Manufacturing Decline: How Racism and the Conservative Movement Crush the American Rust Belt 9780231550475

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MANUFACTURING DECLINE

MANUFACTURING DECLINE HOW RACISM AND THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT CRUSH THE AMERICAN RUST BELT

JASON HACKWORTH

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2019 Columbia University Press All rights reserved A complete cataloging-in-publication record is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-231-19372-6 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-19373-3 (trade pbk.) ISBN 978-0-231-55047-5 (e-book) LCCN 2019010795

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover image: Abandoned House, Detroit. © Kevin Bauman

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations vii Preface ix Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction: Organized Deprivation in the American Rust Belt 1 PART I: OTHERING THE DEPRIVED CITY 1 Racial Threat and Urban Decline 35 2 Urban Decline as Conservative Bonding Capital 63 3 The Conservative Myth of Detroit 96

PART II: DEPRIVING THE OTHERED CITY 4 Conservative City Limits 117 5 Land-Market Fundamentalism 134 6 Demolition as Urban Policy 160 7 Saving the City to Kill It 186

Conclusion: Urban Decline Was Planned 213 Notes 231 Bibliography 277 Index 307

ABBREVIATIONS

ACS—American Community Survey ALEC—American Legislative and Executive Council CBD—central business district CCP—Center for Community Progress CM—conservative movement CRM—civil rights movement DBRTF—Detroit Blight Removal Task Force DFC—Detroit Future City DRPS—Detroit Residential Parcel Survey DIY—do it yourself DWS—Detroit Water System EHLN—extreme housing-loss neighborhood GCLB—Genessee County Land Bank GM—General Motors FHA—Federal Housing Administration HOPE VI—Home Ownership and Opportunity Everywhere (HUD program) HUD—United States Department of Housing and Urban Development LFR—laissez-faire racism LIHTC—low-income housing tax credits

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LLC—limited liability corporation NAACP—National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NBER—National Bureau of Economic Research OPEC—Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries PCS—public-choice school SIGTARP—Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program SSHRC—Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council TIF—tax increment financing (Districts) UAW—United Auto Workers U-SNAP-BAC—United Streets Networking and Planning; Building A Community WPA—Works Progress Administration

PREFACE

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Donald Trump was elected president in the early hours of Wednesday, November 9, 2016, a large chunk of the United States was as confused as they were upset. How could a country elect a man who so openly pandered to the most openly racist people in the country—a man who promised a Muslim ban, a man who said that a Mexican American judge was too Mexican to fairly referee the civil suit against his fraudulent university, a man who seemed so fond of scaring white audiences with tales of black-on-black crime in Chicago—how could he get elected after Barack Obama? Didn’t the country turn a corner in 2008? Wasn’t America supposed to be “postracial” or at least less openly bigoted now? Activists, authors, and academics who shared the sense of despair and anger—but did not share the surprise—began to respond on social media, in their classrooms, and on the airwaves with a series of “how did this happen?” reading lists. It didn’t take them long because most had been teaching about racial reaction in America for many years, and there was a considerable body of work from which to draw. The fact that the election of the country’s first black president seemed to provoke the election of a figure who looked and sounded more like George Wallace than Barack Obama was HEN

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not surprising to them—it was expected. Every perceived or real advance of African American political or material rights has been followed by an angry reaction—stoked by opportunistic figures like Trump but fueled by millions of white Americans who were very willing to accept the notion that the granting of privileges or rights to nonwhite Americans was, ipso facto, the removal of theirs. I was very pleased to see W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America on almost all of those reading lists. For those who have not had the pleasure of reading Black Reconstruction, it is Du Bois’s account of how and why racism is in the DNA of American society, how it is a crucial component of class formation, and how it is also simultaneously separate from class formation as understood in a Marxian framework. Black Reconstruction is, in my view, one of the most erudite books ever written about the United States. It is the kind of book where you read a paragraph and then stare off into space for an hour thinking about what you just read. It is a blend of historical materialism, social psychology, and simple conviction. That Du Bois was himself a black man living in the early twentieth-century South gives it a sense of authenticity that is missing in works of political economy written by radical (and nonradical) white visitors from Europe. And yet, Black Reconstruction and the corpus of sociology that Du Bois produced are largely niche within “mainstream” sociology. When I was an undergraduate sociology major, we read a short excerpt from The Philadelphia Negro. In my African American literature course, we read an excerpt from The Souls of Black Folk. But that was it. In graduate school, I was told how important it was to read Marx, Foucault, and Gramsci if I wanted to be a true political economist, but Du Bois was never mentioned in these conservations. Most sociologists know who he is but relegate him to a week on “black contributions” to the field or on the early

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methodological significance of his Philadelphia work. Most Americans don’t even know who he was. The reason that so many scholars placed Black Reconstruction on those reading lists is because it so neatly and presciently laid the foundation for understanding the paradoxical but repetitive pattern of racial progress followed by an angry reaction that often nullifies the progress made in the initial advance. Du Bois’s opus was about the first major episode of this sort: the establishment of slavery, the end of slavery, followed by Reconstruction, then an angry multidecade reaction. The initial acts of Reconstruction gave citizenship to people who had been considered subhuman throughout the South only a few years before. It provoked an angry backlash that consisted of lynching and juridical reversals of Reconstruction (i.e., the establishment of Jim Crow). But it also consisted of reactions that were less direct: “good faith” historians arguing that black people were just not ready to handle the right to vote, and massive expansion of the incarceration system. Authors of the latter sort insisted (as modern conservatives do today) that their efforts have nothing to do with race, but the credibility of such denials seems almost comical to even the most marginally critical historian. Du Bois, unlike other sociologists and historians, understood that this reaction was rooted in the very racialized class construction of the United States during and after slavery. It was not just a matter of convincing working-class whites that they were voting against their interests by siding with plutocratic land owners and corporations over their darker-skinned class compatriots. The identity and materiality of whiteness was much more powerful than that. You cannot simply insist that poor white people are exhibiting a “false consciousness” as so many European Marxists insisted (and continue to insist). Within this framework it is not hard to understand how poor whites refused to make common cause with poor black people in post-Reconstruction

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America. More than refusing common cause, poor whites often enthusiastically supported Jim Crow segregation, participated in lynchings, and spit at black people trying to protest one injustice or another. They supported these awful things because the psychic value of whiteness was worth more than the material value of a more egalitarian class structure. They didn’t have to be convinced that black progress meant the erosion of white supremacy (and thus their value), because that’s what they already felt and had been cultivated to feel by planters during late slavery. Seen through this lens, the awful history of physical and juridical violence committed against black people after the Civil War and into the mid-twentieth century is easier to understand. Seen through this lens, it is easier to understand how the very incremental gains of the civil rights movement—Brown v. Board of Education, the partial desegregation of the army in 1946, the spate of legislation and court decisions in the 1960s—provoked an angry backlash that fueled everything from simple racist violence to “colorblind” economic policy construction for a generation. Seen through this lens, it is easier to understand how the election of a black president was so easily exploited by the modern version of Du Bois’s planters—corporate leaders, establishment Republicans, think-tank true believers intent on ripping away the only protections most people have against the brutality of the market, and, yes, Donald Trump. The fact that Trump could and can exploit these sentiments so openly and without meaningful electoral consequence is in my view more a testament to how engrained racial reaction is in the DNA of American society than it is to the particular brilliance of one speech or turn of phrase. In some ways, it is surprising it took so long for someone to so successfully exploit the sentiment. This book is about one effect and cause of that reaction: the distressed Rust Belt city. It is about how spaces of urban distress

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are themselves the product of racial reaction. We cannot fully understand the weathered, depopulated shells of places like Detroit by simply concluding, as we often do, that they are merely the product of being forced into retirement by the forces of deindustrialization. Detroit and places like it are generated by a variety of forces, but none more salient than racial reaction. It is also true that distressed Rust Belt cities are more than physical relics of once larger cities. They are also symbols deployed by political entrepreneurs for electoral benefit. This book explores how the imagery and idea of urban decline have been used by the conservative movement since the 1970s to advance their cause. The idea of urban decline has served as a proxy for other social struggles that are difficult or unsavory to discuss more openly. In particular, conservatives have used images of urban distress to craft dogwhistle messages to racially resentful whites in the Midwest and beyond. These messages have been highly successful not only at consolidating the racially resentful vote for the Republican Party but also for justifying the imposition of limits on local autonomy in distressed cities. Black industrial cities and citizens have been “othered” in a highly organized way. In turn, this othering has served as the basis for an organized deprivation that has only exacerbated the flight of people and capital from such places. Decline has been manufactured both literally and rhetorically by an organized effort to use Rust Belt cities to advance a deprivationist agenda. This book is an examination of that process. The more I age, the more I recognize how much help it takes to write a book. To be sure, this book is the result of a lot of work by yours truly: staring at computer screens, tinkering with databases, interviewing overworked public officials, and reading everything I could get my hands on about race and the Rust Belt. But it is also the product of conversations with colleagues,

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careful critiques by friends, classroom lectures, student presentations, and invited talks. I am grateful to the many who have commented on various drafts, gave good advice about book publishing, helped me with a dataset or method, or just had a conversation with me about some of the ideas. They include: Josh Akers, Frank Alexander, Matthias Bernt, Scott Bollens, Anne Bonds, Larry Bourne, Sophie Buhnik, Dan Cohen, Tenley Conway, Patrick Cooper-McCann, Joe Darden, James Defilippis, Margaret Dewar, Brian Doucet, Meagan Elliot, Pierre Filion, John Gallagher, Joanna Ganning, Heather Hall, Dan Hammel, Maxx Hartt, Megan Hatch, Claire Herbert, Justin Hollander, David Imbroscio, William Jenkins, Dennis Keating, Kim Kinder, R. J. Koscielniak, Alan Mallach, Martin Murray, Tracy Neumann, Michael Leo Owens, Linda Peake, Jamie Peck, Deirdre Pfeiffer, Anne Pitcher, Yolande Pottie-Sherman, James Rhodes, Bjarke Risager, Akira Drake Rodriguez, Emily Rosenman, Brent Ryan, Laura Schatz, Eric Seymour, Robert Silverman, Lester Spence, Ben Teresa, Rosie Tighe, Alan Walks, Kevin Ward, Tim Weaver, Rachel Weber, David Wilson, Peter Wissoker, Geoffrey Wodtke, Elvin Wyly, and Doug Young. I’d also like to thank my longtime copy editor, Mitchell Gray, who is terrific at smoothing out the bumps in my writing. I really appreciate his work. I am grateful to the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for continuing to indulge my obsession with American cities and allowing me to buy equipment, supplies, copyrighted images, and datasets and to travel repeatedly to places that were crucial for this project. Most important, SSHRC allows me to hire great research assistants. This project wouldn’t be what it is without the help of Tamara Augsten, Andrew Dick, Natalie Langlois, Jennifer Le, Julie Mah, Jacob Nigro, Kelsey Nowakowski, Amanda Orlando, Maria Velichko, and Austin Zwick. The students of my graduate

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seminar on urban decline have been a great sounding board for ideas that made their way into this book and, probably more importantly, for ideas that did not make it into the book. Eric Schwartz and Lowell Frye at Columbia University Press have been a delight to work with. I have published two previous books and had dozens of interactions with acquisition editors over the course of my career. Eric and Lowell are as punctual, fair, kind, organized, and straightforward as anyone I have encountered in the business. I am so happy that they are building an urban series and hope that other urban scholars will consider submitting their work to CUP in the coming years. Books take years to write (for me anyway). During those periods, life happens—some of it positive, some of it, well, not so positive. For me, the people who come to the pub to watch a football game with me are as integral to book-building as the people who carefully respond to paper drafts (and even more helpful if they do both!). They make me laugh and give me balance. Thank you to Chris, Eric, Erik, Jason, Maxx, Josh, and Tony for making me laugh. Thanks, in particular, to Erik and his extended family for reading my early work on Detroit and being perplexed when I didn’t say anything of substance. And thank you to Tony for breaking into abandoned properties with me, and being such an active proponent of strengthening lead paint fines for landlords in Toledo. Last but of course not least, Tenley and Tom. Thank you for tolerating my single-minded focus (obsession?) on various research projects that sometimes results in me shuffling around the house in my pajamas mumbling about location quotients or group threat theory. Thank you for tolerating my introverted ways but insisting that it might also be nice to get out of the house once in a while. And thank you above all for sharing your lives with me.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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parts of this book were workshopped or previewed in earlier forms. Multiple sections were derived from public lectures given at the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, the University of Waterloo, and the University of Potsdam; at the annual meetings of the Urban Affairs Association and Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics; and given in courses I have taught at the University of Toronto. Some of the material is also adapted from previous publications. Chapter 2 contains some material that originally appeared in Jason Hackworth, “Urban Crisis as Conservative Bonding Capital,” City 23, no. 1 (2019). Chapter 3 contains some material that originally appeared in Jason Hackworth, “Defiant Neoliberalism and the Danger of Detroit,” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 107, no. 5 (2016). Chapter 5 contains some material that originally appeared in Jason Hackworth, “The Limits to Market-Based Strategies for Addressing Land Abandonment in Shrinking American Cities,” Progress in Planning, 90 (2014). Chapter 6 is a revised version of Jason Hackworth, “Demolition as Urban Policy in the American Rust Belt,” Environment and Planning A 48, no. 11 (2016). OME

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Chapter 7 is a revised version of Jason Hackworth, “RightSizing as Spatial Austerity in the American Rust Belt,” Environment and Planning A 47, no. 4 (2015). Figure 2.1 is derived from an image owned by Getty Images. It originally appeared as “Ronald Reagan Speaking to People” and has been reprinted with the permission of Bettmann/Getty Images. Figure 6.1 is derived from an image owned by and originally published in the Detroit News. It has been reprinted here with the permission of Detroit Free Press/ZUMA Wire.

MANUFACTURING DECLINE

INTRODUCTION Organized Deprivation in the American Rust Belt

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the backdrop of racial denial and stingy responses to urban poverty, the Kerner Commission Report of 1968 is an extraordinary document in American history. The report was commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson to provide an autopsy of the previous summer of violence, when uprisings exploded in 159 U.S. cities. The commission met with hundreds of city leaders and residents, read thousands of document pages, and reviewed the history of race relations in the United States. They focused on the neighborhoods where violence during the summer of 1967 was most intense and tried to understand what sparked it. Their conclusions were incredibly bold. In perhaps the most unvarnished passage, the commission wrote: GAINST

Certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans. Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively in the past; it now threatens to do so again. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.

This was not a document written by critical race theory professors at UC Berkeley or black militant leaders in Detroit. Most

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members of the committee were white, and many had held elected office at some point in their careers. Some were even self-professed conservatives. They understood the toxic racial dynamic in the United States, and they wrote this honest take on conditions anyway. Perhaps even bolder than their racial honesty were their policy recommendations. They argued that previous efforts to address concentrated, highly racialized poverty—urban renewal, the War on Poverty, the Model Cities Program, etc.—had been inadequate to the task, not because they were philosophically flawed but because they were underfunded. The commission argued for major reinvestments in extant programs, passage and muscular enforcement of fair housing and employment opportunities, and major outlays to schools and educational initiatives. Above all, they argued for a response that was “on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems.” The Kerner Report was big, bold, and unusual. It is safe to say that President Johnson was incensed by the report. Politically weakened by the escalation of the Vietnam War and social upheaval, Johnson did not have the political capital to advance such an agenda through Congress and was enraged that his handpicked committee had put him in this position. He worried even more that the commission’s conclusions and recommendations would hasten the flight of southern and rural whites from the Democratic Party—and he was prescient to worry about this. Kerner and the social upheavals it documented provoked an angry, multifaceted backlash. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated less than six weeks after the report was released. George Wallace, an openly segregationist presidential candidate, won five southern states and shockingly high vote percentages in counties surrounding conflict-ridden cities like Cincinnati, Detroit, Gary, and Dayton later that year. Richard Nixon openly ran against the document, sneering that it “blame[d] everyone except the rioters,”

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and won the presidency. Perhaps more important for the longer term, Nixon began the process of bottling white racial anxiety for conservative benefit. He would master these techniques by 1972 and go on to rout his opposition. Fifty years after Kerner, the political ethos and range of potential policy solutions for urban decline and poverty could not be more different. The very same neighborhoods chronicled in Kerner are now poorer, as racially isolated (or more), and more poorly serviced than they were in 1968. Kerner was grand, compensatory, and empathetic, while today’s policy suite for distressed urban spaces is austere, penal, and filled with accommodations to a mythical market that left these areas a generation ago. The belief that government spending failed (or even caused) the problems of urban decline is now so popularly accepted that conservatives openly mock the conclusions of the famous document. Jason Riley, a fellow of the Manhattan Institute, used the fiftieth anniversary of Kerner in 2018 to mock progressives for “blaming everything on racism.” “We can’t hope,” he wrote, to address effectively the social pathology on display in so many black ghettos by playing down the role of culture and personal responsibility so as to keep the focus on white racism. What blacks were doing on their own to develop human capital and to narrow racial gaps in the first half of the 20th century has a far better record of success than any government program. This history is seldom discussed among politicians in search of votes or activists in search of relevance, but it ought to be part of any serious national debate about racial inequality today.

