaya 2018). Municipalities’ perception of the limitations for

1 A term to represent the ‘loss of place’ and ‘structures of feeling’ that are often overlooked when associating displacement as solely a spatial phenomenon. Displacement reasserts place in a term that commonly reduced to conceptions of space (Davidson + Lees 2010).

research to empirically account for displacement-related gentrification (Cortright 2019; Brummet

2019) constructs the ‘helpful versus harmful’ spectrum presented above. Regardless of the measured

harmful effects of gentrification (Davidson + Lees 2010; Shaw 2015; Arcaya 2018), municipalities continue to outweigh the helpful aspects of gentrification over the harmful (Wacquant 2008). In the

past several decades, research has experienced this shift that diverts focus from understanding vulnerable populations, to center gentrifiers’ motivations and contributions to blighted communities.

Thus, contributing to the absolution of current city revitalization efforts’ displacement repercussions

(Wacquant 2008).

As I mentioned before, gentrification is traditionally viewed as a racial dichotomy that places black communities as its victims. However, as black and brown communities are experiencing greater higher-education attainment rates and seeking affordable housing with moral interests in supporting the reinvestment of culturally significant neighborhoods, their movements are being attributed as black gentrification (Taylor 1992; Moore 2009). These settlement patterns present the complex phenomenon as the in-movements of black residents, with differences in tastes and socio- economic status from the existing community, identifies them as black gentrifiers. While discussed as following the familiar models of gentrification patterns where the agents are white, the processes of black gentrification are uniquely different. From a history that limited the spatial, economic, and social advancement for Black Americans, to the generational wealth inequalities that disproportionately affect these communities today, residential patterns of black middle-class citizens embody different motivations and capabilities than their white counterparts. As the black middle-

class population grows, cities like Detroit view the attraction of these populations into their majority

black city, as an extension of equitable development. This viewpoint however, neglects to resolve

the space-place tensions that emerge from mixed community policies. The following thesis

investigates the need to (re)center place in addressing anti-displacement revitalization initiatives in

the City of Detroit.

Where space represents a geographical location characterized by its natural and built

environments, place "plays a key ontological role in anchoring one's identity and existence” (Images 2

– 5). Place represents a sense of security and connotes familiarities of touch, smell, and sentiments of nostalgia (Davidson + Lees 2010; Bunten 2019). In 1977, humanistic geographer Yi Fu Tuan differentiated space from place: "[h]ometown is an intimate place. It may be plain, lacking in architectural distinction and historical glamour, yet we resent an outsider's criticism of it." (Davidson

+ Lees 2010). Much of the gentrification scholarship today simplifies displacement as a spatial phenomenon. These theories assume spatial relocation solely equates displacement, and any absence of such resettlement denotes otherwise (Davidson 2009). Attempts to quantify the extent to which people are spatially displaced has shifted the study of gentrification-related displacement to deemphasize place (Slater 2006) (Wacquant 2008), ultimately contributing to works that discount displacement entirely when quantifiable data was not visible (Cortright 2019) (Brummet 2019).

However, in failing to center place, social research has correlated a lack of spatial resettlement to a lack of displacement—a tendency in research to advocate for social mixing policies that in turn overlooks socio-spatial inequality that emerges from a loss of place.

Deconstructing social research's disregard to place can be attributed to the shifted focus on

gentrifiers' motivations and settlement patterns while condoning their actions as increasing 'diversity'

and aiding in the upward mobility of lower-income communities. Much of gentrification research,

including the works on black gentrification in Part III of this paper, are limited by their inability to

center the "loss of sense of place" from lower-income communities that construct the "emotional

geographies" of displacement (Davidson + Lees 2010). The decentering of the working-class in

gentrification research is supported by Wacquant's argument that deindustrialization has formed the

invisible urban proletariat of today. The working-class' plight of rising rents, limited housing options, and state policies are often ignored by researchers who favor business development and middle-class

(re)settlement. Researchers' shifted focus to the higher class gentrifiers as critical contributors to the

revitalization of cities completely overlooks the growing class inequalities in these neighborhoods

(Wacquant 2008). In (re)centering place, we can shift the focus from the agents of gentrification, to

analyze how city revitalization efforts impact the socio-spatial networks of long-standing residents.

In line with these authors' call to re-spatialize place in theories of displacement, this paper aims to contribute an analysis of the limitations of Detroit’s revitalization efforts that overlook the importance of place when implementing anti-displacement and equitable development initiatives.

Part II will contextualize the current state of Detroit while exploring the settlement patterns of white and black residents as far back as the 1940s. Part III will present a literature review of Black gentrification scholarship. Part IV will analyze social planning and revitalization efforts that create a challenging planning issue for how Detroit can develop equitably. Finally, with lens centering place,

Part V will examine the constraints revitalization efforts outlined in the previous section and present my reflections of this study.

