Customer Reviews:
 Bad thesis but a story that still needs to be looked at December 16, 2006
1 out of 13 found this review helpful
Sugrue takes a look at one of the crisis to hit not only Detroit but the rest of the country in his book on race and inequality. While there have been a lot of disturbing factors that have occurred during urban renewal Sugrue takes his text a little far. His flagrant bashing of urban planning gets old after the first two chapters and the book tends to drag on. This is an important issue that bears further studying but hopefully it will be done in a more academic way. This book does have all the information you need to start studying the subject and is a good way to begin looking at urban renewal.
 How a Frightening Economic Powerhouse Became Just Plain Frightening August 29, 2006
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
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-a-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.
 a grad student November 30, 2005
15 out of 44 found this review helpful
Sugrue's thesis in this book is that endemic racism (along with economic decline) is responsible for Detroit being largely Black, poor and greatly in decline. He's a revisionist historian who wants to refute older narratives that Detroit is corrupt (because all the city governments after 1967 have been run by Democrats and Blacks). Instead he attempts to refute that by showing the deeply ingrained racism in the community.
Sugrue's attempt at political polemics is bad history. He fails to mention the obvious: Detroit is over-taxed and run by incompetent, corrupt politicians. It's public unions have caused government workers to be some of the highest paid in the country with little to show for it. This is thanks to former-Mayor Young who instituted an arbitration law. To pay for this, the city's taxes are exorbitant which pushes businesses further out. Because of this, Detroit never found other businesses to take the place of the declining auto-industry which has inflated pay for its jobs in the first place.
Of the past three mayors, two have been highly corrupt. Archer who was mayor in the '90s, after a distinguished career in the state Supreme Court, tried to reform the city but was kicked out of office. Young and the current mayor, Kilpatrick, are very corrupt. Just do a google news search of "Kwame Kilpatrick" and "corrupt" and you'll see the various scandals that have plagued him. Other than stealing city funds for himself and his family he turned down a $200,000,000 private gift to the city for charter schools because the teacher's unions were against it. Young, mayor in the '70s and '80s, made room for a GM plant by confiscating private land through eminent domain. Few could understand why he buldozed tax producing land when he could have given over acres of abandoned property, except that the residents of that neighborhood voted overwhelmingly against him.
Yes, white people with means fled Detroit for the suburbs. But Sugrue glosses over that fact that middle class Black residents left as soon as the could too. Southfield, a surburb township, is overwhelming Black and middle class, populated by those who couldn't stand the crime and corruption of Detroit.
Far from being an example of a typical post-industrial American City, Detroit is the exception. It should be held up as a prime example of how not to run a city. That being said, unless you've been assigned this book, don't read it. Sugrue gives excuses and vague general reasons (aka racism) for Detroit's decline when the real problems are staring him in the face
Well researched, well written January 2, 2004
18 out of 19 found this review helpful
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.
 not sure if full explanation, but worth buying April 20, 2003
5 out of 10 found this review helpful
I think Origins of the Urban Crisis is the best book about deindustrialization, white resistance to open housing, and Detroit that I have ever read, but I am not sure if Origins fully explains the urban crisis. I still recommend it, but I am not sure if Sugrue proves what he sets out to prove. In the early 1960s people had cause for optimism about Detroit. The city had a building boom and racial divisions from 1943 were supposed to be healing. Also, Sugrue never addresses the increase in illegitimate births in the African-American community. A very high proportion of the 1967 rioters were from female-headed households. All of the following are from 1960s studies of Detroit. These quotes are from From Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence From a U MIch and Wayne State study:
Long before the enactment of the Fed Civil Rights Act of 1964, and even while the State of Michigan adopted its own civil rights act there was much evidence that the disadvantaged minorities were beginning to break out of their ghetto patterns and establish first class citizenship in many areas.
From Fortune magazine:
the most significant is the progress Detroit has made in race relations. The grim specter of the 1943 riots never quite fadesfrom the minds of city leaders. As much as anything else, that specter has enabled the power struture to overcome tenacious prejudice and give the Negro communitiy a role in teh consensus probably unparalleled in any major American city.
Negroes in Detroit have deep roots in the community, compared with the more transient population of NEgro ghettos in Harlem and elsewhere in the North. . . . more than 40% of the negro pop own their own houses.
nor was Detroit doing so badly economically
From the National Observer
The evidence, both statistical and visual, is everywhere. Retail sales are up dramatically. Earnings are higher. Unemployment is lower. People are putting new aluminum sidings on their homes, new carpets on the floor, new cars in the garage.
Some people are forsaking the suburbs and returning to the city. Physically Detroit has acquired freshness and vitality. Acres of slums have been razed, and steel and glass apartments, angular and lonely in the vacated landscape, have sprung up in their place. In the central business district, hard by the Detroit River, severely [sic] rectangular skyscrapers - none more than 5 years old - jostle uncomfortably with the gilded behemoths of another age.
Accustomed to years of adversity, to decades of drabness and civil immobility, Detroiters are naturally exhilerated. They note with particular pride that D has been removed the the Fed Bureau of Employment Security's classification of "an area with substantial and persistent unemployment."
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