Riley, like most conservatives, sees racial inequality as the residue of cultural inferiority. White people have better economic

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outcomes and live in more prosperous places because they are more invested in the nuclear family, education, and the Protestant ethic. Government programs—other than the carceral state— cannot hope to address these concerns. Only tough love, selfhelp, and deprivation will work. It would be tempting to dismiss such sentiments as the cold ravings of a conservative think-tank ideologue if they were not also the de facto policy frame for what counts as urban policy today in the United States. The notion that the social economy— services for the poor, public housing, etc.—has failed and should be dismantled is effectively axiomatic in many state legislatures and the federal government. The only service increases that federal and state officials propose today are for police officers and prisons. Many state and federal officials, particularly in the Rust Belt, continue to successfully run against the ostensibly excessive spending of cities like Detroit and Cleveland, even though these spaces have the poorest services and lowest spending per capita in their states. Local responses are more mixed, but with limited resources, the main local “policy innovations” have been measures to literally downsize cities, rationalize and reduce expenses, and appear accommodating to real estate investors. If the urban renewal period was marked by a series of unkept promises, the current period is marked by unmade promises. No one is promising to build better spaces with public money or to improve social services. They are instead promising to tear down houses, rationalize services, write off whole neighborhoods, and lubricate the wheels of future land investment. If the core suggestion of Kerner was to target the most deprived neighborhoods with services and enforcement against predation, the prevailing policy ethos fifty years later is effectively the opposite. Urban-policy scholars openly muse about giving up on the most deprived neighborhoods and focusing on those that have “market potential.” City officials give hopeful labels to such activities, like “rightsizing,” but these terms

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do not meaningfully differ from the more pejorative label “triage.” The Kerner Commission was proposing an organized reinvestment in isolated, poor, black neighborhoods, but most policy voices today are arguing for what amounts to an organized deprivation of already deprived spaces. Organized deprivation involves direct state actions to reduce social welfare, liberate corporations from local regulation, and punish “unruly” people. Pointing out the dominance of such ideas within the contemporary urban-policy ethos is, of course, not a novel observation, but the persistence of such efforts does provoke questions that are not easily answered. First, organized deprivation is deeply unpopular. The rightsizing efforts of the last ten years are not the first incarnations of triage. Triage has been proposed numerous times in the past seventy-five years. The idea that certain neighborhoods were beyond repair justified their destruction during urban renewal. In the 1970s, New York City’s chief planner proposed a “planned shrinkage” of neighborhoods that were already losing population. A city councilor in Detroit made a similar proposal in 1993. Aspects of these proposals vary, but they share one common characteristic: they were deeply unpopular to those living in the affected neighborhoods. Proponents have been publicly castigated for at best ignoring, at worst destroying, deprived communities of color. If such ideas are expressed in the abstract, without maps identifying targeted neighborhoods, the reaction remains reasonably muted. But when neighborhoods targeted for downsizing or removal are identified, the reaction is usually hostile. This provokes a basic question: If such proposals are so politically toxic—and they are—why do they continue to be proposed? The wave of rightsizing proposals have all occurred in the past ten years. If local voter support means anything to generally risk-averse politicians, why even propose such measures given their toxic legacies? What explains the durability of triage within a more or less democratic system?

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The second curious dimension of such proposals is their impermeability to evidence of past failure. The efforts to eradicate “blight” during urban renewal have been mercilessly critiqued for failing to achieve their central objectives. Urban renewal destroyed the functioning communities it was supposed to save. Mass demolition was supposed to create a tabula rasa for development but instead created thousands of vacant lots still devoid of development. New York’s planned shrinkage efforts closed firehouses and medical facilities and succeeded only in increasing incidents of arson, AIDS, tuberculosis, and low birth weights. The canard that deregulation will invite productive capital into deprived neighborhoods has also led to measurable failure. Directing development incentives at “hopeful” neighborhoods has merely hastened the demise of “moribund” ones in the same city and has had little effect even in the targeted neighborhoods. Deregulating the tax-foreclosure process to attract capital has merely invited more predatory investors to flood deprived neighborhoods with contract mortgages and other deceptive products. Deregulating mortgage markets as a way to provide better access for deprived communities simply led to financial predation that ended in disaster. Current efforts to downsize, rationalize, and marketize distressed urban spaces have direct antecedents. And those antecedents have, by and large, failed miserably at the very tasks that they purport to achieve. Why are such policies so impervious to past failures? How can local officials tenably frame such efforts with hopeful arguments that they will lead to the city’s rebirth when they have so clearly failed to do so in the fairly recent past?

THE PRODUCTION OF URBAN POLICY Before addressing this applied question, it is necessary to ask a more general one: How does any urban policy get made?

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Conventional understandings of urban-policy production tend to focus on the actions of elected leadership and their interactions with local capital. The ostensibly good-faith search by elected leadership to maximize the public interest is balanced against a self-serving drive to enhance profitability from business interests (who pressure elected leadership). This broad approach is valuable for certain applications, namely understanding land-development activity within a given municipality. But this approach is weaker at understanding policy where there does not appear to be any constituency that benefits directly, or where the proposed policy is so impervious to past failures. It is thus of limited use for understanding the current policy regime in declining cities. This book adopts a different approach to understanding urbanpolicy production—one that is typically less common in the study of urban politics. Much of what we consider “urban” policy is in fact dictated by higher levels of government and private institutions that do not reside in the city in question. Despite the strong mythos of “local control,” policy is often handed down by the state and federal levels. This can include but is not limited to resource limits and contingencies, legal boundaries on local implementation, and preemption laws. A remarkable convergence has formed around a core set of neoliberal ideas that stress a small social state, deregulated market conditions, and intensified penality for individuals and cities who reject these constraints. A parallel set of political theorists have thus emphasized the need to understand the broader ideas on which policy is based rather than the relatively slight differences in local implementation. Fred Block and Margaret Somers argue that certain ideas gain “epistemic privilege” and become even more influential than localized selfinterest or median-voter wishes. These ideas percolate through policy construction at all levels, creating both a positive vision of what policies are acceptable and—equally importantly—a negative vision of what policies are politically unrealistic.

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Ideational scholars have directed the idea of epistemic privilege to study the shift away from Keynesian managerialism toward neoliberalism. David Harvey was among the first to note the erosion of what he deemed Keynesian-managerialist ideas in the 1970s. Within this narrative, the Keynesian-managerial state had to reproduce the conditions for capital accumulation, but it did so more from the position of referee for rather than direct participant in the capitalist process. At the federal level, this included more vigorous bank regulations, antimonopoly protections, and labor laws. At the local level, it meant that cities served more as arbiters between different development interests than as entrepreneurs trying to lure developers. Market forces were “embedded” within local and national democracies—that is, corporations and investors had to adhere to a set of democratically derived limits on their activities. These ideas were supported by the economic conditions of the time (growth), theory (Keynes and his followers), and supportive institutions (the Democratic Party and its think-tank organs like the Brookings Institution), but this began to change in the 1970s when Keynesian ideas fell into disrepute and were increasingly replaced by a neoliberal model. Within the neoliberal paradigm, local governments are converted into competitors with one another. The goal of this model was (and remains) to accommodate rather than regulate capital. Internal governance was rebuilt around this model—running government like a business and offering a deregulated clean slate for capital was the goal. Markets are increasingly liberated—“disembedded” to use Karl Polanyi’s language—from democratically derived regulation. A key question is why and how did such a momentous shift occur? There are three overlapping schools of thought on this matter: structuralism, institutionalism, and hybrid approaches. For Harvey and other structuralists, the source of this shift lies in the structural conditions that support each model. During the

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immediate postwar period, when Keynesian managerialism was thriving, the United States was growing rapidly. With Germany and Japan still rebuilding, America’s industrial power was largely unchallenged for a generation. Cities, states, and the federal government could adopt a more interventionist posture because there was so much profitability in the broader system. The federal government could and did redistribute a great deal of this largesse to cities to build major infrastructure. Cities within this model could referee and allocate this windfall. The need to enhance an individual city’s competitive position was not as acute as it would later become. This set of structural conditions lasted until the economic crisis of the 1970s, sparked by massive Vietnam War debt, an OPEC oil embargo, and major competitive pressures from Germany and Japan. It led to stagflation (the combination of inflation and high unemployment) and the erosion of Bretton Woods—the WWII-era system of international finance centered exclusively on the American dollar. With resources scarcer, government at all levels shifted to an austerity-first model. Institutionalists adopt many of the same assumptions but emphasize a different element—the role of powerful groups in advancing ideas of neoliberalism and austerity, starting in the 1960s. As Jason Stahl points out, the most powerful think tank in the United States during the mid-twentieth century was the Brookings Institution. Brookings served several roles—it worked out the intricacies of policy and legislation for the Democratic Party and promoted ideas supportive of the New Deal Keynesian coalition. The Republican Party and its ideas of self-help, small government, and low taxes had no equivalent vessel to disseminate and support its ideas. But this began to change in the late 1960s. Many point to the role of the seminal Powell Memorandum of 1971. In a memo entitled “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System,” retired Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell

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offered a blistering critique of a dubiously conflated series of threats—communism, fascism, and the New Deal. Powell argued that corporate leaders should be more directly political—should create think tanks, donate to political figures, and run for political office—to support a deregulatory agenda. Scholars of conservatism consider the Powell Memo a blueprint for the conservative movement, as it inspired the establishment or expansion of a powerful army of think tanks. Today, there is no equivalent on the Left to the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute, and American Enterprise Institute, or Fox News. These organizations successfully promote conservative ideas and contest alternative perspectives. Thus, when policy ideas are debated, an asymmetric war for epistemic privilege drives policy construction more than the wishes of the local electorate. The third school of thought is a hybrid of the first two. Here, theorists have sought to understand how the combination of institutions and economic conditions produced the shift toward neoliberalism. Mark Blyth, in particular, argues that paradigm shifts are rare because the gravitational pull of past institutional pathways is strong. For such a shift to occur, two conditions must be met: first, a politicoeconomic shock that the prevailing paradigm cannot solve and, second, the availability of a sufficiently developed alternative approach. Blyth’s comparative study of Sweden and the United States shows that the shock of the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Great Depression created a set of conditions and misery that laissez-faire economics could not solve. Economists in the United States, the UK, and smaller countries like Sweden began theorizing a justification for a more interventionist state apparatus that could avoid or solve such crises more effectively. Political figures and institutions followed by adopting and appointing adherents of this approach to government posts. Once implemented and demonstrably

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successful at smoothing out the business cycle, such ideas became even more foundational. The Keynesian paradigm was held intact by conditions of growth until the 1970s, at which point a reversal occurred. The shock challenged the putative ability of Keynesian approaches to solve it, and conservative groups had been developing an alternative model in the political wilderness for years. When charismatic political figures like Reagan and Thatcher came to power, they implemented this alternative approach as rapidly as they could. Governance at all levels was affected. These are powerful narratives, and I adopt many of their assumptions, particularly the notion that local or urban policy is constrained and at times even determined by much wider nonlocal paradigms. But such theories are limited by their strict materialist emphasis—the conditions and ideas ostensibly of greatest importance are purely economic. The central characters are corporations and conservative economists who were motivated by high taxes and sluggish growth. Other social conflicts and movements are not seriously considered within most such narratives. I certainly do not refute that economic events and motivations are important, but I part from the assumption they fully explain the transition to the current policy paradigm. I argue that the social crises of the 1960s (namely white reaction to black political progress) are equally (and in some cases more) important as the economic shocks of the 1970s. This book seeks to build from the insights of the ideational school of policy production but to incorporate a more robust consideration of racial reaction and local conditions into the analysis. I seek to foreground the role of racial reaction in the transition toward the neoliberal mode of governance and to highlight the pernicious outcomes this mode has had for declining cities in the American Rust Belt. By foregrounding race, I do not mean to suggest that it is the only factor involved in the transition toward organized

12 4 Introduction

deprivation. I seek only to counter those who argue that race is not a factor, and to complement those scholars who simply do not invoke race or do not adequately explain why it is a factor. Arguments that emphasize race have been applied in the past to the issues such as incarceration, but comparatively less literature explores how race is crucial in the construction of neoliberal urban policy or the incidence of urban decline. This book attempts to fill this void by exploring how organized deprivation is rooted in both the economic crisis of the 1970s and the social upheavals of the 1960s. The topical focus is on the shrinking cities of the Great Lakes industrial region, but the intent is to gesture to and inform wider economic, social, and ideational change.

ORGANIZED DEPRIVATION Figure 0.1 is a schematic summary of this book’s argument. In short, a multifaceted, multiscalar policy reaction among urban decline, racial threat, and the conservative movement has

Urban Decline +

+

Organized deprivation: The Conservative Movement

Racial Threat

- austerity - limiting local autonomy - disembedding the market - punishing unruly people

+

FIGURE 0.1  The

production of deprivationist urban policy in the American Rust Belt.

Introduction 4 13

created the policy inertia supporting organized deprivation in the American Rust Belt. These policies are premised on austerity, deprivation, and penality. Organized deprivation can consist of direct forms of austerity—for example, funding cuts to the social safety net—but can also consist of various indirect measures meant to reduce state obligations (e.g., rightsizing) or provide enhanced access for capital. Locally, organized deprivation persists because the forces provoking and reproducing it are ensconced elsewhere. Its reproduction is rooted in an organized “othering” of a highly racialized inner city. By framing it as organized I do not wish to suggest that the process is orchestrated by a single malevolent puppet master, or even a singular interest set. Rather, I argue that there is an order to this policy inertia and that this order is rooted in a common reaction to black political progress and promoted by a powerful set of interest groups. Before summarizing the relationships within this positive feedback loop, it is important to describe and explain each component.

Urban Decline I understand urban decline as the flight of people or capital (usually both) from urban space. There is no consensus on what level, duration, or spatial extent of decline should constitute a concern for local policy makers, but it is clear that most city leaders actively resist even the first indication of it. Many city leaders find the label “urban decline” so pejorative that they actively rebut the suggestion that it might apply to their city or are willing to engage in expensive and unrealistic attempts to preempt its onset, only to, in the process, hasten its arrival. Spatially, most cities, even the most visibly deteriorated, are a mix of growing and declining spaces. Temporally, many cities

14 4 Introduction

have experienced alternating periods of growth and decline. This book focuses on the most visibly derelict and abandoned land as a proxy for urban decline. Every city has an uneven landscape of poverty and wealth—neighborhoods and spaces where disinvestment and marginalization prevail, mixed with spaces of privilege and positive investment flows. Conditions of disinvestment are more visible and widespread in some cities than others. In the postindustrial Rust Belt, such spaces are often disfigured shells of their former selves. Often more than half of the existing structures are missing—victims of scrapping, arson, and eventual demolition (figure 0.2). Remaining structures are often unoccupied and rapidly deteriorating (figure 0.3). I focus on such spaces for two reasons. First, dereliction and abandonment are signals of only the most extreme decline. While it is debatable whether a 5 percent drop in population over a ten-year period is sufficient to signal decline, there is no such ambiguity about a neighborhood that

FIGURE 0.2  Extreme

land abandonment on the far east side of Detroit, 2018. Photo credit: Author

Introduction 4 15

FIGURE 0.3  Housing

deterioration in Detroit.

