Race, class, unemployment, and housing vacancies in Detroit: an empirical analysis

Bentley, George C.; McCutcheon, Priscilla; Cromley, Robert G.; Hanink, Dean M.

doi:10.1080/02723638.2015.1112642

Cited by 21 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Suburban jurisdictions approve thousands of building permits per year, exacerbating the problem (Breger, 1967). A 'housing disassembly line' emerges as this seemingly never-ending production of housing units gets introduced to the region, making smaller, less modern, more expensive (to maintain) housing in the inner core less plausible to sell (Galster, 2013;Bentley et al, 2016). Houses of the latter kind sit empty as owners await buyers; they are sometimes vandalized, burned or scrapped.…”

Section: -Housing Lifecyclementioning

confidence: 99%

“…When a housing unit is vacant, it has, by definition, been abandoned by its user, so some researchers use vacancy rates as a proxy for land abandonment (e.g. Bentley et al, 2016). 8 It is indeed true that places like Heidelberg Street have high vacancy rates (Hackworth, 2016a), but that does not make the vacancy rate a necessarily reliable metric of complete abandonment.…”

Section: Stages Of Land Abandonmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Though there is no consensus, quantitative studies on land abandonment tend to use a continuous metric of housing vacancy or housing unit loss as a measurement (Bentley et al, 2016). That is, in such studies a census tract value can range from 0% to 100% (loss of housing units).…”

Section: Levels Of Land Abandonmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Race and the Production of Extreme Land Abandonment in the American Rust Belt

Hackworth

2018

Int J Urban Regional Res

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Extreme land abandonment is one of the most visible expressions of urban decline. Conventional theory emphasizes housing lifecycle processes, municipal fiscal challenges and deindustrialization to explain its prevalence. Empirically however, these factors are not strongly associated with the most extreme instances of land abandonment in the American Rust Belt. Race, by contrast, is strongly associated with these patterns, yet there is little mention of it in conventional theory. This article draws on group threat theory to explain how the construction of Blackness as a threat to white property, power and political influence, has propelled the production of extreme land abandonment. The constructed threat has translated into a sustained suppression of demand and capital for overwhelmingly black neighborhoods. These forces operate both independently and as an accelerant for other abandonment drivers. IntroductionHeidelberg Street in Detroit is fairly typical of the city's near east side. Virtually every home on the street has been abandoned and demolished since the early 1970s (see Figure 1). Today, its open spaces make it look more like a semi-rural town in central Michigan than the center of what was once the fourth largest city in the United States. Though extreme, Heidelberg Street is not unique--62 other census tracts in Detroit alone have also lost half or more of their housing since 1970. In total, there are 269 such extreme housing loss neighborhoods (EHLNs) spread across 49 cities in the region. 1 Though they account for only a small percentage of overall neighborhoods in the region, these spaces are highly visible, and a frequent focus for scholars, practitioners, artists and the general public.2 'Ruin porn' photographers and documentarians flock to such neighborhoods to record ostensibly representative images of Detroit and other cities (Kinney, 2016). Planners and city officials struggle to manage the costs associated with such places (Hackworth, 2015). Urban scholars seek to explain how they became so concentrated in some cities as opposed to others (Dewar and Weber, 2012). Conventional explanations of land abandonment emphasize some combination of housing lifecycle processes, deindustrialization, or municipal fiscal collapse. But, when operationalized across the region, these drivers exhibit much weaker relationships with extreme abandonment than an additional factor that has only been partially developed in this context: race. I argue that race has an under-appreciated causal influence on the production of such extreme land abandonment, past and present. In particular, the construction of Blackness as a threat to white property, political power and safety 1Extreme housing loss neighborhoods (EHLNs) are census tracts that lost more than half of their housing between 1970 and 2010. The more detailed definition and justification for this threshold is contained in the study design section. 2In the 49 cities with extreme housing loss, 6.8% of tracts were EHLNs, 47.3% of tracts had lost 0-49.9% o...

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Section: -Housing Lifecyclementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Stages Of Land Abandonmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Race and the Production of Extreme Land Abandonment in the American Rust Belt

Hackworth

2018

Int J Urban Regional Res

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“…Contrary to the less adaptable planning practice, the research on urban shrinkage in the US offers a broader understanding of its many accompanying phenomena, such as sub-urbanisation, growth and concentration of urban poverty, racial segregation, and immigration (Audirac 2009;Bentley et al 2016;Martinez-Fernandez et al 2012). Based on the outcomes of this research, it is possible to determine some major characteristics of decline in the cities of the Rust Belt.…”

Section: Urban Decline and The Context Of Post-industrial Us Citiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Firstly, scholars agree that long-term post-industrial transformation is the main driver of urban decline. Secondly, the process mostly affected urban cores, while suburban regions continued to grow, due to a process rooted in the long history of spatial segregation at the intersection of race and class (Bentley et al 2016). Thirdly, the public sector seemed to be less powerful than in the cities of the Western Europe, and was thus more dominated by growth regimes (Audirac 2009).…”

Section: Urban Decline and The Context Of Post-industrial Us Citiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Innovative post-neoliberal policy as a way out of crisis? Another reflection on the case of urban decline in Detroit

Čamprag

2018

City Territ Archit

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Introduction: Many scholars have discussed urban decline, and one of the emerging discourses has called for redefining the crisis as an opportunity to establish new urban governance models. This paper evaluates the outcomes of such innovative approaches to managing urban decline by identifying its major implementation challenges, effects and outcomes, and pointing out long-term development perspectives. Case description:The focus was on Detroit, the 'greatest failure' among the troubled large cities in the US, whose municipal government, policy makers and elites have invested a great deal of effort to stem the city's rapid decline. Discussion and evaluation:Of particular interest was the period since 2013 when the city government declared bankruptcy. An innovative strategy based on stabilisation, recovery, and irreversible degrowth was then embraced. The research method to investigate the efficiency of its implementation is centered on analysis of the secondary literature, strategies and official documents designed by the local government and private foundations in Detroit, as well as of supporting news reports. Conclusions:In conclusion, besides the importance of redefining approaches to urban policy-making in declining cities, the study illustrated the necessity of developing equally innovative alternative ways for their successful implementation.

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