PART II – POSTWAR DETROIT

The Growth and Fall of a Black City

Detroit's height of industrialization and the coinciding Great Migration from southern states in the 1940s, explicate the race and class issues that ultimately contributed to the decline of the city in the late twentieth century. The combination of forced segregation into inadequate housing conditions and blatant discrimination from gainful employment in the 1940s stunted the economic, social, and political advancement for many black community members throughout the 20th century

(Sugrue 2014). Between 1910 and 1970, African Americans fled the Jim Crow south for the promise of abundant jobs and perceived refuge in the north. However, northern states were not innocent of what many have justified as de facto segregation as skewed racial ideologies motivated policies and

11 informal regulations that contributed to the maintenance of de jure segregation in the North

(Highsmith 2015).

An innately sprawled city, Detroit was built on the growth and designed for the primary use of the automobile. Housing developments during the height of the population in the mid-twentieth century "lacked tenements and high-rise apartments," and instead, consisted of single-family dwellings (Sugure 2014). The booming manufacturing industries, of which 40% were nonautomotive-related, supported rapid outward metropolitan growth, introducing growing jobs in construction, innovative manufacturing, and retail in the 1950s. It was during this period that

Detroit's black population doubled (Sugrue 2014). While the 1940s saw active recruitment of southern black workers by Ford and later the growing need to integrate plants to fill the demand from the war, there was a persistent climate of animosity between white and black workers. The perceived threat by the white community played out as black newcomers were forced into overcrowded black neighborhoods with deteriorating housing and limited access to public infrastructure. Academic Thomas Sugrue portrayed this phenomenon as exemplifying that by "the

1940s, the black sections of the city were already crowded in the 1920s and 1930s". Sugrue later characterized these methods of settlement as "set[ing] into motion a chain reaction that reinforced patterns of racial inequality" that persisted in Detroit (Sugrue 2014). Regardless of the intentional formation of these failing neighborhoods, white residents and policymakers justified further divestment from these predominantly black neighborhoods because of their deteriorating nature.

These actions further limited housing and reinforced concentrated, generational cycles of poverty in the city.

The deindustrialization of the 1950s and 1960s left black residents behind, unable to follow

the jobs as many white residents were able to. Race continued to divide and the scarcity of

employment with a growing black population amid white flight, exasperated racial animosity, and

scapegoating of black residents. The 1960s saw a political shift to the left as the ever-increasing

majority black population gained electoral power. Even so, these gains were overshadowed by the

persistent injustices facing young black residents enduring police brutality and a scarcity of jobs –

actions that raised the urgency for white residents to resist integration or ultimately flee. Inadequate

housing, scarce employment, and severe police brutality were constant impediments for a thriving

black community – themes that would continue for decades to come. A 1960s survey of the most

depressed inner-city neighborhoods found that 25-30% of young residents between the ages of 18 and 24 years of age, were out of work. Researcher expounded that the resulting increase of criminal

activity among young adults occurred when living "under conditions where a gap in legitimate

opportunity exists in the world, such deviant occupations grow up to fill the void. The motif is one

of survival; it is not based on thrill seeking. What we call deviant occupations are in fact perceived to

be common and in fact legitimate within the context of the culture in which these youths live"

(Sugrue 2014).

Black Suburbanization

The immense wealth generated in the city was not just beneficial for top executives but granted unions strong negotiating power to ensure steady employment for factory workers with some of the highest wages in the nation. However, as factories shifted in response to automation

14 and global competition, firms could no longer justify the highest pay rates in the country for a seemingly low-skilled labor force (Thomas 2013). As the 1970s saw the fleeing of industry from

Detroit and the reluctancy for new industries to establish themselves in Michigan, fearing the strongly unionized workforce, generations of families who relied on factory employment were left with no solutions to the already scarce job market in Detroit. Without jobs to retain residents and the gradual loss in tax base, middle-class white families began to flee for inner-ring suburbs between the 1950s and 1960s. Demolition of many dilapidated, predominantly black, neighborhoods during this period's Urban Renewal programs exacerbated housing shortages for black Detroiters. But the era's massive white flight resulted in the ability for black families to gain entry into previously restricted central-city neighborhoods. As white families progressively moved from inner-ring suburbs to outer-ring suburbs, the 1970s ushered in an era where middle-class black residents had the choice to move to relatively stabilized central-city neighborhoods and inner-ring suburbs.

The 1970s saw what many academics coined as minority suburbanization across the nation, as a

more significant number of communities of color moved from central-cities or directly to suburban

areas. The decline of Detroit's population in the 1970s resulted in overall tri-county (Wayne,

Oakland, Macomb Counties) population loss. However, black suburbanization amounted for 34%

of total suburban growth during this era (Metzger and Booza 2002). During the period of Black

suburbanization between 1970 and 2000, Detroit suburbs grew by 14.8% in population. The

majority of the tri-county suburban population growth was attributed to a 142% growth in black

residents (Metzger and Booza 2002). During the 1970s, inner-ring suburbs of Ecorse, Highland

Park, Inkster, Pontiac, River Rouge, and Royal Oak housed 78.5% of the suburban black population.