Photo credit: Author

has lost half of its housing units to arson, demolition, and weathering. Such landscapes are the unmistakable residue of massive population and capital flight. Second, such spaces of dereliction and abandonment offer fuel for a declining-cities imaginary that will be discussed in this book. Declining spaces are real in the sense that actual people lived in and abandoned them; real people, moreover, continue to live and struggle in them every day. But they are also imagined spaces. Often they make up only a small portion of the actual land area of a city, but their extent is amplified in other ways. They are images conjured when a politician invokes the problems of the inner city. They are frequently photographed for their shock value. Images of such places constitute an entire genre of photography and film—“ruin porn.” The deterioration is undeniably fascinating to look at, and it stimulates

16 4 Introduction

consideration of what caused the neighborhood to be vacated and to fall into disrepair. Scholars have noted that many respondents, when systematically asked such questions (i.e., why did the neighborhood you are looking at fall into disrepair?), resort to highly racialized understandings. When white respondents see such broken urban spaces, they frequently assume they are occupied by black or nonwhite people even when none are present in the images. When respondents see a house with a white family standing in front of it, they assume it is worth more and less dangerous than the same house with a black family standing in front of it. This book is in part about that connection. Why is there such an association between blackness and urban decline in the American Rust Belt? Some scholars explain this as a matter of “statistical discrimination bias”—in short, our minds have become polluted with imagery of black pathology and broken urban landscapes, and we unconsciously seek confirmation of that bias when we are presented with images. This book emphasizes a different angle—namely, the role that political entrepreneurs have played in creating and exploiting a connection between blackness and physical urban decline.

Racial Threat There are different ways to conceive of racial animus. My own thinking is derived from racial threat theory. Devised by Herbert Blumer, racial threat theory argues that the impetus for racial prejudice lies in the threat posed to one’s group position. It is distinct from theories that try to explain racial animus through varied levels of education or other socialization factors. Within racial threat theory, racism emerges as a mostly subconscious but nevertheless collective response to perceived group positional

Introduction 4 17

threat. When black people constituted only small portions of the population in northern cities in the early twentieth century, relations with whites were relatively integrated and peaceful. But when black people began to migrate en masse to cities of the West, Midwest, and Northeast, relations deteriorated rapidly. White people, governments, and businesses enacted a strict set of formal and informal limits on where black newcomers could live, travel, and patronize. Group position theory understands this transformation as based on a collectively conceived threat among white people. Black people and their increasingly sizable, politically influential presence in cities were constructed as a threat to white property, political power, and safety. Apartheid-like housing and employment restrictions were enacted in response to this threat. Researchers have shown how sizable movements or concentrations of black people have provoked spikes in hostility to busing and social welfare and an embrace of zero-tolerance policing. These tensions are amplified when direct conflict between the majority “in-group” and minority “out-group” occurs. Racial threat theory is rarely applied to the broad policy shifts discussed earlier, but there are important reasons it ought to be. Lawrence Bobo and colleagues argue that racial threat can be used to understand a broader transformation of American racism more generally. Jim Crow racism, Bobo and others write, “was at its zenith during a historical epoch when African Americans remained a largely southern, rural, agricultural workforce; when antiblack bias was formal state policy; and when most white Americans comfortably accepted the idea that blacks were inherently inferior.” Bobo argues, however, that Jim Crow racism disintegrated in the 1950s and 1960s because of the confluence of two major factors: the activism of the civil rights movement that punctured notions of biological inferiority and the erosion of the southern agricultural economic system upon which Jim Crow

18 4 Introduction

was based. These events did not, however, make racism disappear. Rather it morphed to laissez-faire racism (LFR). Laissez-faire racism, Bobo and Smith write, blames blacks themselves for the black-white gap in social economic standing and actively resists meaningful efforts to ameliorate America’s racist social conditions and institutions.  .  .  . Jim Crow racism was premised on notions of black biological inferiority; laissez-faire racism is based on notions of black cultural inferiority. Both serve to encourage whites’ comfort with and acceptance of persistent racial inequality, discrimination, and exploitation.

Laissez-faire racism provokes, and is provoked by, a sensibility that justifies, disregards, or individualizes disparate impact. If black people are incarcerated more often than white people, it must mean that they are just more predisposed to crime, not that they are being targeted disproportionately. If black people have a higher unemployment rate, it must mean that they are lazy, not that employers are less willing to hire them. If black cities are poorer than white ones, it must be because they are poorly managed or corrupt, not that they have been financially and politically redlined within their respective states. LFR does not acknowledge racial animus unless it is formally stated in the most openly bigoted way. It animates and generates strenuous denials of racial intent in a range of policies that clearly impact black people more than white. As long as the language of Jim Crow racism is not used in policy documents or justifications, conservatives (and many white moderates) insist that it cannot be racist. Avoiding the language of race is not the only method that prevails under laissez-faire racism. Intricate alternate explanations are developed to deny racism. Policies that disproportionately

Introduction 4 19

impact black people are justified using thin, ostensibly deracialized justifications. In Ohio, Medicaid work requirements were put in place by the state’s Republican leadership in 2018, but the whitest areas of the state were exempted. Lawmakers swatted away accusations of racism by insisting that the reason was it would be unfair to institute such requirements in rural areas because the unemployment rate is higher there. The state and federal government have put in place guidelines that if a county has an unemployment rate over 120 percent of the federal rate, it can be exempted from the work requirements. The urban counties of the state have lower unemployment rates, but the cities where large numbers of African American people live—such as Akron, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton—have much higher unemployment rates. Thus, the overwhelmingly black poor populations of Cleveland are required to work to receive access to basic medical care while the overwhelmingly white Meigs County in southern Ohio is exempt from the requirements. While Cuyahoga County’s unemployment rate is below the qualifying threshold, the county’s main city, Cleveland, is not. That Cleveland’s unemployment rate is greater than places like Meigs County does not matter— Cleveland’s (overwhelmingly black) poor population is treated with malice while the overwhelmingly white (but impoverished) population of Meigs County is treated with empathy. Proponents of the requirement continue to insist that this has nothing to do with race—it is merely an urban/rural geographic distribution. But anyone with even a basic knowledge of the state’s racial geography knows that the majority of black Medicaid recipients live in cities and that the majority of white Medicaid recipients live in rural areas and vote Republican, particularly in the southeastern quadrant of the state. The whole logic of a work requirement is rooted in a suggestion that the poor are undeserving. The fact that the majority of white applicants are exempt reveals a great deal

20 4 Introduction

about the uneven application of empathy, but as long as race is not mentioned explicitly, conservative lawmakers insist it is not racist. This same dynamic occurs in voter suppression and incarceration. These policies disproportionately affect black people, but as long as the conservatives instituting them insist it has nothing to do with race and have even the flimsiest alternate justification, it is sufficient to convince other conservatives that they are not influenced by racial animus. A final common method under laissez-faire racism is to invoke apparent concern for those who will be targeted for deprivation. Conservatives, for example, argue that deprivationist programs will actually benefit black Americans (especially when they clearly will not). The policy suite of deprivation, incarceration, demolition, and rightsizing are all sold on the basis that they will actually improve the lives of affected populations. Often, proponents use half-truths rooted in legitimate concerns and contort or cherry-pick them to fit a conservative outcome. Elizabeth Hinton and others deem this maneuver “selective hearing.” The escalation of incarceration is justified because black residents want safer neighborhoods (never mind the fact that most residents arguing for greater police protection want it to be in combination with social programming and better employment opportunities that are nowhere to be found). Legitimate concerns about vacant houses in black communities provoke wholesale clearance of those neighborhoods even though most voices would like there to be development. Policies, in other words, that worsen conditions or have uneven impact are often justified on the basis of a bad-faith reading of black concerns. But as long as the legislation or policy avoids openly racist language and justification, it is sufficient within the ethos of laissez-faire racism to convince many confirmation-seeking whites that their support of it is not racist.

Introduction 4 21

Bobo and others understand the emergence of laissez-faire racism to be relatively socially organic; there is no conspiracy or conscious organization per se. White people are like any other group—social, conscious of their position, and seeking to maximize that position within society. LFR is simply the narrative that has emerged to rationalize those impulses. This book accepts most of the assumptions of the theory of laissez-faire racism except this one. I understand racial animus to be an expression of group interest, but I do not think that such animus is random, organic, or without conscious organization. As will be discussed in this book, the conservative movement has weaponized laissez-faire racism to enact a whole range of deprivationist policies. This has been deliberate, organized, and highly effective. Conservatives are not solely responsible for racial threat, but they have played a crucial organizational role in its dissemination and implementation.

The Conservative Movement Neoliberalism is one of the most common topics in the contemporary social sciences. Scholars and activists within this paradigm begin with the irrefutable observation that the dominant political movement in the Global North (and much of the Global South) involves a minimalist social state (austerity), deregulation, free trade, and low tax rates. This agenda is remarkably consistent at local, regional, and national levels. Neoliberal policies are frequently justified by vague gestures to freedom and sometimes specific references to neoliberal fountainheads like Hayek, Friedman, and Rand. Scholars have labeled this turn “neoliberal” in the sense that it attempts to capture elements of classical liberalism from the mid-nineteenth century and earlier. Explanations for this transformation vary somewhat but generally involve economic

22 4 Introduction

crisis (in the 1970s) and the rise of conservative think tanks. These approaches are important, valuable, and certainly contain a kernel of truth. But by the same token, they remain incomplete narratives for understanding the ideational dominance of agenda items like austerity and penality. First, the core elements of neoliberalism are politically unpopular. Even proudly neoliberal politicians frequently campaign on agenda items that are more persuasive to voters. Military interventions, abortion rights, and gay marriage drive conservatives to the polls more effectively than cuts to Social Security. Former House speaker Paul Ryan might, for example, quietly acknowledge that Ayn Rand is his favorite author but publicly will claim that the Bible is his favorite book. He quietly pushed for cuts to Medicaid but publicly pushed for limitations to abortion rights. President Trump, moreover, won election in part by promising to fight free trade and not cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In fact, the key policy applications of neoliberalism (e.g., austerity, low taxes for the rich) are deeply unpopular. The ideational durability of neoliberalism within more or less democratic societies thus would remain questionable if it were a stand-alone movement. Second, and related, the policy outcomes of the current political moment are not exclusively neoliberal. Some high-profile policies—e.g., the Faith-Based Initiative; an expensive, interventionist military; and preemption laws to limit the power of localities—actually fly in the face of strict neoliberalism. Others are merely different but no less popular or frequent, such as support for Confederate monuments and antiabortion legislation. If neoliberalism were the stand-alone touchstone for modern politics in the United States, such measures would be deeply confusing and maybe even call into question the ostensible dominance of the idea. But neoliberalism is not, of course, a standalone idea. It is part of a wider conservative movement.

Introduction 4 23

At the broadest philosophical level, conservatism is a politically powerful (and easily exploitable) narrative of loss. It appeals to individuals who feel that they have lost something—real or imagined—because of a changing social order and who are motivated by a politics seeking to revive a previous order. To political theorist Corey Robin, conservatism is “a meditation on—and a theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” Conservatism and its advocates profit politically from the perceived loss of privilege—the notion that one’s individual or group position has been undermined by social change. Seen in this way, several dominant movements of the twentieth century can be usefully placed within the conservative tradition. Hostility to the New Deal and a parallel anticommunism were thus based on the fear that the economic privileges of an ascendant United States were going to be whittled away. Hostility to busing and housing integration can be seen as a fear that racial privilege for white people was being undermined. These sentiments are related to political parties and other institutions, but they are not entirely reducible to them. Hostility to the New Deal was, and continues to be, mostly engineered by the Republican Party. Hostility to racial justice was more mixed. The Democratic Party from 1932 to 1960 was famously reliant on the support of segregationists from the South. In a sense, the dominant threads of conservative racial affect (i.e., racism) were split between the two main political parties during the mid-twentieth century. This changed dramatically in the 1960s when black people became more dispersed and numerous in the North, Democrats spearheaded the civil rights movement (CRM), and Republicans figured out how to capture the support of disaffected southern whites through dog whistling. The abbreviated story is that voting and indeed the definitions of what it means to be conservative or liberal/

24 4 Introduction

progressive have become increasingly bifurcated along racial lines since the 1960s. Conservatives have become the dominant political force, and neoliberalism is part of that movement. But the transition to power pivots more on the social upheavals of the 1960s than the economic crises of the 1970s. The 1960s uprisings and the CRM provoked an angry reaction from white people, particularly in the South and Midwest. Conservatives, working primarily through the organ of the Republican Party, have been able to harness white racial resentment to great political effect. Part of that process has involved packaging and deploying images of urban decline as a proxy for black pathology. As the dominant political force since the 1970s, conservatism has had significant policy consequences at the federal, state, and local levels. This has involved the crafting of actual policy approaches (e.g., austerity, penality) and, perhaps more importantly, the crafting of putative impossibilities (i.e., measures, such as raising taxes, that cannot be enacted because they are “politically unrealistic”). The outcomes of this framing are incredibly limiting for distressed postindustrial cities with large black populations. They are left to reorganize the fragments of their landscapes that have been laid waste by disembedded capitalism, sustained austerity, and laissez-faire racism.

Relationships The forces of urban decline, racial threat, and the conservative movement interact with one another to create a policy inertia focused on deprivation and penality for already distressed cities. The positive feedback loop should be thought of in its entirety, but individual relationships are worth parsing and summarizing to introduce the model.

Introduction 4 25 URBAN DECLINE ↔ RACIAL THREAT

Actualized urban decline—the flight of people and capital—is often explained independently of race. Scholars have emphasized employment restructuring, the combination of high taxes and scarce services, and overly permissive building policy in the suburbs as central causes of extreme decline. These are important dimensions, but the fact remains that in the American Rust Belt, declining urban spaces are disproportionately occupied by and associated with black people. Part of this book explores the causes behind this association, namely, the compounded deprivation associated with the construction of blackness as a threat to white property, political power, and safety. In short, white racial reaction is an underreported causal dimension to urban decline. Racial threat, in turn, has fueled the experience and imagery of urban decline. Some of the biggest political shifts in the post-1960s Rust Belt have been in the white suburbs surrounding the most African American cities (Detroit, Dayton, Gary, etc.). Images of urban distress confirm extant biases regarding spaces and people that such residents (or their parents) fled. These images fuel an impression of the black city or neighborhood as something to be avoided, a threat that must be contained, and something that would threaten your group position if you supported a policy solution to fix it. RACIAL THREAT ↔ THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT

The influence of 1960s racial upheavals has been noted elsewhere, and applied to different contexts. Briefly, the Great Migration of black people to northern cities, subsequent civil rights legislation, and racial uprisings in key cities provoked a broad backlash by white people in the United States. The reaction was particularly acute in the white suburbs surrounding the most conflict-ridden Rust Belt cities. Because the Rust Belt has always been a swing

26 4 Introduction

region, this local reaction to “black disorder” had implications for realigning national politics. Conservative idea entrepreneurs were initially unsuccessful at capturing white resentment but eventually came to master dog-whistle politics. Declining urban spaces have been an important part of the dog-whistle strategy. Conservatives have exploited the aforementioned connections between blackness and distressed urban space to great political effect. By speaking ostensibly about derelict urban spaces, they create a plausibly deniable dog-whistle discourse. To some ears, they are speaking merely about arcane economic policy matters; to other ears, they are pinning urban failure on black individual pathology. THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT ↔ URBAN DECLINE

Declining city imagery not only serves as a coded way to speak about race but also impugns the ostensible “excesses” of progressive governance more generally. Conservatives have invested heavily, particularly in the Midwest, in creating urban bêtes noires. By deploying the imagery of broken landscapes in Detroit or Cleveland and assertively pinning these outcomes on profligacy and regulation, they set the necessary condition for their policy agenda. Because this policy agenda consists largely of measures that restrict direct expenditure (e.g., budget cuts, taxation limits, etc.) or open cities and their residents to income or wealth exploitation (e.g., mortgage deregulation, minimum-wage law preemptions, etc.), conservative policy directly contributes to the flight of people and capital from such spaces. In effect, it is an organized deprivation of already deprived spaces. These three forces—urban decline, racial threat, and the conservative movement—animate and reinforce one another. One cannot fully understand the form of any of these forces without reference to the other two. Laissez-faire racism is significantly built on an

Introduction 4 27

organized construction of the failed black city. The failed black city is significantly built upon white reaction and the conservative movement. Together they provoke a multiscalar policy inertia that positions deprivation as the only way forward.

