The water crisis that has embroiled Flint, Michigan, since 2014 is often explained via the proximate causes of government oversight and punitive emergency management. While these were critical elements in the decision to switch the city's water source, many other forces helped precipitate the crisis. One such force has been an enduring support for Charles Tiebout's model of interlocal competition, through which a region is presumed stronger when fragmented, independent municipalities compete for residents and investment. However, the Tiebout model fails to account for spillover effects, particularly regarding questions of social and regional equity. In this sense, the fragmentation of the Flint metropolitan region-supported through a variety of housing and land use policies over many decades-created the conditions through which suburbs were absolved of responsibility for Flint's decades-long economic crisis. Because of the Tiebout model's inability to address imbalances in population shifts arising from disparities in municipal services, Flint's more affluent suburbs continued to prosper, while Flint grew poorer and experienced infrastructure decline. Underlying this pattern of inequality has been a long history of racial segregation and massive deindustrialization, which concentrated the region's black population in the economically depressed central city. The Flint Water Crisis is thus a classic example of an environmental injustice, as policies were set in motion, which led to the creation of a politically separate and majority-black municipality with concentrated poverty, while nearby municipalities-most of them overwhelmingly white-accepted little responsibility for the legacy costs created by the region's starkly uneven patterns of metropolitan development.

In 1960, city officials in Flint, Michigan, announced plans to demolish the St. John Street neighborhood. In support of the clearance project-which promised to replace a segregated black neighborhood with an industrial park and a freeway-executives from General Motors, municipal officials, and downtown boosters argued that redevelopment would provide more jobs and a growth-oriented future. Yet urban renewal in Flint was much more than a top-down campaign for growth. Many civil rights and neighborhood activists also supported St. John redevelopment, viewing urban renewal as an opportunity to secure new housing, desegregation, and clean air. Nevertheless, by the mid-1970s, corporate and city officials had triumphed over local civil rights activists, ultimately presiding over a renewal program that valued short-term industrial growth and ghetto containment over housing equity. Emphasizing state-sanctioned segregation, this article challenges the usefulness of de facto segregation as a descriptor of the North's color lines.

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Time magazine featured an autopsy of Detroit, Michigan, a city of nearly 750,000 people. In it, Motor City native Daniel Okrent injects the now-familiar urban declension narrative with a shot of hyperbole, treating readers to a titillating tour of the Rust Belt's most notorious metropolis. According to the author, Detroit is a city that "has been brought to its knees," "the urban equivalent of a boxer's mouth, more gaps than teeth," and a metropolis in the midst of a "death spiral." 1 Angered by the deindustrialization and depopulation of this once "muscular" city, Okrent deploys these and other metaphors in an attempt to convey both the human costs of the urban crisis and his own authenticity as an observer. The results, unfortunately, are quite mixed. On the positive side, Okrent accurately describes many of Detroit's most pressing social problems-everything from crime to corporate greed. More negatively, though, Okrent's anthropomorphic caricatures of Detroit's demise reinforce the popular fiction that cities somehow die after white people, investors, and professionals move away from them. Only slightly less vexing is the author's insistence on identifying the individuals who "killed Detroit," a polarizing exercise that offends many city dwellers while simultaneously obscuring the deep structural roots of the urban crisis. The clear lesson in all of this is that narratives and metaphors of urban death are unfair-both to thriving neighborhoods such as Detroit's Mexicantown and, more generally, to the millions of people who remain in shrinking cities.Like journalists, historians have been writing about the decline of the modern city for decades. 2 In 1996, Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis traced how white racism and corporate disinvestment shaped "Detroit's journey from urban heyday to urban crisis." Significantly, Sugrue argued that the "rusting of the Rust Belt" began quietly after World War II, long before the destructive urban riots of the 1960s. 3 While Sugrue marshaled an impressive

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Motors shuttered a massive complex of factories in the gritty industrial city of Flint, Michigan, signs were placed around the empty facility reading, "Demolition Means Progress," suggesting that the struggling metropolis could not move forward to greatness until the old plants met the wrecking ball. Much more than a trite corporate slogan, the phrase encapsulates the operating ethos of the nation's metropolitan leadership from at least the 1930s to the present. Throughout, the leaders of Flint and other municipalities repeatedly tried to revitalize their communities by demolishing outdated and inefficient structures and institutions and overseeing numerous urban renewal campaigns-many of which yielded only more impoverished and more divided metropolises. After decades of these efforts, the dawn of the twentyfirst century found Flint one of the most racially segregated and economically polarized metropolitan areas in the nation.

Background/Context In the first half of the 20th century, American policy makers at all levels of government, alongside housing and real estate industry figures, crafted mechanisms of racial exclusion that helped to segregate metropolitan residential landscapes. Although educators and historians have recognized the long-term consequences of these policies for the making of educational segregation, they have not yet fully perceived how strongly ideas about public schools mattered in the shaping of these exclusionary practices. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This historical study examines the “neighborhood unit” concept, its origins, and its influence, to illustrate the centrality of schooling in shaping mechanisms of racial segregation. The “neighborhood unit” concept, advocated during the 1920s by planner Clarence Perry before becoming central to local-level planning as well as federal-level housing policy, imagined self-contained communities within cities. Each of the units featured multi-purpose school-community facilities at their literal spatial as well as conceptual center. Perry and the influential cadre of planners who adopted the concept thought it would make metropolitan areas more livable, vibrant, and socially cohesive. But their neighborhood unit idea also encouraged racial segregation, in both schools and residential areas. Research Design Sources for this qualitative historical investigation include published and unpublished primary sources from individuals, organizations, and government entities involved in making and using the idea of the neighborhood unit as well as extant historical scholarship. Conclusions/Recommendations The history of the neighborhood unit shows that ideas about schools were central in the creation of the modern metropolitan landscape and enduring patterns of racial segregation. This evidence furthers the growing historical interpretation that housing segregation and school segregation operate not as separate terrain, but in deep connection with one another. By acknowledging and incorporating this historical perspective, educators and policy makers can reconceptualize segregation's roots, and perhaps its remedies.