These shares dropped to 34% as black residents moved into outer-ring suburbs between the 1980s and 2000s (Metzger and Booza 2002) (Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity 2006).

Table 1 Percentage of Black Population in Suburban Detroit-Warren-Livonia Metropolitan Study Area + Population Change, 1980 - 2000 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

Total Population 2,861,121 3,150,344 3,220,800 3,501,284 3,582,473 Percentage Black Population 3.4% 4.2% 5.1% 6.9% 10.9% Percent Change 0.8% 0.9% 1.8% 4% Detroit-Warren-Livonia MSA: Lapeer, Livingston, Macomb, Oakland, St. Clair, + Wayne Counties Data excludes City of Detroit population numbers Source: Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity 2006; Social Explorer Tables (SE), Census 1970 - 2010, Census Bureau; Social Explorer

These movements were driven by seeking economic opportunity along with stable and

secure housing that was not afforded in central Detroit. However, researchers from the University

of Minnesota’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity found that much of the national minority

suburbanization between 1970 and 2000 was not met by integration and plentiful economic

opportunities. In studying fifteen metropolitan areas, Detroit held the highest rates of segregated

neighborhoods in the year 2000. At a constant rate of 11%, Detroit had experienced no change in

integrated neighborhoods between the years 1980 and 2000 (Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity

2006). Moreover, in 2000, researchers estimated that “85% of either whites or blacks would need to

move for the two groups to be evenly distributed throughout that metro region” – this number

attributes to the region’s dissimilarity index, a value comparing the relative amount of segregation in

a metropolitan region. Persistent segregation throughout Detroit’s metropolitan region reinforced

barriers of opportunity for black residents well into the 21st century. While the 1990s saw

considerable growth of black suburbanization in inner-ring suburbs, job growth took place in the second and third-ring communities. In 2000, there was an extreme spatial mismatch of 71.4, on a scale of 1 (perfect proximity) – 100 (no proximity), between jobs and black residents due to segregation and job sprawl in Detroit (Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity 2006). Researchers expounded upon the phenomena of spatial mismatch: “For instance, if economic opportunity in the form of jobs is suburbanizing in one direction while households of color primarily suburbanize in a different direction, the resulting geographic mismatch can significantly decrease economic opportunity for those groups” (Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity 2006).

Leading up to the 2007 economic crisis, Detroit experienced its greatest amount of mortgage foreclosures between the years of 2005 and 2011. In 2005 alone, 18.8% of occupied housing units existing in 2000 were foreclosed upon (Thomas 2013). As vacancy rose, homes deteriorated due to neglected maintenance, weather conditions, and scrappers removing valuable items. As blight increased across the city, the best solution considering the city’s limited resources resulted in razing these homes, leaving behind vast empty lots that became popularized iconic imagery of a fallen city.

A 2009 Detroit Residential Parcel Survey that meticulously recorded the conditions of 91,000 vacant parcels, found that 26% of the parcels were being maintained or improved by nearby residents

(Thomas 2013). The maintenance of these parcels, referred to as self-provisioning housing techniques by

urban planner Dr. Kimberley Kinder, ranged from removing mail from empty stoops to make it

appear as someone inhabited the home to cutting the lawn and shrubbery to reduce dumping and

prevent home invaders from hiding in bushes. This was a pattern taken up by Detroit residents who

still held great pride in their city and neighborhoods. No one was paid to maintain the lots. These were grassroots efforts in the face of failing municipal services to ensure a sense of security for themselves and their neighbors. As the recession reduced housing prices throughout the region,

Detroit families had the opportunity to move to suburban communities with stable neighborhoods and greater public services for the same prices as their city homes. These movements contributed to

a significant loss of Detroit’s black middle-class.

Anecdotally, many community members were vocal when black Detroiters began selling their homes due to financial struggles, feelings of insecurity, or to seek better educational resources as the last strong Detroit public schools were vastly defunded. Critics not only saw this as abandoning Detroit but were frustrated and perceived these acts as acquiescing Detroit to white

gentrifiers who swooped in after the financial crisis to flip homes and take advantage of low-

competitive markets. These sentiments rang true for many residents and allies. However, similar to

Marc Lamont Hill’s experience of choosing to educate his child outside of his low-resourced community, is it not the right for black Detroiters to take advantage of the market to build equity off the sale of their homes? Historically, this option was not available to black Americans, resulting in the staggering wealth inequalities that disproportionately affect black residents today. To complicate the discussion, should we not welcome the increased interest of outsiders into Detroit as there is an extreme need to rebuild a strong tax base to improve the greater city? The reality is, these conversations are challenging when we take into account how segregated Detroit remains in 2020.