WHY THE AMERICAN RUST BELT? The empirical core of this book is a comparative analyses of large cities in the American Rust Belt. I employ a comparative approach because I want to separate broader patterns from locally contingent findings as much as possible. If a theory suggests, for example, that suburban fringe construction is driving inner-core abandonment in Detroit, presumably we would also see that pattern in other places with similar levels of fringe construction. If race is the leading factor, then presumably we could find similar patterns in cities and regions with similar racial mixes. This broad approach colors the methodology for various chapters. At times, the comparison is quantitative and systematic. At others, it involves several case studies. In still others, I focus on a single case city with an implicit comparison to other cities in the region. There is no hard and fast definition for the Rust Belt, which is, after all, a colloquialism for the postindustrial landscape of the American Midwest. For this book, I am interested in the large interior cities of the manufacturing belt, so I operationalize it as follows (see figure 0.4). I include all major urban areas (those with over 500,000 people in 2016) in the states bordering the Great Lakes: Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. I eliminate the “gateway cities” of New York and Philadelphia because they are much older and exhibit different building stock and migrant histories. I add two cities whose metropolitan areas spill into the aforementioned

28 4 Introduction

MN

NY Minneapolis

Albany

MI

WI

Rochester Buffalo

Syracuse

Grand Rapids

Madison Milwaukee

Scranton

Detroit

PA

Toledo

Chicago

Akron

Cleveland Youngstown Pittsburgh

OH IN

Allentown Harrisburg Lancaster

Columbus Dayton

Indianapolis Cincinnati

MO

WV

IL

Saint Louis

FIGURE 0.4  Core

Louisville

KY

cities of large metropolitan regions (over 500,000 persons) in the Rust Belt.

states—Louisville and St. Louis—because of their functional similarity with the cities in the putative region. Most of the focus in this book is on the core city of each metropolitan area, but periodically, I also invoke other smaller cities within the Rust Belt such as Flint, Gary, Saginaw, and East St. Louis as examples. No region is monolithic and perfectly distinct from other regions in the country, but the cities of the American Rust Belt exhibit several tendencies that make them an interesting focus for a book on the collision of race, urban decline, and the conservative movement. First, they share broadly common landscape histories. They are large interior cities that experienced their major growth spurt later than coastal cities like New York, Philadelphia, and

Introduction 4 29

Baltimore. The cities of the Rust Belt grew rapidly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the automobile, cheap construction techniques, and expressway construction were transforming the shape of cities. More of Detroit is composed of low-density, wood-frame, single-family housing than, say, Philadelphia. One consequence of this basic difference is that the older coastal cities deteriorated less quickly than interior cities even with similar levels of property abandonment. Baltimore, for example, is filled with fully vacant three-story brick-frame apartment buildings. Quickly built single-family houses in Detroit will, by contrast, deteriorate to the point of inhabitability within a few years. The cities of the Rust Belt also differ somewhat from other American regions in their ethnoracial histories and makeup (table 0.1). Large, central Rust Belt cities all contain either black or white majority populations. Rust Belt cities have lower percentages of residents who consider themselves to be neither black nor white than similarly sized cities in the West and Northeast. Rust Belt central cities have also experienced unusual levels of population decline compared to other regions and the remainder of the United States. Scoping out to the national level, it is also evident that the Rust Belt’s black population is dispersed differently than in other regions. Unlike the West, Northeast, and Northwest, most states in the Rust Belt have higher than average levels of black populations. And unlike the South, where black populations are associated with rural and urban spaces, black populations in the Rust Belt are primarily concentrated in large cities. Thus, the Rust Belt is a place where “inner city,” “blackness,” and population decline can be imagined and deployed politically. Rurality in these states is unusually white, whereas urban settings are unusually black (not mixed or other) compared to other regions. This demographic geography makes it easier to exploit rural/urban differences by polluting them with the language and discourse of racism.

TABLE 0.1 POPULATION CHANGE AND CURRENT DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PRINCIPAL CITIES OF LARGE RUST BELT METROPOLITAN AREAS

Principal City Detroit Harrisburg Cleveland St. Louis Youngstown Cincinnati Rochester Dayton Milwaukee Buffalo Chicago Akron Albany Syracuse Indianapolis Columbus Toledo Pittsburgh Louisville Grand Rapids Minneapolis Lancaster Allentown United States Madison Scranton

Current Demographicsa

Population Change

Black (%) White (%) Neither (%)b

1950 to 2016 (%)

79.7 51.3 50.8 47.9 43.7 43.1 40.9 39.8 39.2 37.3 30.9 30.5 29.9 29.0 28.0 28.0 27.2 24.3 22.9 19.7 18.8 17.1 14.0 12.6 7.0 6.8

13.6 32.6 40.3 45.6 49.1 50.7 46.1 54.9 46.0 48.1 48.7 61.1 55.6 55.3 61.6 61.1 63.5 66.3 70.9 68.3 64.8 58.7 58.8 73.4 78.7 85.0

6.7 16.1 8.9 6.5 7.3 6.2 12.9 5.3 14.8 14.6 20.4 8.5 14.5 15.7 10.5 10.9 9.3 9.5 6.2 12.0 16.4 24.2 27.2 14.0 14.2 8.3

−63.0 −45.1 −57.5 −63.1 −61.3 −40.9 −36.8 −42.1* −6.1 −55.4 −25.0 −27.7 −27.1 −34.6 +98.2* +122.7* −7.5∗ −54.9 +65.7∗ +9.8 −22.4 −7.0 +12.1 +111.4 +156.1∗ −39.2

Sources: American Community Survey, 2012–2016; U.S. Census of Population, 1950. ∗ Cities that grew by over 100 percent of their 1950 land area due to annexation. a Current figures were derived from the ACS five-year estimates for 2012–2016. b This is the percentage that do not self-identify as either black or white. This can be because they are mixed race or because they otherwise do not identify with either black or white as a category.

Introduction 4 31

Finally, and related to this point, the Rust Belt has long been a highly contested political space in the United States (figure 0.5). Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition is often discussed as an electoral juggernaut with wide support across the United States. In fact,

1932–1960

1972–2016

FIGURE 0.5  States

where the presidential election margin was in the lowest quartile (i.e., most competitive) in 1932–1960 and 1972–2016.

Source: Dave Leip Presidential Atlas Custom Datafile Note: Lowest quartile breakpoint was 10.25 percent for 1932–1960 and 11.35 percent for 1972–2016.

32 4 Introduction

support for the coalition was highly uneven. Through voter suppression and extreme loyalty to the Democratic Party, the “Solid South” elected Roosevelt by numbers only seen in organized dictatorships. By contrast, the Northeast was generally Republican (but closely contested), and the western United States more mixed. The civil rights movement dramatically restructured the American electoral map. The South and Northeast increasingly switched roles as zones of support and resistance for the Democratic Party. Most of the midwestern states, by contrast, remained competitive electoral zones. The Rust Belt was home to significant New Deal resistance from rural, nonunionized whites and business leaders. It was also home to substantial support for New Deal labor initiatives, especially when rates of unionization were much higher than they are now. Since the civil rights movement, the generally competitive pattern has remained but further consolidated. White rurality and suburbanity are increasingly associated with the post-CRM Republican Party. Nonwhite urbanity is increasingly associated with the post-CRM Democratic Party. The Rust Belt, in short, was and remains a very contested space. Small shifts in voting numbers, political themes, and strategies in this region have had enormous impact on the wider conservative movement. Because of the demographic makeup of the region, actively framing urban decline as a proxy for black pathology has paid electoral dividends at the state and federal levels.

PART I OTHERING THE DEPRIVED CITY

4

 RACIAL THREAT AND URBAN DECLINE

T

causal links between race and urban decline are not always obvious within the literature. In fact, the bulk of urban decline theory does not focus on race at all. The most common explanation is to pin urban decline on deindustrialization and the lack of economic resilience afterward. Others, particularly conservatives, emphasize the combination of high taxes and poor services that drives people and capital out of the city. Still others emphasize the economic geography of housing markets, particularly central-city house age and obsolescence combined with high levels of suburban house construction. Buyers with options flock to the newer housing with lower maintenance costs on the suburban fringe and away from older houses in the central city. Radical approaches such as the theory of uneven development view the urban landscape as first and foremost a profit-driven template—within this framework matters of race are a proxy for class, if they are mentioned at all. There are elements of truth to these explanations, but they are limited. Detroit, Cleveland, and East St. Louis have indeed been crushed by deindustrialization and have an abundance of poorly built obsolete housing that is difficult to sell in regions that approve so many building permits. The frequent occurrence HE

36 4 Othering the Deprived City

of neighborhoods with extreme housing loss and declining cities more generally closely parallels the concentration of African American people and political power in the Rust Belt. Many scholars note the empirical association between African Americans and distressed cities, but few draw out the linkages between racialization and decline. But simply noting the overrepresentation of one group does not constitute a theoretical explanation of why that association exists. This chapter documents the association and summarizes the theoretical explanations for it. The goal here is to isolate the ways that racial threat has produced or combined with other forces to produce urban decline. My thesis is that the construction of blackness as a threat to white property, political power, and safety has been a fundamental cause of urban decline. Racial threat has manifested in five modalities that will be discussed later in the chapter: (1) the legacy effects of de jure racism, (2) historic and ongoing white flight, (3) the hollow prize of black municipal empowerment, (4) statesanctioned discrimination, and (5) tolerance of private discrimination. Together these forces have translated into what Kristin Perkins and Robert Sampson have deemed “compounded deprivation.” Cities and neighborhoods that are the most African American experience the greatest outflow of capital and (white) people because of these forces. Before reviewing these modalities, the following section summarizes the empirical parallel between blackness and decline.

UNEVEN DECLINE AND BLACKNESS There is no single factor that fully explains all instances of urban decline and its symptoms (land abandonment, job loss, etc.), but there is a clear association between its prevalence and the

Racial Threat and Urban Decline 4 37

location of black populations. Consider the twenty-five largest cities in the Rust Belt (figure 0.4). In total, these cities contain 3,306 census tracts. Across the region, there has been considerable uneven development in the past five decades, but the most acute forms of decline are located where black populations reside in the greatest concentrations. The most rapidly shrinking neighborhood populations are where black residents were most concentrated in 1970 (table 1.1). Neighborhoods that grew were overwhelmingly white in 1970 and 2010. Income decline is also heavily associated with black population concentration (table 1.2). TABLE 1.1 NEIGHBORHOOD POPULATION CHANGE, 1970 TO 2010, CROSS-TABULATED BY PERCENT BLACK IN SELECTED RUST BELT CITIES

Black Population, 1970 Population Change 1970–2010a Extreme shrinkage (n = 1,249) Mild shrinkage (n = 1,250) Mild growth (n = 402) Extreme growth (n = 401)

Medianb Total c

Black Population, 2010

Black Maj.d

Median

Total

Black Maj.

28.7%

46.7%

548

77.9%

60.8%

808

0.3%

7.4%

68

18.8%

32.5%

353

0.2%

3.4%

12

8.8%

16.6%

36

0.5%

4.4%

9

13.0%

20.8%

55

Source: Geolytics Neighborhood Change Database. a All tracts in the twenty-five cities (figure 0.4) were divided into growing and shrinking based on their population changes between 1970 and 2010. The growing tracts (n = 809) and the shrinking tracts (n = 2,497) were then halved to derive “extreme” and “mild” categories. Note: Some census tracts were removed for incomplete data for one or both years. b Median percent black figure of all census tracts in given population change category. c Total aggregated black population in all census tracts in given population change category. d Number of tracts that have >50 percent black populations in given population change category.

Decline (n = 244) Stasis (n = 628) Growth (n = 44) Decline (n = 1,394) Stasis (n = 582) Growth (n = 65) Decline (n = 280) Stasis (n = 43) Growth (n = 13)

Low

20.2% 31.1% 6.4% 0.4% 0.4% 0.7% 0.3% 0.4% 0.2%

Medianc 43.0% 49.9% 33.9% 14.0% 20.8% 7.1% 6.2% 3.3% 0.9%

Total d 90 284 13 142 93 2 11 1 0

Black Maj.e 55.1% 57.6% 14.5% 25.2% 14.7% 2.7% 12.3% 4.1% 2.8%

Median 50.1% 50.2% 15.1% 36.4% 31.2% 7.2% 23.4% 11.4% 6.0%

Total

133 352 8 510 188 4 53 4 0

Black Maj.

2010 Black Population

Source: Geolytics Neighborhood Change Database. a Tracts (with adequate data) were divided into three categories based on their average household income versus the U.S. average in 1970. Low-income tracts were those that were 125 percent of the national average (n = 336). b After separating the tracts by their 1970 income level, they were further subdivided into three categories for each level: (a) decline (tracts whose relative income level had fallen by more than 25 points between 1970 and 2010); (b) stasis (tracts whose relative income change was + or − 25 points); and (c) growth (tracts whose relative income change had grown by over 25 points). c Median percent black figure of all census tracts in given income change category. d Total aggregated black population in all census tracts in given income change category. e Number of tracts that have >50 percent black populations in given income change category.

High

Medium

Income Changeb

Income Levela

1970 Black Population

TABLE 1.2 NEIGHBORHOOD AVERAGE INCOME CHANGE, 1970 TO 2010, CROSS-TABULATED BY PERCENT BLACK IN SELECTED RUST BELT CITIES

Racial Threat and Urban Decline 4 39

Black populations were overwhelmingly concentrated in the poorest neighborhoods in 1970, and they remain so in 2010. The high- and middle-income exceptions are largely in the places where black people have moved since 1970. House value decline, moreover, is highly associated with the presence of black residents (table 1.3). Regardless of the initial 1970 value, neighborhood house value decline is overrepresented in precisely the places to which black people are moving. These patterns are even more pronounced when considering the specific outcome of acute land abandonment. There are at least 269 neighborhoods in the region that have seen more than half of their housing demolished because of land abandonment (figure 1.1). These neighborhoods and the cities in which they are located are overwhelmingly black. The presence of black populations explains extreme land abandonment better than other factors like deindustrialization, suburban fringe growth, and high taxes. Extreme housing loss neighborhoods are significantly more African American than the remainder of those cities. Cities with at least one extreme housing loss neighborhood are significantly more African American than those without one. Blackness and land abandonment are particularly associated in the region no matter what the scale—city or neighborhood. A comparison with similar cities outside of the United States also highlights this relationship. The cities of southern Ontario, for example, have many economic features similar to the American Rust Belt. Ontarian cities have undergone a punishing (and comparable in scope) deindustrialization during the past seventy years. Like their American counterparts, Ontario’s labor force went from being about half manufacturing-oriented in the midtwentieth century to less than 10 percent today. Ontario (and the rest of Canada) also shares a history of hostility toward black citizens. Canada openly favored white over nonwhite immigrants

Decline (n = 156) Stasis (n = 644) Growth (n = 315) Decline (n = 556) Stasis (n = 521) Growth (n = 311) Decline (n = 190) Stasis (n = 101) Growth (n = 140)

HV Changeb 9.9% 6.6% 2.3% 0.5% 0.3% 0.1% 0.3% 0.3% 0.1%

Medianc 41.6% 34.5% 21.9% 16.0% 22.3% 18.0% 5.1% 13.7% 2.4%

Total d 56 195 44 72 94 36 6 9 3

Black Maj.e 75.8% 49.8% 15.3% 61.2% 18.9% 5.4% 14.8% 9.0% 3.6%

Median 61.5% 45.8% 23.8% 52.3% 35.6% 17.6% 23.6% 21.1% 7.3%

Total

105 321 60 312 184 52 31 16 4

Black Maj.

2010 Black Population

Source: Geolytics Neighborhood Change Database. a Tracts (with adequate data) were divided into three categories based on their average owner-occupied house value versus the U.S. average in 1970. Lowvalue tracts were those that were  125 percent of the national average (n = 431). b After separating the tracts by their 1970 house value level, they were further subdivided into three categories for each level: (a) decline (tracts whose relative house values had fallen by more than 25 points between 1970 and 2010); (b) stasis (tracts whose relative house value change was +/− 25 points); and (c) growth (tracts whose relative house value change had grown by over 25 points). c Median percent black figure of all census tracts in given house value change category. d Total aggregated black population in all census tracts in given house value change category. e Number of tracts that have > 50 percent black populations in given house value change category.

High

Medium

Low

Value Levela

1970 Black Population

TABLE 1.3 NEIGHBORHOOD AVERAGE HOUSE VALUE CHANGE, 1970 TO 2010, CROSS-TABULATED BY PERCENT BLACK IN SELECTED RUST BELT CITIES

Racial Threat and Urban Decline 4 41

FIGURE 1.1  Extreme housing loss neighborhood on the near east side of Cleveland, Ohio, 2017. More than 50 percent of the housing in this neighborhood has been demolished since 1970.

Photo credit: Author

until 1967. Racially restrictive covenants were legal in the country until 1951. The Ontario Fair Accommodations Act had to be passed in 1954 to stop towns and businesses in southwestern Ontario from upholding Jim Crow–like strictures, including whites-only lunch counters and sundown laws for black people. The last blacks-only school in Ontario was not closed until 1963 (and 1983 in Nova Scotia). Black Canadians are overrepresented in prison, in the bottom quintile of income, and as the targets for “carding” (police officers accosting citizens without probable cause that a crime has been committed). But while Canada shares these economic and social histories with the United States, there is not a single Canadian city that is as abandoned as Detroit, St. Louis, or Gary. Why?

