Detroit's Decline (Part II)

Kevin Boyle offers his explanation for the decline of Detroit.

In retrospect, Americans should have seen the riot coming. Since the 1920s, not just Detroit but all of the nation's major cities had restricted blacks to the oldest, most decrepit neighborhoods available. Segregation inevitably spawned discrimination: Schools in African American areas were overcrowded and underfunded; city services were delivered sporadically; policing was frighteningly oppressive.

Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, the urban black economy tumbled into crisis, as decent-paying factory work started to disappear. From 1947 to 1967, Detroit alone lost 120,000 manufacturing jobs. In the city's ghetto, unemployment skyrocketed. Poverty intensified. And under the strain of it all, life on the streets became more dangerous. There were 112 murders in Detroit in 1946. In 1966, there were twice as many, a sure sign of a horribly strained social fabric.

As if that weren't bad enough, the crisis of the inner cities struck as much of the nation's economy boomed, creating a dazzling world of color TVs, backyard barbecues and cars the size of luxury liners. Poor blacks could see it all on display in the new suburbs that necklaced central cities. But suburbia was white man's territory, and it was fiercely defended. Just a month before the Detroit riot, white thugs killed a young black man, a Vietnam veteran who had the audacity to linger in a suburban park after dark. So African Americans had no choice but to stay on the far side of the urban color line, struggling to make do while white America made good.

No wonder Clairmount Street exploded in the summer of '67. And no wonder the riot's signature act wasn't battling police -- though that's how it started -- but looting and burning stores.

Wait! What? Everything was going fine; Boyle was explaining well the discrimination blacks faced in Detroit and elsewhere. (BTW - Isn't it interesting that the north destroyed the south over slavery, yet when blacks began migrating to the heavily unionized north for better employment opportunities, all of a sudden they weren't welcome. "Blacks should certainly be free, just not here in the north.") But then he has to throw in that "looting and burning stores." Is that a cause or an effect of the plight of blacks in Detroit?

Okay, well what's Boyle's remedy?

Policymakers didn't understand -- not at first. "What happened?" a shaken President Lyndon B. Johnson asked on the day he appointed the Kerner Commission to investigate the riots. It would have been easy for his appointees to equivocate, to blame the violence on black hoodlums or radical agitators. Instead, they gave the president a searingly honest answer. "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal," they reported in March 1968, a month before Washington's inner city burned. "Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American."

But Johnson's appointees also believed, in classic American fashion, that the nation could right itself. "The movement apart can be reversed," they insisted, though doing so would be extraordinarily difficult. The federal government had to shatter the institutions that fostered neighborhood segregation. City schools had to be integrated and dramatically improved. Inner-city housing had to be rehabilitated. Welfare programs had to be made less bureaucratic and far more generous. And together, the public and private sectors had to create millions of entry-level jobs in poor neighborhoods.

For a few years, policymakers tried -- imperfectly, half-heartedly, sometimes stupidly -- to break down the ghettos' walls. Congress passed legislation that banned discrimination in housing. The Supreme Court ordered city school systems to desegregate, even if that meant busing kids from one end of town to another. And the Nixon White House took a small, innovative program called affirmative action and extended it nationwide. It wasn't enough, not close to enough, to pull the urban poor into the mainstream of American society. But it was a start. The percentage of Americans living below the poverty line declined in the early 1970s. And partly because of affirmative action, the black middle class began to expand, a transformation of profound importance.

Then, in the late 1970s and '80s, the national commitment to the urban poor unraveled, destroyed by a furious white backlash and a resurgent conservatism that vilified big government and sanctified the free market. With that shift in American politics, hope gave way to neglect. It has been 30 years since the federal government really invested in America's inner cities. The only time anyone talks about segregation is when the Supreme Court prohibits another school district from employing the mildest of racial remedies. The welfare state has been eviscerated, not expanded. Even progressives prefer to focus more on the needs of the middle class than on the burdens of the poor.

Oh, so Detroit's economic problems are caused by an abundance of free market activity. Even more problematic with Boyle's comment is that Detroit is what Glaeser and Shleiffer refer to as "the first major Third World city in the United States" and has languished in poverty while nearly every other major city in this country has gone through extensive redevelopment and experienced economic growth and revival. Why is Detroit so special? Why has it not happened there?

I've discussed this before already, and Bob Subrick at Stationary Bandit has this excellent post. Bottom line: Why didn't Boyle bring up the travesty known as former Mayor Coleman Young? Boyle attributes the white flight to the riots of 1968, but the facts tell a different story, one implicating Young as the cause of Detroit's population decline.

Detroit's population growth (decline):

• 1940 - 1950 = +13.9%
• 1950 - 1960 = -9.7%
• 1960 - 1970 = -9.3%
• 1970 - 1980 = -20.5% (Young's stint as mayor began in 1973.)
• 1980 - 1990 = -14.6%
• 1990 - 2000 = -7.5% (Young's stint as mayor ends in 1994.)

Detroit's population declined nearly 800 thousand between 1950 and today.  As Glaeser and Shleiffer conclude:

Did Young hurt Detroit? Did he hurt the black residents of Detroit? There is no question that Detroit was in much worse shape when Young left office than when he first entered it. Its population fell from 1.51 million in 1970 to 1.03 million in 1990, a 32 percent decline. The unemployment rate as a percentage of civilian labor force rose from 10.3% in 1969 to 20.6% in 1990. The percentage of households living below the poverty line rose from 18.6% to 29.8%. Nearly all the victims of this unemployment and povertywere Young’s black supporters. Over Young’s twenty years, surely in part due to hispolicies, Detroit became an overwhelmingly black city mired in poverty and socialproblems. While some of black Detroit was worse off before Young, it is hard to believethat a less confrontational mayor would not have helped his constituency more.

Why didn't Boyle mention Detroit's political leaders beginning with Coleman Young as at least contributors to Detroit's economic and social problems?

Comments

[James Klich]

We need to restart heavy industry in Detroit and Cleveland. We don't have to move all new jobs overseas. We need to start making products in America again. A good place to start is Detroit and Cleveland. Bring back the steal Industry. The need for steal products in the coming years will outstrip demand. We also need a High Speed Train system in the United States. Why can't we build these trains in Detroit. We need to make more things ourselves.