The lived experiences of many community members are homogenous, often vilifying the ‘other’ for

the city’s plights, and neglecting to fully realize the historical, physical, regional and economic

limitations impacting the city’s future success. Due to a historically poor relationship between

residents and city government, latent with distrust, any reinvestment or redevelopment efforts

between 2009 and today have been immediately critiqued as gentrification.

PART III – BLACK GENTRIFICATION

Literature Review

Typical depictions of gentrification are attributed to higher capital holding residents inflicting

economic strain and displacing marginalized persons from their communities through their entry

and investment in fairly weak markets. In only focusing on the limited scope of the supply and

demand-side of gentrification, much of the current literature fails to center race or class in discourse.

Additional limitations arise as gentrification scholarship struggles to unpack gentrification as a

phenomenon. Foundational variances of gentrification’s temporality, hyper- locality, and both its positive and negative externalities are often overlooked. Empirical evidence’s inability to measure displacement exaggerates all forms of gentrification as singular, negative, and unpredictable actions.

To unpack black gentrification, I have looked at four authors who respectively attempt to deconstruct the differentiation of black gentrifiers between the 1970s and late 1990s. Sequentially, and building on one another, I will focus on the works of Taylor in their analysis of black gentrification in 1970s Harlem (Taylor 1992); Lees’ 1990 assessment of gentrification’s complexity, both globally and through time (Lees 2000); and Moore’s case study of black gentrification in

Brickton, Philadelphia in the late 1990s (Moore 2009).

Sociologist Monique Taylor grounds her work in Turner’s 1967 theory of Cultural

Dimensions of Gentrification (Marginality, Structure, + Anti-Structure) to build the case in differentiating black middle-class reinvestment of 1970s Harlem as both a search for community and

identity, and as a response, to tensions of race and class (Taylor 1992). Following the Civil Rights

Era, the 1970s were considered a pivotal period in the study of gentrification as many expected a

reversal and remedy to persistent discriminatory practices and policies that limited the spatial

mobility of black-Americans. However, as noted by Taylor, “homeostatic principle suggests that

structural changes reflected in the political and economic realms foster[ed] a hostile cultural reaction

that reinforce[ed] racism” (Taylor 1992). We see this play out in Detroit, at the outset of black

suburbanization, with the 1974 Milken v. Bradley ruling where inter-district busing of public school students to combat the region’s intense segregation was squashed in favor of suburban white interests to prevent the entry of black residents into their communities. A common thread that emerged in Taylor’s work highlights a self-advocation by black gentrifiers to serve as guides to elevate lower-income community members through their transference of social and cultural capital

(Taylor 1992). To advocate that gentrifiers hold a greater “house proud attitude” can inadvertently convey to lower-income communities that they lack agency to create and maintain strong communities. The presumption that middle-class residents, regardless of race, are teaching lower- income families, neglects to take into account the lived experiences of lower-income residents that are limited due to wealth inequality, poor housing stock, and inadequate municipal resources.

Despite this assumption, Taylor’s work reminds us to emphasize the need to center class, specifically the lived experiences of lower-income residents, when investigating neighborhood gentrification as it is their fears and perceptions that inadvertently relinquishes an overwhelming amount of power to gentrifiers.

Urban geographer Loretta Lees attempts to advocate for an “updated and rigorous deconstruction of […] the process […] and discourses on gentrification” by stepping away from the standard discussion of the supply and demand-side of gentrification (Lees 2000). Lees urges the analysis of 1990s financification, the gentrification of previously gentrified neighborhoods by

individuals in the financial sector, and attempts to address the complex issues of race and gentrification in the 1970s (Lees 2000). In adding to the scholarship of gentrification, Lees is differentiating the process of gentrification between global cities and smaller cities further down the

“urban hierarchy” – a crucial differentiation that diminishes the perceived singularity of

gentrification. Lees compartmentalizes previous literature analyzing the causes of gentrification as

the (1) emancipatory city, (2) new middle class, and (3) revanchist city – culminating in a call for a

new look at gentrification because of the gaps they previously highlighted. For example, Lees

advocated for a greater investigation into black and ethnic minority gentrification as Black gay gentrifiers

in 1970s Castro District of San Francisco presented a distorted image of gentrification that placed

traditionally perceived ‘victims’ in the roles of ‘agents.’ Lees’ analysis of the differing gentrification

processes that occur in cities of different status reframes how to propose reinvestment and anti-

displacement solutions for Detroit. Case studies often highlight the successes of anti-gentrification

efforts in denser cities with access to greater municipal funding sources. However, addressing

equitable economic development in the city of Detroit it must follow differing solutions that take

into account its innate sprawl, suburban efforts against regional planning, and struggling tax base

with low-homeowner rates.