42 4 Othering the Deprived City

The most meaningful difference between cities in the two countries is the number and concentration of nonwhite people. Canada had very few nonwhite immigrants (by design) before 1967 policy reforms. Even today, the country is only 2.4 percent black. There is no majority-black city in the country. In fact, there is no majority-minority city no matter what group is considered. So while racism in the Canadian Rust Belt is deeply embedded and certainly persists today, it has a smaller economic impact on the population simply because it is directed at a group that is smaller. White flight from nonwhite people has less of an impact if there are fewer nonwhite people from whom to flee. City-suburb tensions certainly exist, but they have not taken on American levels of toxicity in large part because white reaction only applies to a small percentage of the population. In short, black people, black neighborhoods, and black cities are highly associated with conventional measures of decline in the American Rust Belt. There are a number of different approaches to explaining this association.

DENYING RACISM An influential group of scholars and ideologues concede that a spatial relationship exists but strenuously deny a connection to racism. One scholarly paradigm, racial proxy theory, reduces ethnoracial differences to class when observing the parallel between black populations and decline. Another perspective is less a scholarly paradigm than a conservative movement talking point—namely, that black leaders have deliberately sabotaged city fortunes by being too militant, antiwhite, antibusiness, and not sufficiently oppressive to “rioting” populations. Racial proxy theory holds that whites indeed fled neighborhoods that black people were moving to, but it was not because of

Racial Threat and Urban Decline 4 43

internal racial animus. To white people, in-migrating black people were simply a proxy for decline. Whites just made the rational decision to sell their house and move to a different neighborhood after black people moved there, because the latter were “associated” with decline. Thus, racial animus per se does not have a role in decline—it was just a series of class-based calculations. Whites saw black people as proxies for decline, so they fled to protect their investment. Others have applied this logic to the corporate realm to understand why corporations fled black-run cities or treated black citizens differently. Scholars of urban politics have long noted how public and private officials form a “growth machine” or an “urban regime” that effectively governs the city in a way that enhances the conditions for profit in a politically legitimate way. Much of this literature positions the business community as a more or less neutral avatar of profit. When ethnoracial division enters the narrative, capital is routinely framed as passive and inert when it comes to questions of ethnicity or race. Reflecting on the struggles of Gary, Indiana, Neil Kraus and Todd Swanstrom write that “the white business community began leaving the city in large numbers, apparently interpreting solid black political power as a sign of inevitable economic decline.” White businesses, in other words, harbor no core racial animus—they just want to make a profit, and black municipal empowerment was merely a market indicator of a city in decline. In short, this logic acknowledges the correlation between nonwhite people and urban decline but in effect sanitizes the motives of the people and firms that fled the city. Black people—in the case of the Rust Belt—were merely signals of decline. Fleeing whites were simply protecting their material interests by acting in an economically rational way. Conservative activists have approached the connection between decline and blackness differently. Many conservatives strenuously deny or ignore the connection outright, but those

44 4 Othering the Deprived City

who accept it tend to see it as a by-product of a regulated market. Neoliberal figures like Gary Becker and Ayn Rand have long argued that the market was in fact an antidote to racism. If the market is properly obeyed, it should yield an egalitarian society, according to this logic. If decline occurs it must be because of antimarket political forces. Some conservatives have taken this argument further by suggesting that the true problem was black hostility to white people and the market. Black people, they argue, drove whites from cities by committing crime, rioting, and electing “radical” politicians like Detroit’s Coleman Young. These figures in turn sought to drive white people from cities to enhance their electoral success. Conservative activists Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer write about Young: In his 24 years as mayor, Detroit’s Coleman Young drove white residents and businesses out of the city, [similar to how] Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe abused white farmers after his country’s independence, openly encouraging their emigration even at a huge cost to the economy.

Conservatives argue that black mayors like Young were lax on disorder and did not focus sufficiently on criminal justice. They spent too much money on unnecessary services and did not give sufficient attention to firms and middle-class residents. “Incompetent” black Democratic mayors thus built unsafe, disorderly, antibusiness cities that drove hard-working, law-abiding white people to the suburbs. In this conception, black people and politicians are only capable of bitter retroactive animus, while white people are simply rational, race-blind, economic maximizers. While this perspective lacks in logic, empathy, historical accuracy, and support from most academics, it has enormous support amongst conservatives.

Racial Threat and Urban Decline 4 45

URBAN DECLINE AS RACIAL THREAT Denialist arguments are useful to consider for their political impact on the debate about urban decline, but such narratives run counter to a variety of literatures that suggest not only that antiblack racism exists but further that it has meaningful impact on the flow of capital and people to and away from cities. Though this literature is rarely synthesized into a more complete explanation, it is voluminous and available. Combined, these sources offer a compelling explanation for the association between racial threat and urban decline. Blackness has been converted into urban decline through at least five modalities: the legacy effect of the de jure racism period, the impact of historical and continuing white flight, the “hollowing” of municipal government power after black people assume political leadership and demographic dominance, state-sanctioned discrimination in policing, and tolerance of informal discrimination by private actors.

Legacy Effects of de Jure Racism Some of the most iconic areas of contemporary black culture and concentration in the Rust Belt were the original, formally segregated ghettos in those cities. The east sides of Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo, the north sides of Milwaukee and St. Louis, and the south and west sides of Chicago were once formally constructed ghettos. Through a variety of mechanisms such as zoning, steering, redlining, restrictive covenants, and informal racism, these were the only places where black newcomers from the Great Migration were permitted to live. Physical violence was often the consequence for daring to move outside of the formally constructed ghetto. Inside the ghetto, most land was

46 4 Othering the Deprived City

owned by predatory landlords who diced up buildings into small apartments. The only avenue available for homeownership was “contract mortgages”—seller-to-buyer agreements that rarely generated ownership or even equity for the buyer. Federal government rules prohibiting development of racially mixed housing complexes meant that new housing for black people was almost nonexistent. Formal and informal redlining by banks ensured that capital flow to the places black people resided was restricted. Housing that black people occupied deteriorated more quickly because there was little money for repair and upkeep. The juridical framework that allowed, even encouraged, this restriction of capital and white people in black spaces did not begin to dissolve until the mid-twentieth century. Restrictive covenants were the first to fall, in 1948, but other meaningful measures did not emerge until the 1968 Housing Act. It outlawed rental and purchasing discrimination but was kept deliberately weak in terms of enforcement so as not to “overburden” builders and neighborhood groups. Meaningful measures to combat redlining did not emerge until the mid-1970s, notably with the passage of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (1975) and the Community Reinvestment Act (1977). These are important acts in the struggle against housing discrimination, but they occurred less than fifty years ago. The legacy effect argument is that de jure forms of discrimination continue to have a direct impact on the patterns described above because they severely disadvantaged a certain set of neighborhoods and their residents. Thus, white and black neighborhoods emerged from the de jure period of racist housing laws in very different positions. We can interpret current differences as rooted in unfairly different pasts. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the

Racial Threat and Urban Decline 4 47

healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.

Legal housing discrimination severely restricted housing capital and facilitated segregation, which diluted demand by effectively removing these submarkets from the majority population of potential buyers (white people). Black people and cities are burdened with an unequal starting point that only began in the 1960s when de jure discrimination was outlawed (although not very effectively).

White Flight White flight is often presented as a historical matter. As the Great Migration was channeling millions of black people to previously white northern cities, the federal government was subsidizing white flight by building expressways to open distant areas and offering discount mortgages, effectively, to whites only. This is of course an important dimension to current racial geography, but it does not fully explain what has happened since end of the major expressway construction binge and the outlawing of racist mortgage insurance practices by the federal government. Though there is some evidence for regional racial desegregation since the 1960s, there is parallel evidence of sustained or even worsening racial isolation at other scales of analysis. Black-majority cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Gary, and East St. Louis are now composed of higher percentages of black people than they were fifty years ago. Extreme housing loss neighborhoods, similarly, are now on average more African American than they were in 1970. What accounts for the persistence of white-black separation in a post–de jure legal

48 4 Othering the Deprived City

environment? Racial proxy theorists argue that it is not about race per se but rather that black neighborhoods and people have “accumulated deficits” of housing deterioration and discrimination. White people reacting to the movement of black people to their neighborhood are thus merely being economically rational agents. Beyond the very serious question of how this equation of blackness with decline is not itself a self-fulfilling act of racism, serious multivariate research suggests it is also inaccurate. Researchers have controlled for differences in the physical environment and for the class makeup of new and longer-term residents and found that white residents are not just acting as postracial economic automatons. Samuel Kye, for example, found that even after controlling for economic class, whites are still likely to flee when black people move to their neighborhoods. This pattern is even more pronounced in middle-class neighborhoods than in poorer ones. Jackelyn Hwang and Robert Sampson have found, moreover, that the presence of black people is the most persistent and effective repellant for (white) gentrification in Chicago today. The most-declining neighborhoods in the Rust Belt are now more African American than they were before. Integrating inner-suburban areas like Ferguson, Missouri (a suburb of St. Louis) are exhibiting patterns similar to those of integrating inner-city neighborhoods in the 1950s. Qualitative researchers have also found the persistence of white resistance to residence near black people. Matthew Desmond, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book Evicted, notes the fear and disappointment of his white (very poor) respondents when he informs them that he is moving to Milwaukee’s majority-black North Side. In one memorable passage when he reveals to one of his white subjects (Larraine)—who incidentally was living in an incredibly impoverished, crime-ridden, all-white trailer park in South Milwaukee—that he was moving

Racial Threat and Urban Decline 4 49

to the city’s almost-all-black North Side, she and others became immediately concerned for his safety: If moving to the North Side initially confused Woo, it deeply disturbed my neighbors in the trailer park. When I told Larraine, she nearly cried. “No, Matt. You don’t know how dangerous it is.” Beaker chimed in: “They don’t cotton to white folks over there.”

Elsewhere in the book, Desmond details the lengths to which even the most economically and socially marginalized white people would go to avoid living on Milwaukee’s North Side themselves. To his in-group white subjects, nothing was considered lower than living with poor black people, so all desperately avoided this fate if they could. Civil rights–era laws were premised on prohibiting discrimination—that is, on making it illegal to keep blacks and other nonwhites from moving to white spaces. Outlawing this kind of discrimination is difficult and incomplete but possible. Outlawing white flight is much more difficult, probably impossible. And yet it is this impulse—white exit at the first sign that a neighborhood is becoming nonwhite—that likely has more of an impact on overall segregation patterns than any other single force. Most whites now broadly agree with abstract integrationist ideas (in surveys), but when faced with actual residential choices they are by and large still inclined to move when nonwhite people reach a certain population threshold. White people are still the vast majority in all midwestern states. Regardless of their reasoning, if the majority population is committed to not living near, being schooled with, or even interacting with the largest minority group—black people—there is a collapse of effective demand in precisely the most African American spaces. White resistance to black presence is not just a historical

50 4 Othering the Deprived City

matter; it is active, ongoing, and pervasive. And it is a key contributor to urban decline.

The Hollow Prize of Black Political Ascendance Until the 1940s, the vast majority of African Americans still lived in the rural South. But as that began to change with the Great Migration, substantial black urban settlements began to form (or expand) in Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Gary, and Chicago, among other places. Racial progressives openly pondered whether political change would occur in such places once black people became the demographic majority. Majority (or large plurality) black populations emerged in several cities and in some cases led to black elected leadership. But while black voters were successful at electing black mayors, the hope of black political ascendance remained largely unachieved. Black political control provoked an intense reaction by white residents, higher levels of government, and corporations. Political scientists have deemed this arc the “hollow prize,” because assuming leadership of municipal government has not meaningfully increased black political power. If anything, it may have isolated it further. There are different explanations for this. Perhaps the most benign and structural is that black leadership only emerged in the most economically damaged places that were already on their way to urban decline. Others have gone further, comparing the situation to de jure indirect rule wherein white racial animus continues to treat black people and cities according to a different set of rules. Ironically, because of white suspicion, the first (and second) wave of black mayors led unusually business-focused regimes dedicated to growth and a “healthy business climate.” But no matter how accommodating the black leadership structure—and

Racial Threat and Urban Decline 4 51

it was often more accommodating than the white liberal predecessors in places like Detroit, Atlanta, and New Orleans—they were and continue to be framed as “anti-business.” This framing deeply influences the way other governments and firms approach the black city. The hollowing and marginalization of the black city have taken three important forms: suburban governmental resistance to regionalization, state-level marginalization, and corporate mistreatment of the black city. As white suburbs were forming and becoming more politically powerful in the 1950s and 1960s, central cities were beginning to actively campaign for regionalization and annexation. The argument of older central cities was that most jobs were still located there and suburban municipalities were filled with people who were unfairly using central-city infrastructure without paying into the property tax rolls used to service it. Moreover, as white, middle-class populations suburbanized, inner-core locations became poorer, thus requiring more expensive social services at precisely the time that their budgets were under assault by white flight. Most white municipalities on the fringe of cities responded to such regional overtures with hostility. Paul Friesema predicted this in 1969 when he wrote, “As municipal boundaries become racial boundaries, the current system of relatively easy inter-jurisdictional cooperation and adjustment is likely to disappear.” And indeed it did within the American system of “defensive localism” wherein municipalities are structurally forced, in a virtual zero-sum game with fellow regional cities, to attract as many tax-paying, service-light residents (i.e., wealthy people) and repel as many low-tax-paying, service-heavy residents (i.e., poor people) as possible. Suburban municipalities eventually began to band together to control schooling, water, and transportation policy agendas to the detriment of the core city. Regional public transit is a common point of contention.

52 4 Othering the Deprived City

Suburban areas like Macomb County, for example, continue to resist any attempt to build a regional bus system that might allow the majority African American residents of Detroit to access job centers outside of the city. A strongly related force has been the marginalization of the black city by state legislatures. It is sometimes forgotten that while places like Detroit and Cleveland are majority black, they are surrounded by states that are overwhelmingly white. As suburbs grew, they became vote-rich targets for politicians. As Friesema predicted fifty years ago, As Negroes assume positions of political power within municipal governments, it seems altogether probable that state legislatures, mostly whites representing other whites, will become even less interested in providing funds or other aids to cities. . . . Influential whites will be in suburban pastures, and city Negroes will have only a small and politically ineffective voice in state legislatures. Without large numbers of politically effective whites living in the same cities with many of the same problems and demands, Negroes will be without allies in the struggle for state support. State legislatures will simply have little political reason to be responsive—their support will come from suburbia and the balance of the state.

Black-majority inner cities have been pathologized for political gain. Outstate politicians in Michigan and Ohio have often run against the state’s main city. Running against the “excesses,” “incompetence,” or “corruption” in Detroit or Cleveland can be a powerful political vehicle for residents running in virtually allwhite rural and suburban counties elsewhere in the state. Invoking such cities became a barely concealed dog whistle to justify social austerity, intensified policing, and cultural marginalization.

Racial Threat and Urban Decline 4 53

Governments are not the only institutions to marginalize the black city. The virtual and literal redlining by private firms and their leaders has arguably been more important. First, mortgage providers have famously treated black people and spaces differently from white people and spaces. As Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data reveal, these differences cannot be easily reduced to class or some anodyne assessment of risk. Banks targeted black people and communities in pernicious ways, including the infiltration of black church networks to build trust. They sold deceptive mortgages to poor black people more frequently than they did to poor white people. When these banks were sued by the government, some of the execrable behavior was revealed, including Wells Fargo employees referring to black clients as “mud people” behind closed doors. The collective effect of sustained redlining has been the constriction of capital allotment in black spaces. This has translated into more rapid deterioration, equity erosion, and house value decline. Though there is more data available to prove it, banks are not the only private institutions to treat black people and urban spaces differently from white ones. Corporations fled cities almost as rapidly as white residents did in the 1960s and 1970s. Black cities were decimated by the flight of jobs and capital. The knee-jerk equation of black people with economic decline became a self-fulfilling prophesy as large institutions effectively redlined nonwhite spaces. The flight was often hasty and without serious regard for underlying business dynamics. Thus it was “path-breaking” in 1995 that Harvard business economist Michael Porter had to remind businesses that there were business opportunities in the inner city (using the very basic justification that people and profit were located there). The fact that trained businesspeople had to be reminded of such obvious details like “inner cities can offer a competitive edge to companies that benefit

54 4 Othering the Deprived City

from proximity to downtown business districts, logistical infrastructure, entertainment or tourist centers, and concentrations of companies,” speaks to the depth (and lack of subtlety) of business resistance to the inner city. But while fleeing businesses certainly did their share of damage, it is arguable that remaining businesses did the most damage to the black city’s economic prospects. Most first-wave black mayors (e.g., in Detroit, Atlanta, New Orleans, Gary, and Cleveland) were preceded by white (Keynesian-managerial) mayors who actually regulated the business community as a way to demonstrate loyalty to their working-class black constituencies. And business elites generally accepted this because they needed the legitimacy of city hall to push through their own agendas. But once black mayors began to take charge, the tone of this interaction changed sharply. Elites went from inviting progressive (white) elected leadership to be part of their social clubs, supporting their reelections, and actively negotiating in good faith for economic development projects to penning hostile editorials, supporting primary opponents, and publicly referring to black mayors like New Orleans’s Marc Morial and Detroit’s Coleman Young as “arrogant,” “incompetent,” or “uppity to whites.” If complicated deals were struck with a black city hall—like GM’s work with Coleman Young on Poletown, or the Atlanta business community’s work with Maynard Jackson on the construction of Hartsfield Airport— the terms were rarely beneficial to black residents, and lucrative giveaways to business were not reciprocated with goodwill and support from the business community. With time, regime theorists began to pin the problem on the lack of negotiating ability in the black city hall, but this onus is dubious, not least because early black regimes were more business friendly than their white predecessors. The white business establishment, by

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contrast, was simply less willing to negotiate in good faith with the black city hall. In short, once black people became the dominant political force and demographic in Rust Belt cities, they were immediately treated differently by white governments and firms. These acts hastened the flow of people and capital from the cities and neighborhoods where black people were most numerous and concentrated.

State-Sanctioned Discrimination There are a variety of ways in which statecraft has produced (and continues to produce) unequal outcomes for black and white people. Michael Sances and Hye You find greater penalty fees in black cities run by white politicians. One of the major points of contention during the 2014 uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, was the high dependence on traffic tickets and other fines as a source of revenue for the black-majority (but white-led) town. This differential use of state power is justified by ongoing territorial stigmatization. Black urban spaces are “problematic,” “dangerous” spaces that need to be dealt with using state force. As Elijah Anderson writes, For the larger society, from the nightly news and media reports of rampant black-on-black crime and at times from close observation of black people in public, images of the black ghetto loom large. Here, the ghetto becomes intensely more iconic, symbolized as a distressed place to which blacks have been relegated to live apart from the larger society, thereby encouraging a universally low opinion of blacks as a racial category. . . . Thus, not only does the physical ghetto persist, but it also has become a highly

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negative icon in American society and culture, serving increasingly as a touchstone for prejudice, a profound source of stereotypes, and a rationalization for discrimination against black people in general.

By contrast, distressed white spaces are more frequently treated with empathy. There is no clearer or more influential form of this than the differential practices and outcomes in policing and incarceration. The overincarceration of America is, in large part, driven by a particular construction and pathologization of the “black inner city.” In the wake of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the United States has increasingly dealt with urban disorder through incarceration. To conservatives and even many moderates, the argument was (and remains) that the CRM and racial uprisings represented a breakdown of social order and that it was the job of the government—law enforcement in particular—to restore order. Order restoration has become an unquestioned political goal among Democrats and Republicans who continue to compete with one another on how strong on crime they can be. Six decades on, the United States now incarcerates 716 out of 100,000 citizens—roughly seven times the rate of similar societies like Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and France. Through differential sentencing (e.g., crack cocaine versus powder cocaine) and geographically targeted policing, black people are incarcerated at an astonishing 2,306 per 100,000. Black men are more likely to be convicted and to serve a longer sentence than white men for the same crime. While pathologized black men from inner-city neighborhoods are incarcerated, disenfranchised, and made virtually unemployable, some outstate communities become the political and economic beneficiaries of the prison industrial complex. Through prison gerrymandering, states are permitted to count prisoners as residents even though they are

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not from the area in which they are being incarcerated and in any case are not allowed to vote even if they were. In Michigan alone, this has translated into at least five state senate seats (all Republican and majority-white) that exist only because they are permitted to count nonresident, disenfranchised prisoners who are incarcerated in their district. Disparities in sentencing are built on an organized pathologization of the black inner city in relation to ostensibly Edenic conditions in the white community. This double standard drives differential policies that harm African American people and spaces more than white people. When heroin was primarily a black inner-city drug (as it was in the late 1960s), it was framed as a public menace that needed to be eradicated through force. Detroit’s famous STRESS police unit brutally preyed upon the city’s residents in the early 1970s to eradicate it. And, of course, this approach continued in the 1980s when crack cocaine was ravaging black urban spaces. Governments at all levels dealt with this as a public safety threat and incarcerated millions of black men to address it. Now that heroin and the connected opioid crisis are primarily a problem for white, rural America, they are being recast more sympathetically as a “public health crisis” (which, of course, it is, just as the crack cocaine crisis was in the 1980s). Such practices and laws actively support the continued flight of capital and people out of spaces filled with citizens who cannot vote, work in the formal sector, or rent an apartment from a reputable landlord. The incarceration wave is built on white reaction to black disorder. By definition, it has more of an impact in places where black people are numerically and politically dominant. These forms of policing disproportionately undermine employment and housing outcomes for black people in such locations. This cycle of state scrutiny is difficult to overcome, and recidivism rates remain high.

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Tolerance of Discrimination by Private Forces Though it is expensive and difficult to prove, researchers continue to find copious evidence of employment and housing discrimination toward black and other nonwhite people by private firms. State action is not involved per se, but the absence of state action in an ostensibly color-blind society is notable. There is little appetite to tackle these issues or strengthen existing law. In fact, the reverse is true: conservative courts and state legislatures have actually weakened extant discrimination laws. These forms of discrimination have obvious and tangible impact on the employment, wealth, and location decisions of those affected. Because racial discrimination is nominally illegal and socially unacceptable, it is difficult to prove—most discriminators deny its existence vehemently for one or both reasons. The most persuasive evidence of its existence thus comes in the form of audit studies—furtive field experiments in which equally qualified people of different races ask for a mortgage, apartment, or some type of purchase. Two applications of these studies are particularly relevant for the connection with urban decline—housing and employment—as they speak directly to the collective outcomes of cities where ethnoracial minorities are concentrated. Audits have been completed to assess housing discrimination in part because the 1968 Housing Act placed the burden for proving discrimination on the renter/client, rather than the landlord/bank. The most comprehensive audit was commissioned by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2000. The study included 5,500 paired tests of discrimination in thirty U.S. metropolitan areas. Along with other, single-city studies, this research revealed systemic racism toward nonwhites in a variety of locations. As Devah Pager and

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Hana Shepherd wrote in their review of this and other similar studies, “Measured discrimination took the form of less information offered about units, fewer opportunities to view units, and in the case of home buyers, less assistance with financing and steering into less wealthy communities and neighborhoods with a higher proportion of minorities.” Moreover, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act studies have revealed systemic differences in loan denials between black and white applicants. The most comprehensive of these studies found that nonwhite applicants experienced loan denials 82 percent more often than similarly qualified white people after controlling for a variety of variables. Because these acts of discrimination are nominally illegal, real estate professionals and landlords are careful to code their language. In a recent ethnography of the homebuying process in Houston, Elizabeth Korver-Glenn uncovered an intricate dance in which real estate agents figured out ways of communicating the ethnoracial makeup of neighborhoods to white clients who had expressed a desire to avoid living near black people. She found, moreover, the continuing use of racial stereotypes by agents, appraisers, underwriters, and lenders that had the aggregate effect of maintaining segregation and suppressing house value (and appreciation trajectories) for nonwhite residents. All of this discrimination was carefully coded so as to be difficult to challenge legally. These acts of discrimination have an obvious human rights dimension, but they also directly affect urban decline insofar as they restrict capital allocation to black people and spaces. Employment discrimination also continues to be a serious problem in the United States. Most corporations and conservatives deny that such discrimination exists. Many insist that the reverse is true—namely, that firms discriminate against white applicants to hire black people—but audits reveal a different

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story. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan sent equally qualified mock résumés (differing only in the name of the applicant) to prospective employers. One set of applicants had stereotypically black names (e.g., Lakisha, Aisha, Jamal, Darnell), while another had stereotypically white names (e.g., Allison, Emily, Brad, Greg). In other experiments, black and white actors were used to apply for jobs in person with identical résumés. In perhaps the most famous study of this sort, Devah Pager found that white testers with an ostensible criminal record were more likely to receive a job interview than black testers without a record. In all of these studies, researchers found that employers were significantly more likely to call back and offer jobs to apparently white candidates than to apparently black applicants. Though obviously impactful to any individual subject to such bias, these processes have a disproportionate income and house-value impact on cities that are home to more black people. Conservatives fight any intervention that might impede the “liberty” of private firms and landlords to make their own decisions. They have actively rolled back, weakened, and diluted the legislation that exists at the local level. The lack of will to create effective policing and enforcement of these forms of discrimination has allowed it to occur without meaningful risk of penalty. These two realms, housing and employment, are particularly relevant to the issue of urban decline as they translate directly into differential levels of wealth, residential opportunities, and income trajectories. American Rust Belt urban decline is complicated and multifaceted. No single factor explains every manifestation of decline within the region. But it is also undeniably true that its uneven appearance parallels the variation in black populations as much as any other factor. Some scholars and activists have dismissed

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a causal link, insisting that race is merely a proxy for class, or that it was black animus toward white people, not the reverse, that produced such outcomes. These explanations fly in the face of serious research that not only documents an empirical link but also explains it. Broadly, these literatures highlight that the construction of blackness as threatening to white safety, political power, and property has been converted into five modalities that produce urban decline. First, the legacy effect of decades of legal discrimination against black people has residual impacts in the least-white cities. Second, the ongoing refusal of white people to live near meaningful concentrations of black people has eroded housing demand and commercial viability in black spaces. Third, municipal political power ascendance by black populations has been met with business flight, suburban hostility, and austerity from the state. Fourth, targeted policing and revenue-collection methods have impaired the economic lives of black people and spaces more than white citizens. Finally, the juridical tolerance of ongoing discrimination by private firms has left unchecked discriminatory behavior that undermines the equity, earning power, and economic lives of black people. Together, these modalities contribute to a compounded deprivation that affects African American people and spaces more than white people and spaces. These forces work both independently and in combination with otherwise nonracial factors like deindustrialization and overproduction of housing in the suburban fringe to produce urban decline—the flight of people and capital from urban space. Race is an underreported and underappreciated dimension of urban decline. But by the same token, the connection between blackness and urban decline is much more than a series of theories that explain the production of real urban decline. Declining cities and spaces are also actively imagined as proxies for blackness.

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The next two chapters detail how this connection has been produced, enhanced, and exploited by conservatives for political gain. The black city, like black people, has been systematically othered by the conservative movement. Above all, and despite the role of white reaction, conservatives have rolled out a set of urbandecline explanations that affirmatively pin the problem on individual black failure and pathology.

 URBAN DECLINE AS CONSERVATIVE BONDING CAPITAL

T

conservative movement is the dominant political force in American politics today. Though it has obviously had the greatest impact on the Republican Party and its institutions, the movement has infected both major political parties. Most national Democrats shy away from sounding too progressive on issues of race, criminal justice, and taxes, among other areas, even when they win decisively. The Overton window has been pulled decisively to the right. Even during wave election years, Democrats govern conservatively within this framing (many quite willingly, because they are themselves conservative). Republicans, by contrast, govern with utter confidence in matters such as regulation and taxation even when they have small majorities, in part because they know their coalition will hold together. Conservatives have successfully framed taxes as theft and welfare as a giveaway to the undeserving. These assumptions frame policy construction at all levels of government in the United States today. These assumptions were not always as dominant as they are now. Prior to the 1960s, the New Deal coalition led an expansionist agenda of government spending and regulation in many areas. How did such a shift occur? The dominant explanation within HE

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the social sciences is the rise of neoliberalism. “Neoliberals” were obscure economists in the 1940s and 1950s who wrote for limited audiences and were generally not influential in policy. But with the economic shocks of the 1970s and the proactive involvement of corporate leaders to promote these once obscure ideas, conservative political figures like Ronald Reagan were provided the opening they needed to institute a fundamental shift away from the Keynesian-interventionist model. There are certainly compelling elements to this narrative, but there are also limitations. First, the core tenets of neoliberalism—antiwelfarism, antitaxation, antiregulation—were part of the Republican response to the New Deal well before the rise of those obscure economists. President Herbert Hoover, whom Franklin D. Roosevelt initially defeated in 1932, was an advocate of laissez-faire economics. Roosevelt’s opponents ran directly against his social democratic policies using the same language that figures like Margaret Thatcher and Reagan would later use. Barry Goldwater’s manifesto The Conscience of a Conservative called for the complete reversal of New Deal interventions on neoliberal grounds. “The government,” he wrote, “must begin to withdraw from a whole series of programs that are outside its constitutional mandate—from social welfare programs, education, public power, agriculture, public housing, urban renewal and all the other activities that can be better performed by lower levels of government or by private institutions or by individuals.” He penned these words more than a decade prior to the economic crises of the 1970s, the acceptance of figures like Friedrich Hayek as mainstream, and the election of figures like Reagan. Second, and related, the message and purpose of the neoliberal/libertarian wing of the conservative movement are unpopular. Most conservatives actually shy away from explicating their austerity plans until they reach office (and even then they do it

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quietly). Thus, it is dubious to suggest that neoliberal ideas themselves simply gained authority. In their purest form, they are a threat to electoral dominance. Third, neoliberal ideas directly contradict other core ideational tenets and institutions of the wider conservative movement. The scaling back of state expenditures collides with the impulses of foreign-policy hawks arguing for an interventionist (and expensive) American military. The goal of removing or radically reducing social welfare directly contradicts the impulse of some religious conservatives to be compassionate to the poor. To understand the power to impose organized deprivation we need a better understanding of what gives the wider conservative movement its power. How, in particular, is it able to have such electoral and institutional power while being associated with such an unpopular idea (austerity)? How, moreover, have conservative activists been able to bridge the differences between the various factions of the movement? Questions of this type routinely point to William F. Buckley’s fusion movement in the 1950s. Buckley was editor of the conservative National Review at the time. Recognizing that conservatives were fractured and ineffective in the face of the New Deal juggernaut, he called for the movement to build what modern sociologists would call “bonding capital”—themes, ideas, and strategies that build in-group cohesion. Buckley’s intervention was among the first, but simply wishing for cohesion is rarely sufficient for achieving it (just ask progressives). Social-science scholars have pointed to several dominant methods conservatives have used to build bonding capital. First, they have made a conscious effort to build different rationales for common projects. For example, the dismantling of welfare is a position that libertarians are very comfortable with, but evangelicals are generally not (at least not framed in that way). Through conscious organizing, conservatives have been able to build different rationales for the same outcome

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(dismantling welfare). For libertarians and deficit hawks, it is easy—such programs cost money and cutting them will reduce the size of the state. But for evangelicals, it has involved a more intricate effort to place such efforts within their self-defined value set. It has included highlighting “neoliberal” passages in the Bible and reframing the alternative (government funding) as an assault on evangelical efforts. This strategy has involved idea entrepreneurs like Marvin Olasky and formal policy efforts like the FaithBased Initiative of the George W. Bush years. A second method is to facilitate cohesion by constructing and advertising common enemies. During the mid-twentieth century, when conservatives were in the political wilderness, the common enemies were communism, the Soviet Union, and the New Deal. And thus, public officials and activists (e.g., the John Birch Society) railed against these common enemies in part to mask the lower-order differences within the conservative movement. The common-enemy method is more tenuous when elements of the coalition or movement have fundamentally different positions about whether something or someone is an enemy at all. In such situations, it becomes necessary to perfect the art of dogwhistle politics—messaging that can simultaneously speak to two very different factions of a political movement. The language of dog whistle politics has been most commonly applied to issues of race. Race is a potentially divisive issue for the conservative movement insofar as it (the CM) is composed of two groups whose self-conceptions are very different on the matter. On the one hand, the CM has captured disaffected former Democrats who resent the racial progress of African Americans during and since the 1960s (hereafter the “racially resentful”). On the other hand, the movement has retained (and captured) a sizeable fraction of voters whose self-conception is that they are not racists— they simply dislike regulation and taxes. Members of the latter

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group have convinced themselves that they have no racial animus, so overtly racist statements by “their” politicians challenge their self-conception (hereafter the “racially anxious”). To reach both groups without alienating either, conservatives have had to perfect messaging that can be heard as sufficiently racist by one audience but sufficiently deniable by the other. This chapter details how the images and ideas of urban decline have been deployed to build bonding capital among conservatives around issues of race. The very spaces that were generated by white reaction are deployed to provoke a further reaction politically. The concept and image of the “pathological inner city” is a carefully constructed vehicle for communicating racial animus. I argue that declining urban spaces have been and continue to be used as a dog-whistle technique to fuse two elements of the conservative movement: the racially resentful voter and the racially anxious voter. This method has been particularly influential at transforming the political landscape of the Rust Belt and framing state and local policy interventions.