Social worker and sociologist Keesha Moore argues that the 1990s gentrification in Brickton,

Philadelphia, by middle-class blacks differs from previous trends of gentrification and provides a

unique set of obstacles and opportunities for all black community members (Moore 2009). Moore

defines the motivation of black gentrification as the “product of continual racial exclusion of African

Americans and reflects a specific social justice agenda that challenges this system” (Moore 2009).

Moore’s theory ties into Taylor’s analysis of 1970s Harlem gentrification, where black-Americans were seeking respite from the discrimination and unfulfilling lifestyle of white communities that matched their income status. In centering race, in her analysis of black gentrification, it becomes

apparent for the need to interrogate how we center race and class to understand the intricate

dynamics of black gentrification fully. Moore outlined the patterns of gentrification as (1)

yuppification, with high-income persons displacing marginalized populations, (2) marginal

gentrification, where residents with high cultural capital but low financial capital that will eventually

gentrify themselves, and (3) thirdwave gentrification, 1990s developer and policy-led initiatives to

revitalize neighborhoods quickly (Moore 2009). Moore expands that black gentrification holds a

“more nuanced ‘constrained agency’ than implied by the victim/oppressor binary” that is prevalent

in the standard of understanding of gentrification. Moore ultimately differentiates black gentrifiers as

actors who (1) have fewer housing options, economic resources, and a lower social status; (2)

migrate with social justice intentions; and (3) produce less inequality but also see less socio-economic advancement themselves (Moore 2009).

Aggregated, these most recent works on black gentrification highlight gentrifiers’ socio- cultural and moral desires to reinvest in lower-income black communities while self-absolving their disruption based on shared race and culture. Mark Davidson argued that “the absence of spatial relocation has been read as an absence of displacement and, consequently, an absence of class antagonisms and social justice more generally” (Davidson 2009). Black and brown communities are not monolithic, and to justify black gentrification based solely on race is negligent of disregarding the role class plays in reinforcing social hierarchies of oppression. The works of Taylor, Lees, and

Moore call for an interrogation of how we center place within black gentrification in future studies.

In response to questioning if the gentrifier’s shared race mitigates the level of disruption experienced by the community, it is clear that an overshadowing of shared race has reduced criticism for the class-conflicts present in the qualitative interviews of Taylor and Moore’s work. It would benefit scholarship to shift qualitative work from investigating the motives of black gentrifiers to understanding how shared race with gentrifiers alters the experience, interpretation, and

construction of “emotional geographies” (Davidson + Lees 2010) of neighborhood change by

vulnerable communities

PART IV – DETROIT TODAY

Policy and Community Reinvestment

Federal policy and its enforcement by local officials greatly contributed to Detroit’s failing infrastructure. Hopeful measures such as Roosevelt’s 1941 Fair Employment Commission (FEPC) intended to curb racial discrimination in factories during the war had poor enforcement but successfully established a bond between black residents and the government (Sugrue 2014).

Measures like these did not integrate communities nor provide communities of color with better opportunities. They were, however, successful in creating animosity between racial groups as whites feared the economic and physical encroachment of the population in their spheres of life. The intervention of private businesses, realtors, and banks ensured the continuation of segregated neighborhoods through acts of redlining and refusing services to blacks – continuing to force blacks in highly concentrated substandard rentals, with reverberations throughout the remaining century.

Under aid from the federal government, attempts to build better housing for black residents within and around the city were quashed by white homeowners fearing the presence of black families in their neighborhoods. The most devastating contribution of the white suburb to Detroit’s urban crisis was the loss of a substantial tax base to support the city’s infrastructure. Enforcement of policies and outward racism limited the upward economic mobility of black communities. Deprived housing, education, and job outlook forced upon the black community left them unable to meet the financial demands of supporting a city when a large subset of the population moved out. Failing infrastructure and poor tax base continued to perpetuate the allocation of deprived resources to the black community, contributing to high rates of poverty and unemployment.

Table 2 Models of Reinvestment 1964 – 1968 1967 – 1974 1974 – Today Office of Economic Model Cities + Model Community Development Opportunity (Community Neighborhoods Block Grant Action Component) Intention: Break cycles of Intention: Provide residents Intention: Improve physical poverty at the locality with with the power to guide development of communities age-specific, community- physical redevelopment and through housing and design programming. social improvement efforts. economic development. Outcomes: Ushered in the more modest initiative of Model Neighborhoods. Outcomes: Head Start, Temporarily employed 8,000 Neighborhood Corps + Outcomes: Completion of target area residents, improved Upward Bound, Medicare urban renewal projects, achievement levels in local Alert, a credit union, an infrastructure improvements elementary schools, put in intramural physical education and blight clearance. place a public health care program. delivery system, and actively promoted affirmative action within city government. Drawbacks: Initiative did not Drawbacks: As the number of Drawbacks: Lacked the social implement sustainable policy target cities grew, resources services orientation of the support to combat poverty. remained insignificant. Model Cities initiative and had With the election of Nixon in Programs were unsustainable dramatically less citizen power 1968, funding ultimately as the government provided in determining community ended. little to no guidance. investments. Source: Thomas 2014

To respond to the city’s concentrated poverty and blight, various municipal and federal

social planning initiatives were enacted during the second half of the twentieth century (Table 2)

(Thomas 2013). During Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh’s (1962 – 1970) tenure, President Johnson

initiated his War on Poverty with establishing the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964. The

“OEO set up local community action agencies to give the poor maximum feasible participation in

program design”—an effort that was more idealistic than feasible in implementation. 1967 welcomed another Johnson policy with the Model Cities program that aimed to utilize a variety of federal programs to target cities’ challenges. Unfortunately, the national popularity of this programming depleted financial resources and little federal guidance left municipalities with greater

challenges than expected – leading to the transition into the more modest programming of the

Model Neighborhoods initiative. In allowing residents to design and administer community-based

programs, the Model Neighborhoods initiative’s most notable benefit was neighborhood

empowerment as community members democratized decision-making to invest in initiatives deemed

the most important (Thomas 2013). The encouraged citizen participation educated city planners on

the needs and creative social planning initiatives of community members, remedying relationships of

trust between neighborhoods and the city. The Model Cities initiative was ultimately consolidated

with a variety of other special grant programs to create the Community Development Block Grant

program, focused on the purely physical development communities (Thomas 2013). CDBG dollars

continue to fund projects throughout the nation today. However, the emphasis of physical over social improvements and removal of citizen participation has led many to question the effectiveness of its funding allocations (Woellert 2017). These series of efforts (Table 2), while well-intentioned, ultimately lacked funding to create sustainable solutions in response to issues that were larger in scope. The gradual decline of citizen participation in programmatic design disempowered residents in formalizing their socio-spatial networks and stressed the relationship between residents and the city.

Table 3 Model Neighborhood Agency Priorities Detroit Expenditures, 1968 - 1975 Ranked Expenditures Amount 1. Education $13,949,000 2. Health $15,136,000 3. Housing $5,121,000 4. Social Services $5,060,000 5. Manpower + Job Development $4,842,000 6. Recreation + Culture $4,578,000

7. Transportation + Communication $4,386,000 8. Relocation $3,283,000 9. Citizen Participation $3,190,000 10. Environmental Protection $2,109,000 11. Crime + Delinquency $1,968,000 12. Evaluation + Information $1,081,000 13. Economic + Business Development $822,000 14. Office Building $937,000 15. Program Administration $9,217,000 TOTAL $73,335,000 Sources: Thomas 2014; Michigan Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Civil Rights and the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974,” vol. 2, A Comparison with Model Cities, June, 1976, p.86.

The demise of these initiatives drove the loss of trust in and withdrawal from urban planning

initiatives throughout the 1990s and 2000s. During Mayor Colman Young’s (1974 – 1994) tenure,

pressures to revive a faltering economy while enduring little to no federal financial support, pushed

Young to position himself in a strong mayorship to enact swift change. Young found financial

backing from private corporations as he sought out to redevelop the Central Business District and

along the river – a move that can be perceived as Young attempting to make a political statement on

his effectiveness, but were efforts to draw in firms and talent to bolster the city’s revitalization.

Unfortunately, Young’s strong mayorship removed power from Detroit’s planning offices, and

when a 1993 voter survey questioned the failures of Young’s tenure, 43% of respondents indicated

‘ignoring city neighborhoods’ (Thomas 2013). The feelings of being left behind rang true well into

the 2010s, as primarily centrally-located redevelopment efforts in the Central Business District,

Midtown, and Corktown were unable to venture outward to Detroit’s sprawling neighborhoods due to a capacity-limited municipality and planning offices.

Detroit 2020: A Call for Black Gentrification

Since the 2007 economic recession, Detroit saw four mayors, a relocation of Quicken Loans’ headquarters as investor Dan Gilbert was interested in revitalizing Detroit’s core, and the unification of philanthropic organizations to prevent the bankruptcy of the city. Duggan, a realistic straight talker that is quick to call out Detroit’s historic racist policies, facilitated the reemergence of Detroit with a priority on repairing crumbling infrastructure to ensure neighborhood security and leveraging corporate reinvestment for affordable housing commitments. In 2017, Mayor Mike Duggan (2014 – today) led the city through the process of applying for Amazon’s HQ2 proposal to house the multinational conglomerate’s new headquarters. Despite his community-centric efforts, Detroit’s

“lack of talent” and ability to retain talent, was cited for their loss in the HQ2 process. Quick to push back on this claim, in favor of acknowledging how far Detroit has come and its future potential, Mayor Duggan continued to move forward with workforce and economic development but recognizes the need to repair the public school system, a challenge that continues to perplex the city.