THE RACIAL REALIGNMENT OF AMERICAN POLITICS The organized construction and dissemination of the concept of the “pathological inner city” both emerged from and has contributed to the broader racial realignment of politics in the United States in the past century. To understand its importance, it is useful to return to some basic history of race and political party affiliation. The election of Roosevelt in 1932 and the creation of the New Deal coalition for the Democratic Party is one of the most important pivot points in twentieth-century American politics. By defeating Hoover, Roosevelt not only beat his Republican

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opponent, he also laid the foundation for a fundamental expansion and restructuring of national governance. It was a “great transformation” away from the laissez-faire governance of the previous century. With this political coalition, Roosevelt and Democratic Party allies instituted a wide range of labor, housing, and Social Security benefits, and a suite of regulations against corporate power and abuse. The New Deal coalition instituted Keynesian managerialism as the dominant mode of governance until the 1970s, but the unsavory truth to this narrative is that they achieved this dominance with the support of the most institutionally racist segment of the country, southern Democrats. Southern states were, by far, the most loyal to the Democratic Party between the 1930s and 1960s. In 1932, for example, more than 80 percent of voters in Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas and more than 90 percent of Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina voted for Roosevelt. These margins only increased in 1936—the electoral high-water mark for Roosevelt. Without the support of the “Solid South,” the New Deal would not have been. Roosevelt faced a much more mixed electorate elsewhere in the country, including the Midwest. To appease southern Democrats, the federal government promised to tread lightly when it came to desegregation, and for the duration of the Roosevelt administration this political arrangement held. But this system began to crumble during World War II with the convergence of several forces. Most important, black people began to move in droves during the second Great Migration to northern cities desperately in need of labor for the war machine. No longer confined to agricultural work in the South, African Americans also became more difficult to exclude from programs like Social Security. Northern black people became numerous enough to start provoking northern Democrats to consider running explicitly pro–civil rights political campaigns. The first meaningful

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gesture toward black civil rights led by a Democrat was President Harry Truman’s desegregation of the army in 1948. Southern Democrats were so angry they began to immediately defect, first in the form of running Strom Thurmond for president in 1948—a former Democrat, running on the newly formed segregationist States’ Rights Democratic Party ticket. The Democratic Party embrace of civil rights accelerated and expanded considerably in the 1960s with the three major legislative acts of what some have deemed the Second Reconstruction: the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. As President Lyndon Johnson, a southern Democrat himself (but one responsible for this legislation) predicted, this agenda would alienate the whites across the country but particularly in the South. The 1960s were the seedbed of a racial realignment in the United States. Increasingly, racially resentful whites migrated from the Democratic to the Republican Party. Republicans entered the 1930s in a very different position from Democrats vis-à-vis questions of race. The Republican Party was then the home of black voters. Most black people still lived in the South and supporting a segregationist party deeply involved in lynching and other violence was not an option. And Republicans still had the residual appeal of being the “party of Lincoln”—the party that outlawed slavery. But in terms of policy, Republicans were not really activists for black voters. Black people were less than 11 percent of the national population in 1930. Most were living in southern states and thus formally disenfranchised, so they were not a large voting bloc. Gestures of support toward the black community were largely symbolic. When it came to actual policy, most Republican outreach efforts were incomplete, bad-faith reminders that southern Democrats (some of whom were now in the presidential administration) were racists. Thus, in 1936, the first major election after the institution of first-wave

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New Deal policies, the Republican Party ran on a platform of reversing Roosevelt’s popular initiatives. To reach black voters, Republicans argued that the racist limitations on Works Progress Administration (WPA) and other jobs were part of an effort to give whites gainful employment and turn blacks into paupers. “We condemn the present New Deal policies,” said Francis Rivers, a black Republican attorney from New York City who campaigned in 1936, “which would regiment and ultimately eliminate the colored citizen from the country’s productive life, and make him solely a ward of the federal government.” Of course, the challenge for Republicans running on this platform was that they were not offering a meaningful chance at gainful employment either. They were running on a laissez-faire platform of selfhelp and deregulation—what might be called neoliberal today. So, while WPA jobs and other New Deal benefits were indeed discriminatory, some black people were getting relief in the form of welfare and employment through new government agencies and were deeply appreciative of them. Other black people, particularly those moving north, aspired to these jobs and benefits. Being second in line for jobs was preferred to having no line at all. The Republican approach thus fell flat, and Roosevelt went on to an electoral landslide in 1936. For the first time in American history, a Democratic president received a majority of black votes. The Republican Party continued to reflexively run against the popular New Deal and remained in the political wilderness for twenty years, losing five straight national presidential elections. Their base of support was largely confined to rural nonsouthern whites and much of the northeastern United States. But as the Democratic Party openly embraced a civil rights agenda in the 1960s, Republican activists saw an opportunity to capture disaffected white southern voters. The “Solid South” was no more—the aforementioned vote margins for Democrats were

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tightening with each successive election, creating an opportunity for Republicans to realign the national electorate. Republicans began to organize in the South for the first time since the Civil War in an attempt to reach the alienated southern white voter. Their efforts were slow and struggled against the headwinds of national Republican leaders still expressing nominal support for civil rights. President Dwight Eisenhower’s desegregation order won him a majority of the black vote but continued to sow hostility in the South for Republicans. Similarly, Richard Nixon’s first campaign in 1960 involved significant outreach on the issue of civil rights, complicating the party’s effort to be a replacement for segregationist Democrats. To capture disaffected segregationists, the Republicans would have to take a harder, more unequivocal line on civil rights. The first expression of this was in the Republican primaries of 1964. George Wallace (a former Democrat) ran in them and won shocking numbers not only in the South but in the white-immigrant cities and suburbs of the manufacturing belt. Republicans, unsure of how to capture this wave, nominated an angry conservative radical, Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act earlier in the year. Goldwater ran on a platform of states’ rights and won five southern states but was routed overall by Johnson. In losing, however, the seeds were planted for a racial realignment of American politics. Black people were incensed at the nomination of Goldwater and have since voted nationally for Democrats in large numbers. White disaffection with the Democratic Party, meanwhile, intensified during the 1960s. Uprisings throughout the country and continued civil rights legislation drove more whites to the Republican Party. Wallace ran as an independent in 1968 and won 13.5 percent of the vote, five southern states, and, perhaps most surprising, high vote totals in the white areas surrounding northern industrial cities. Nixon ran a subtler campaign of

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“law and order” but could not make inroads in the South without more overt gestures to racial resentment. So, in 1972, Nixon and his team devised the “Southern Strategy” to capture racially resentful Wallace voters by invoking themes and language that worked as dog whistles. In an infamous, oft-quoted interview from 1981, Nixon advisor Lee Atwater explained how the Southern Strategy worked to convert Wallace voters into permanent Republicans. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” he stated. By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires—so you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff., And you’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a by-product of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me? Because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut taxes and we want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’ So any way you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.

Nixon is often credited with this noxious Southern Strategy, but it was arguably Reagan who perfected the approach in 1980. States like Alabama and Mississippi were still virtually evenly divided between Democrat and Republican voters at the end of the 1970s. Only a few days removed from the Republican convention, Reagan and his aides made the decision to visit two controversial sites to kick off the campaign. In the first of these, on August 3, 1980, Reagan visited the Neshoba County Fair, a few

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miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi. Philadelphia was infamous as the place where three activists were murdered in 1964 while trying to register black people to vote. National politicians had avoided the Neshoba County Fair since the murders because it was still such a stain on the country’s conscience. But Reagan not only visited the fair, he gave a provocative states’ rights speech. “I believe in states’ rights,” he yelled to the all-white crowd, I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

The dark genius of the strategy was that it achieved what Republicans had been trying to figure out since the implosion of the Goldwater campaign. By invoking states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Reagan was able to reassure white reactionaries that the Republican Party could be trusted, while using language that white moderates could insist was simply about arcane constitutional matters. The Washington Post’s William Raspberry reflected on the sinister significance of that visit: Countless observers have noted that Reagan took the Republican Party from virtual irrelevance to the ascendancy it now enjoys. The essence of that transformation, we shouldn’t forget, is the party’s successful wooing of the race-exploiting Southern Democrats formerly known as Dixiecrats. And Reagan’s Philadelphia appearance was an important bouquet in that courtship.

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The next day Reagan and his aides flew to New York City to visit the National Urban League and execute a carefully orchestrated campaign stop in the South Bronx. His visit to the National Urban League was met with cold silence—the trip to Philadelphia was seen as a symbolic assault on the civil rights movement. Next, his campaign headed to Charlotte Street in the South Bronx for a photo op. When Reagan emerged from his limo, he found a podium that had been placed in front of an abandoned building with the word “DECAY” spray-painted on the side (figure 2.1). The stagecraft had been curated by Reagan’s New York City campaign chair, Roger Stone. Joining Reagan and his aides were several dozen reporters with their cameras and several hundred angry local residents. After a carefully orchestrated tour of the vacant lot he was visiting, he stepped to the podium to pin the very visible decline of the area on his opponent,

FIGURE 2.1  Candidate

Ronald Reagan visits the ruins of Charlotte Street in the South Bronx, August 6, 1980.

Photo credit: Bettmann/Getty Images©, reprinted with permission

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President Jimmy Carter. He promised nothing in the way of funds to rebuild the Bronx. He offered only derision for the idea that government could do anything but make such matters worse. Carter and government intervention have failed you, Reagan argued. He was there to promise tax cuts for developers and the “opportunity” for local residents to pull themselves out of poverty without government help—organized deprivation. The idea that overintervention leads to urban decay is an axiom among conservatives but not among residents of such places or nonconservative scholars. Above all, places like the South Bronx had been decimated by private forces for decades—white people fleeing to the suburbs, predatory building owners torching their holdings to collect an insurance check, and banks who refused to lend there. Government intervention had almost no role in the production of abandonment in these areas. Not only is the United States one of the least-taxed and least-interventionist wealthy societies on earth, its welfare state is among the stingiest. The predominant trajectory of government involvement in the South Bronx of 1980 was in fact withdrawal. The city was still experiencing the “planned shrinkage” of places like Charlotte Street wherein city officials closed fire stations, schools, and medical facilities to rationalize the shrinkage of government. To the extent that the decay of Charlotte Street had anything to do with government, it was more obviously linked to its withdrawal than its ostensibly Leviathan-like presence. The residents of the neighborhood understood the decay in this way and were vocally hostile to Reagan when he came to preach the virtues of bootstrap capitalism as the solution to all of their problems. Some pundits thus initially wondered why candidate Reagan would subject himself to jeering from an audience who would never vote for him. But the Charlotte Street visit was not really

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for the residents there. It had a more complicated and less obvious purpose—it was part of a strategy of invoking or visualizing the “pathological inner city” to fuse two factions within the conservative movement. Reagan was able to deploy distressed urban space as a proxy for government failure and black pathology in a way that would animate his racially resentful supporters but offer plausible deniability for his racially anxious supporters.

FUSING THE ANXIOUS AND THE RESENTFUL Reagan’s visit to Charlotte Street was a more public version of a careful dance that conservatives have been performing since the Nixon administration’s efforts to capture the Wallace voter. This dance consists of a careful rhetorical and policy performance meant to build bridges between two important constituencies within the conservative movement: the racially anxious and the racially resentful. Racially resentful white voters view pathology and danger as innate to black people or at least the result of poor individual choices. It is a sensibility fueled by the remnants of Jim Crow racism and by those who feel that the civil rights movement was an unjustified assault on their white privilege. Researchers have illustrated how racial resentment is an important part of the Republican coalition, but openly appealing to such resentment poses risks for racial denial within the conservative movement. Many Republican strategists have encouraged candidates to be more coded in their efforts to animate racial resentment, because more open appeals might alienate the racially anxious. Racially anxious white voters do not believe themselves to be resentful, but they are surrounded by accusations from nonconservatives that their support for the

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Republican Party is itself an act of racism. How could one support a party so openly hostile to key elements of the civil rights movement? If one is just drawn to the Republican Party because of its embrace of low taxes and small government, how does one reconcile the fact that open white supremacists also seem to be particularly fond of the party? Conservative messaging has thus been designed to convey to racially resentful voters that the civil rights movement is over and that Republicans will restore order while simultaneously containing evidence that racially anxious supporters can use to deny the apparent racism of the party and perhaps even themselves. Two methods have been particularly popular. First, performances of concern for minority groups have been very public. Reagan’s visit to Charlotte Street gave more verbal ammunition to racially anxious white suburban voters to proclaim that he (Reagan) was acting out of concern for poor nonwhite people in the Bronx than it actually delivered votes in the Bronx itself. One unnamed campaign consultant openly admitted that this was the rationale behind Reagan’s visit. “Mr. Reagan’s effort,” noted the consultant, “could help in his attempt to widen his appeal among other segments of the electorate, such as liberal and moderate suburban Republicans.” It provided a way for the anxious to strenuously deny that acts like going to the Neshoba County Fair the day before were acts of racism. And other Republicans have followed suit since. Press conferences in black cities like Detroit have become common-place for Republicans since Reagan. Invocations of “compassionate conservatism” are, at their core, about placating those who are uneasy with the mean-spirited edge of racial resentment. Even Trump, who seems less concerned about the racially anxious voter than his predecessors, has spent time and rhetoric with such performances of concern. In one oft-cited stop during his

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2016 campaign, he proclaimed (to an all-white audience) his evident desire to help black inner city people in the region: What do you have to lose? . . . Our government has totally failed our African-American friends, our Hispanic friends and the people of our country . . . The Democrats have failed completely in the inner cities. For those hurting the most who have been failed and failed by their politician—year after year, failure after failure, worse numbers after worse numbers. Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing, no homes, no ownership. Crime at levels that nobody has seen. You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats.

Trump later spent time touring Flint’s crippled water plant and going to black churches there and in Detroit on his 2016 campaign. Though his presence was vocally protested in both places, he and his advisors got the photo ops they were looking for, and those optics were designed for the racially anxious voter. The second common method for assuaging the racial anxiety of those within the conservative fold is to publicly repudiate the support of Jim Crow racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. George H. W. Bush, for example, publicly condemned KKK member David Duke in his 1991 run for the Louisiana governorship. Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole made an impassioned rejection of racists who supported the Republican Party in 1996, and George W. Bush visited the NAACP Convention in 2000 to admit that “for my party, there is no escaping the reality that the party of Lincoln has not always carried the mantle of Lincoln.” George W. Bush later went on to very publicly rebuke former Senate leader Trent Lott for praising the segregationist work of Republican Strom Thurmond. The careful denial of open

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segregation and biological inferiority are a key part of comforting the anxious. President Trump’s more recent refusal to repudiate such sources of support is unusual in this trajectory. To be sure, however, Republican claims of unease with open bigots have been superficial compared to the simultaneous messaging and policy designed to placate the racially resentful. Through a mix of coded rhetoric and policy, conservatives have sought to animate a visceral reaction to racial progress from the 1960s. This messaging and policy dance has spanned a number of different genres, including voting rights, but three areas stand out as proxies for the “pathological inner city” trope. First, the fearmongering around black drug crimes led to a dramatic escalation of the prison-industrial complex and the destruction of millions of black livelihoods. Former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman admitted later in his life that the escalation of rhetoric and antidrug policing techniques in the late 1960s were rooted in the pathologization of political enemies—black men in particular. When asked by journalist Dan Baum in 1994 what the War on Drugs was about, the Nixon insider responded: You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

While Ehrlichman was willing to make such an admission nearly twenty years after Nixon left office, most conservatives

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strenuously deny that the focus on crime has anything to do with race. And yet, when faced with a strong Democratic Party challenger, the trope of the dangerous black man has frequently been used to gin up votes. When Michael Dukakis was running ahead of Vice President George H. W. Bush in the 1988 election campaign, his advisors unleashed the “Willie Horton” ads—alarmist accounts of how a black man committed crimes while on furlough from prison in Massachusetts when Dukakis was governor. Similarly, when Donald Trump shouted that he was the “law and order” candidate during his presidential nomination acceptance speech sprinkled with tales of black-on-black crime in Chicago, it was a clear way to invoke the dangerous black inner city to ears that could hear that frequency. Every Republican president has used this rhetorical space to motivate real policy—usually the intensification of resources for policing and incarceration, but often just as influential, using the Justice Department to thwart police misconduct efforts. Welfare has been a second prominent vehicle for invoking the “pathological inner city.” Republicans had been campaigning against public assistance since at least the New Deal years, but it was not until their rhetorical strategies began to appeal to poor white people that they began to pay electoral dividends. In one of Reagan’s stump speeches during his unsuccessful 1976 Republican primary campaign, he mused to southern audiences about how frustrating it must be to see a “strapping young buck” using his food stamps to “buy a T-bone steak” at the grocery store, when white people had to work for such luxuries. Later in the same campaign he lamented the “welfare queen”: She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.