Approaching 2020, for the first time in several decades, Detroit is experiencing an increase in

the supply of housing units. According to Detroit Future City, a nonprofit planning organization, to

support the sustainable growth of the city, approximately 33,8000 middle-class households would need to be introduced in Detroit. To promote equitable development, 27,700 of the incoming middle-class families must represent black households (Images 7 – 8)(“Detroit Future City - Middle-

Class Report” 2020). The advocation for black gentrification is necessary to contribute to a stronger

tax base that can support municipal services, but how does a city retain the incoming community

members if the quality of services does not yet exist? Moreover, how can we prevent class strife or

long-standing black residents in lower-resourced communities from persistent feelings of

disinvestment from decades of being left behind?

PART V – RE-SPATIALIZING THE THEORY OF DISPLACEMENT

If a place changes, feelings of displacement can be experienced. (Shaw 2015)

Loss of Place in the Face of Revitalization

In efforts to augment the local tax base, Detroit’s advocation for an increased middle-class

population while pledging to secure affordable and low-income housing stock is standard anti-

displacement gentrification policy. Beyond the financial benefits to the city, the resulting social

mixing of economic classes is perceived as aiding lower-income residents in achieving upward social

mobility through spatial proximity. However, recent work by Kate Shaw and Iris Hagemans at the

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research highlighted that combating physical

displacement does not fully combat the adverse effects of gentrification (Shaw 2015). Despite anti- displacement policy efforts aim to prevent the spatial displacement of lower-income residents, the loss of retail or community spaces initially intended to serve these communities develops a sense of

‘out-of-placeness’ (Shaw 2015) (Davidson 2008). Peter Marcuse adds:

When a family sees the neighbourhood around it changing dramatically, when their friends are leaving the neighbourhood, when the stores they patronize are liquidating and new stores for other clientele are taking their places, and when changes in public facilities, in transportation patterns, and in support services all clearly are making the neighbourhood less and less livable, then the pressure of displacement already is severe (Marcuse 1985).

Shaw and Hagemans find that the expected benefits for lower-income residents remaining in

gentrifying communities are not evident in research. In supporting work by Marcuse and Davidson,

Shaw and Hagemans’ conclude the empirical evidence “is not sufficient to alleviate the displacement that comes from a sense of loss of place” (Shaw 2015).

Davidson and Lees argue that “[g]entrification is now a global urban strategy used in cities

that must be sophisticated entrepreneurs” (Davidson + Lees 2010). Meaning that in the face of

diminished federal funding to localities in the 1970s, along with deindustrialization and

suburbanization, cities must turn to revitalization solutions that promote elevating neighborhoods

by introducing a ‘diversity’ of middle- and upper-class statuses. These shifts will inevitably displace

their vulnerable communities. Wacquant pushes against lauding city revitalization efforts that promote social mixing because it feeds into the views of government and business elites:

“surprising twist and troublesome trend in recent studies of gentrification, whereby the takeover of working-class districts by middle- and upperclass residents and activities is increasingly presented wholesale as a collective good if not boon. By focusing narrowly on the practices and aspirations of the gentrifiers through rose- tinted conceptual glasses, to the near-complete neglect of the fate of the occupants pushed aside and out by urban redevelopment, this scholarship parrots the reigning business and government rhetoric that equates the revamping of the neoliberal metropolis as the coming of a social Eden of diversity, energy and opportunity (Wacquant 2008).

Wacquant’s work interrogates these shifts and attributes them to the growing invisibility of the working class after the fall of industrialization, as the state transitioned from a “provider for support for lower-income populations to supplier of business services and amenities for middle- and upperclass urbanites” (Wacquant 2008). This transition was evident in Mayor Coleman Young’s Detroit

(1974 – 1994) when his efforts to reel from a dramatic population loss and declining infrastructure prompted him to redevelop the Central Business District and along the riverfront. Culminating in the 1980s development of the General Motors Renaissance Center, the Joe Louis Arena, and the

Riverfront Towers residential apartments (Images 9 -11)(Thomas 2013) – these corporate-funded projects would later lead to criticisms that Young’s greatest failure was his neglect of central city neighborhoods. The growing need for Detroit to combat blight, construct stable housing, and attract talent to bolster their tax base was met with funding constraints that ultimately pushed the city to continue seeking corporate partnerships to fund redevelopment projects. Like the Riverfront

Towers, an insular amenity-rich gated apartment complex, much of these developments were

innately exclusionary.

New-build gentrification, “the state-led and funded/co-funded by corporate capital”

(Davidson + Lees 2010), is crucial to understanding the extent of displacement in Detroit. Davidson and Lees build from Marcuse’s schema of displacement types to define new-build gentrification as

nuanced and following patterns of exclusionary displacement. Similar to the construction of the 1980s

Riverfront Towers, the relocation of Quicken Loans’ Headquarters to Detroit in 2010 brought forth

redevelopment projects primarily funded by Dan Gilbert and Bedrock, the development arm of

Quicken Loans. Bedrock took advantage of a very cheap market to redevelop a significant number

of parcels in downtown Detroit. Gilbert’s vision and reinvestment helped spur greater outside investment in Detroit and supported the development of two new grocery stores (Whole Foods +

Plum Market), the implementation of the QLine, a 3.3-mile streetcar connecting Downtown to

Midtown, and the development of the Little Caesars Arena, bringing home the Detroit Pistons

Basketball team from the suburbs (Images 12 -14). While these efforts played a crucial role in reviving the economy of Detroit, these developments mostly took place in the Central Business

District, Corktown, and Midtown neighborhoods of Detroit – far from the residential areas that house predominately black residents. Moreover, these are a representative sample of projects that exemplify the desire to ‘diversify’ Detroit with higher socio-economic persons and are exclusionary due to their costs and the limited utility by lower-income Detroiters. While many of these projects take place on vacant lands or within abandoned buildings, the ‘loss of place’ is experienced by long- standing Detroiters who see how the renewed investment in their city is “dismantling the social and legal regimes” (Bunten 2019) positioned around them as long-standing residents.

Personal Reflection

I first heard the term ‘black gentrification’ during the discussion portion of a book talk for

Gentrifier, an auto-ethnology that centers three authors who self-identify as “gentrifiers.” Jason Patch, a tenured professor at a small liberal arts college on the East Coast, was the primary author of

Gentrifier’s collective work, where Marc Lamont Hill, a progressive thought leader, also contributed.

Patch ended the discussion by presenting an anecdote where he boasted how he pushed Hill to

36 recognize his role as a gentrifier. Not unlike many people of color, Hill returned to his historically under-resourced childhood city in an honest effort to reinvest in his community. In Patch's perspective, Hill's efforts became reprehensible when he chose to send his child to a private school outside the city’s bounds. In sharing Hill’s story, Patch concluded by naming Hill a black gentrifier and calling academia to examine the profoundly understudied phenomenon of black gentrification. My reaction was visceral – that moment was the first time I heard the term gentrifier used to identify a person of color. Years of lived experiences and readings of academic studies brought forth a flood of knowledge on all the injustices and the structural inequalities that have persisted in black and brown communities. How could this white man attempt to deflect the pivotal conversations for white community members to recognize their power in creating situations where gentrification begins and ends its confusing life cycle? I was frustrated by Patch venturing to place blame on the statistically few marginalized community members who can break these cycles of oppression.

In investigating the phenomenon further, I questioned if the reinvestment of black gentrifiers in a majority-black community would produce class conflict. If so, could this conflict contribute to the displacement of vulnerable community members? I understood how even well- intentioned redevelopment projects could increase the social vulnerability of low-income residents, whose loss of place can exasperate long-term stresses and quality of mental health (Arcaya 2018)— but I wondered if reinvestment by community members of one’s shared culture and race, would mitigate these displacement pressures. My exploration yielded a complexity of responses to these questions as, ultimately, the contributions and social interchange between black established community members and black gentrifiers generated a value add for the entire community. Long- standing residents’ socio-spatial networks that construct a desirable neighborhood attract black gentrifiers that are more engaged than their white counterparts to participate in the existing social networks and economics. When faced with Detroit’s fiscal limitations to reinvest in lower-income

black neighborhoods and the implications of our nation’s capitalist market economy's historic use of black bodies as a commodity, one can hypothesize that socially mixed black communities experience displacement to a lesser degree. Ultimately, this research has affirmed that while the structures of gentrification-related displacement are at play when analyzing black gentrification, the process and outcomes vary in a significant manner. I firmly believe that to combat the feelings of place-less-ness, the City of Detroit must converge the appropriate networks and resources to secure a sense of community for vulnerable residents in changing neighborhoods. Class solidarity can be achievable if it is built into municipal planning processes that reframe from referring to the socio-spatial networks established by lower-income communities as economically weak or contributors to blight. These

processes can embody healing sessions that address Detroit’s traumatic history of

deindustrialization, divestment, and persistent segregation that long-standing residents have had to endure. These efforts can build a bridge for incoming residents to recognize and support the existing socio-spatial networks as they navigate in contributing their own. Above all, centering the lived- experiences and emotional geographies of lower-income community members is vital for combating the displacement of black Detroiters.

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