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In making such rhetorical moves, conservatives have been able to convert something that many people (the majority of whom are white) benefit from into an unfair concession to black people. So successful were they that national Democrats—most prominently Bill Clinton—also campaigned on and governed with hostility to social assistance. Republican animus toward social assistance predates their perfection of dog-whistle techniques, but it is only through the latter that they have made it an issue popular enough to win national elections. Finally, housing law has been a vehicle through which conservatives have balanced hostility to the civil rights movement with rhetoric to placate their anxious constituents. Though always careful to publicly repudiate housing discrimination in the abstract, the governing record of Republicans has displayed an indifference at best, hostility at worst, to the housing rights legislation from the 1960s and 1970s. As J. Brian Charles writes, Support for the basic principles of the Fair Housing Act has historically been bipartisan, [but] . . . enforcement has been another matter. Republican administrations, meanwhile, have routinely scaled back . . . efforts [to enforce the Fair Housing Act]. In many ways, then, the efforts to step back Fair Housing enforcement under President Trump are par for the course under a Republican administration.

Republican presidents have deployed a number of methods to marginalize and even sabotage the efforts of HUD and the Fair Housing Act. First, Republican HUD appointees since Reagan have been dubiously qualified, often corrupt, and in any case not the focus of spending priorities for conservatives so the agency has starved under their leadership. Second, enforcement of existing laws has been inconsistent under Republicans. When Nixon HUD secretary George Romney attempted to actually

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enforce the Fair Housing Act, Nixon pushed him out of the cabinet. Most subsequent HUD secretaries have not even tried to enforce it in the way that Romney did. The Justice Department under Reagan and both Bushes was notably less willing to bring cases of housing discrimination than the Clinton and Obama administrations. Under Trump, HUD and the Justice Department are actively seeking reversals of housing rights enforcement by making it more difficult for victims of discrimination to prove their case with disparate impact data. Fair housing was a key component of the civil rights movement, and conservatives have devised ways of sabotaging it to placate the racially resentful. Through crime, welfare, and housing, conservatives have been able to animate the sensibilities of the racially resentful while offering plausible deniability for their more anxious constituents. Within this framework, Democrats have campaigned and governed defensively. Quietly, Democratic presidents have enforced the housing and voting segments of the civil rights movement more robustly than their Republican counterparts but have adopted some elements of the conservative playbook as well. Presidents Carter and Clinton both railed against welfare, and the latter proudly dismantled welfare “as we knew it.” Democrats have governed with particular vulnerability on issues of crime. Elizabeth Hinton writes how Democrats have been equally, if not more, responsible for the escalation of incarceration since the 1960s. More than this, national Democratic officials often seem frightened that they will be portrayed as weak on crime, knowing that the conservative position on law and order is dominant in the United States. In remarks that would come back to haunt her eventual presidential campaign, then First Lady Hillary Clinton made comments on the 1996 campaign trail touting her husband’s recently signed crime bill and approach to law and order. Speaking of “dangerous” inner-city black children she mused:

Urban Decline as Conservative Bonding Capital 4 83

We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators—no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.

The crime bill that her husband signed into law in 1994 was an escalation of the existing War on Drugs. It increased resources for law enforcement and, among other stipulations, widened the use of the death penalty. Democratic presidents, in short, had been relatively similar to Republicans when it came to law enforcement until Obama. Unlike Clinton and Carter, Obama took public stances against police misconduct, expressed (guarded) empathy for Black Lives Matter, and used his Justice Department to spearhead a de-escalation of drug law enforcement. These stances generated enormous backlash among the racially resentful in the United States. It is perhaps a reminder that the undercurrent of racial resentment is strong. Republicans toy with it in plausibly deniable ways while Democrats at best try to avoid the backlash or at worse join their Republican colleagues in stoking the embers. What does the tension between the racially anxious and racially resentful mean in the age of Trump? In some ways, the Trump presidency is merely a continuation of Republican rhetoric and priorities since the civil rights movement. Like his predecessors, he has shown hostility to fair housing initiatives and appointed judges who seek to undermine the Voting Rights Act. Also like his Republican predecessors, he seems concerned enough about the perception that he is motivated by racial animus to send nonwhite spokespeople to the media to defend him. But it is also unquestionably true that Trump and his relationship with the racially anxious voter seems to be a departure from

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previous conservative efforts. First, the efforts to have nonwhite people defend him seem manifestly less serious than previous efforts. The Bushes, for example, sought to defend their civil rights credentials by foregrounding or promoting accomplished black conservatives—Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice. Trump, by contrast, is left with Internet personalities Diamond and Silk, Kanye West, and Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke to defend his noxious rhetoric and actions. More importantly, these relatively muted efforts to insist that he is not a racist are overwhelmed by a simultaneous loop of toxic race baiting that has characterized his presidency. Whether it was his refusal to repudiate the Ku Klux Klan, his “both sides to blame” comments about the murderous white supremacy rally in Charlottesville, or his constant reference to crime in Chicago, Trump’s racial rhetoric does not fit the description of dog whistle—it is loud and clear for all ears to hear. And white nationalists have been vocally supportive of him for it. In the run-up to the 2018 midterms, Trump amplified the racial rhetoric and violence ensued. A man who lived in a van that was covered in Donald Trump stickers sent pipe bombs to Trump enemies in October 2018. Another man was so incensed that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was apparently funding a caravan of Honduran refugees—the caravan that Trump portrayed as a threat to America—that he murdered eleven elderly worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue a few weeks before the midterm election. By combing through arrest records after Trump’s first two years of office, ABC News found seventeen instances of a person arrested for a violent act who has invoked Trump during police questioning. What impact did these connections have on Trump and the willingness of racially anxious voters to stay conservative? Not as much as one might think given the history of anxiety among Republican strategists about alienating them. While the

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Democrats won the House in November 2018, the conservative coalition behind Trump stayed largely intact. Republican turnout did not drop off—the Democratic victories were because they more successfully turned out their base. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans stood at 91 percent during the week of the 2018 midterms. What does it mean in the age of Trump to be racially anxious? Perhaps that the racially resentful have grown in number. Perhaps the Republicans were wrong to fear a backlash all along. Perhaps the racially anxious are so desperate to believe that they are not on the same team as the KKK that even the thinnest denial by Kanye West or Diamond and Silk is sufficient to affirm their belief. It is difficult to say, but it is clear that racial resentment is a strong sentiment in the United States, that Trump is masterful at animating it, and that a considerable number of Americans are willing to strenuously deny its existence even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary.

RACIAL REALIGNMENT IN THE RUST BELT The use of distressed urban space was and remains a national strategy by conservatives to lay the groundwork for a deprivationist policy agenda. But the latent possibility that such imagery will be linked to black pathology varies by region, in part because of demographic geographies and the history of electoral competitiveness. The Northeast, for example, was the center of opposition to government expansion during the New Deal. It is composed of more independent (nonunionized) workers and is exceedingly white (before and after the CRM) so less affected by dog-whistle politics. The western United States is also composed of a more dispersed and smaller nonwhite population and newer

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cities, so the power of derelict space imagery as a proxy for black pathology is lower. The entire point of the Southern Strategy was to capture southern white votes, so much has been written about its impact in the South. It generated a dramatic shift from the region being almost completely Democratic to dominant Republican between the 1940s and 1980s. This is absolutely true, but the demographic geography of the South is different from the Rust Belt in important ways that make the particular strategy of pathologizing the inner city of limited use. The South still contains the highest numbers and concentration of African American people, but they are not exclusively or particularly urban. Southern black people are demographically dominant in rural and urban locations. The invocation of distressed urban space in the Bronx or Detroit does not necessarily have the same dogwhistle effect on a white voter in rural Alabama as on a white voter in Macomb County outside of Detroit. The Midwest, by contrast, was demographically and electorally predisposed to the strategy of framing the inner city as a proxy for black pathology. A few factors are particularly relevant. First, the region had, during the early New Deal, the highest concentrations of white unionized workers who developed a connection with the Democratic Party. Unionized voters still vote disproportionately for the Democratic Party, but the number of unionized voters is dramatically lower than it was in the midtwentieth century. Thus, a main (white) source of Rust Belt support for the Democratic Party has eroded in the past fifty years, leaving the party vulnerable. Second, the black population geography in the Rust Belt is unlike any other region. Black people are more numerous there than in the West or Northeast, but more exclusively urbanized than in the South (figure 2.2). Black people are numerically dominant but only in large midwestern cities. This creates a ready-made template on which Republicans can,

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Large metropolitan statistical area Black population in county exceeds 12.6%

FIGURE 2.2  Counties

exceeding the national percentage of African American people (12.6 percent) and principal cities of large (>500,000 people) metropolitan statistical areas. Source: American Community Survey, 2012–2016 estimates

and have, gerrymandered the highly concentrated, Democraticvoting black population into electoral irrelevance. It also creates a ready-made template on which Republicans could run against the “inner city” and have great political gain among the otherwise dominant white population in the region. Urban distress as black pathology is an easier message to sell when it confirms the extant biases of the audience. In the Midwest, most black people live in cities; white people are numerically dominant everywhere else. County-level presidential data between 1932 and the present reveal a more nuanced geography to the receptiveness to conservative messaging about cities. Figures 2.3 and 2.4 reveal a pattern that largely conforms to the national racial realignment. Between 1932 and the 1960s, the association between whitedominated spaces and voting Republican on the one hand and

0.8

Sig.

Not Sig.

White

Spearman’s Correlation Coefficient

0.6

Black

0.4

0.2

0.0

1932 1936 1940 1944 1948 1952 1956 1960 1964 1968 1972 1976 1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012 2016

–0.2

–0.4

–0.6

FIGURE 2.3  Correlations

between percentage vote for the Republican presidential candidate and percentage black or white in Rust Belt counties, 1932–2016.

Sources: Dave Leip Presidential Atlas Custom Datafile; U.S. Census Note: Significance = p < 0.05 0.8

Sig.

Not Sig.

White 0.6

Spearman’s Correlation Coefficient

Black 0.4

0.2

0.0 1932 1936 1940 1944 1948 1952 1956 1960 1964 1968 1972 1976 1980 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012 2016 –0.2

–0.4

–0.6

–0.8

FIGURE 2.4  Correlations

between percentage vote for the Democratic presidential candidate and percentage black or white in Rust Belt counties, 1932–2016.

Sources: Dave Leip Presidential Atlas Custom Datafile; U.S. Census Note: Significance = p < 0.05

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nonwhite dominated spaces voting Democratic on the other is slight. But as the aforementioned racial realignment took hold, the racial profile of the county in question started taking on greater salience as an explanatory factor in voting patterns. Voting Republican has become increasingly associated with whiteness, both culturally and demographically. Democrats, by contrast, could not win national elections without the votes of nonwhite people in the Midwest. Moreover, this shift is not even across the Rust Belt. It has centered on the white spaces adjacent to black cities and neighborhoods. Table 2.1 is a matrix of racial threat conditions in the large cities introduced in figure 0.2. These conditions are derived from the racial threat literature, which holds that several factors increase the likelihood for white racial backlash. Each city was coded for nine overlapping conditions, including black population percentages in 1950 and 2010, the presence (or lack) of majority black neighborhoods, the intensity of civil conflict in the 1960s, and the presence of black mayors at different times. Some cities, such as Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Dayton, score very high on all counts, while others like Allentown, Lancaster, Madison, and Scranton exhibit none of these conditions. High threat condition cities provoked a white reaction that not only helped produce or exacerbate urban decline, they also produced an angry shift away from the Democratic Party for its embrace of the civil rights agenda. The first major thumbprint of this reaction was the shockingly high, but geographically concentrated, Rust Belt support for Wallace in 1968. The Wallace electoral story is often focused solely on the South, but he also attracted considerable support in the Rust Belt (figure 2.5). He bested his regional average (8.4 percent) in 237 Rust Belt counties and beat the national average (13.5 percent, which includes southern states) in another 66 counties. His support was clustered heavily around

Detroit

• • • • • • • • •

Cleveland

• • • • • • • • •

9

Cincinnati

• • • • • • • • •

Dayton

• • • • • • • • •

Chicago

• • • • • • •

7

Youngstown •

• • • • • •

Pittsburgh • • • • • •

6

Rochester •

• • • • • •

• •

•

St. Louis • • •

Louisville

• • •

Columbus •

•

• • •

5

Buffalo •

• •

• •

Milwaukee • • • • •

Minneapolis •

• • • •

Toledo •

•

• •

4

Grand Rapids •

•

• •

Harrisburg • • •

Indianapolis • • •

Akron 3

•

• •

Albany •

• •

Syracuse •

• •

Lancaster

Allentown

0

Cities that exceeded the national percentage of African Americans in 1950 (10%). Source: U.S. Census Place Level Data for 1950. Note: In 1950, this included “Black and other races.” b Cities that exceeded the national percentage of African Americans in 2010 (12.3%). Source: U.S. Census Place Level Data for 2010. c Cities that contained at least two 50%+ African American census tracts in 2010. Source: U.S. Census, via the Geolytics Neighborhood Change Database. d “Major” was defined as either: (1) an uprising where a death was involved, (2) $1 million in damages were caused, or (3) it was counted as “major” by the 1968 Kerner Commission Report. Sources: NACCD, The Kerner Report, ed. Walter Rucker and James Nathaniel Upton; Encyclopedia of Race Riots (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006). e “Minor” included all known uprisings not covered under note d. Sources: NACCD, The Kerner Report, ed. Walter Rucker and James Nathaniel Upton; Encyclopedia of Race Riots (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006). f Dates of black mayoralties were combined from two sources: Joint Center for Political Studies, Profiles of Black Mayors in America, 1977; Wikipedia (2017) entry on “list of first African American mayors.”

a

Threat conditions

Black pop., 1950a Black pop., 2010b Multiple black tractsc Major 60s uprisingd Minor 60s uprisinge Multiple 60s uprisings Pre-90 black mayorf Post-90 black mayor Multiple black mayors

Madison

TABLE 2.1 INDICATORS OF BLACK ASCENDANCE, AND WHITE REACTION, IN SELECTED RUST BELT CITIES

Scranton

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Cities with five or more racial threat conditions Vote % for Wallace, 1968 8.4-13.4 13.5 and above

FIGURE 2.5  County-level

vote totals for George Wallace in 1968 and the location of high racial threat cities.

Source: Dave Leip Presidential Atlas Custom Datafile Note: See table 2.1 for an explanation of threat conditions.

cities with a high number of threat conditions (five or more). The only exceptions in the Rust Belt to this pattern were in New York State, where Wallace was not officially on the ballot so had to be a write-in candidate; the Indianapolis suburbs, which voted heavily for Wallace despite only having three threat conditions; and a number of smaller cities such as Flint and Kalamazoo, which fell below the population threshold outlined in the introduction (but also had a high number of threat conditions). The dominant pattern was of major Wallace support near cities where white people and capital were most threatened by the black presence. In southwestern Ohio, which was adjacent to three high-threat cities—Cincinnati, Columbus, and Dayton—Wallace received his highest support outside of the South. In Warren, Claremont,

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and Brown Counties, Wallace attracted more than 20 percent of the vote. Many, though not all, of the Wallace voters were white Democrats who had grown disaffected by the party’s embrace of civil rights. Republicans have targeted these counties since then. Places like Macomb County outside of Detroit are home to what some pundits deem “Reagan Democrats”—former Democrats, who voted for Wallace, then Republicans after Nixon in 1972. The strategic deployment of the “pathological inner city” was particularly effective because it resonated with their extant biases. The Southern Strategy to attract disaffected Wallace voters thus had an impact not only in the South but in the Rust Belt as well. The Wallace wave was a leading indicator of racial realignment in the region. Many of those voters eventually converted to Republican after the party began to perfect dog-whistle techniques. The deployment of the “pathological inner city” was a particularly potent vehicle because of the location of these racially resentful voters. The biggest shifts in Democratic to Republican after the civil rights movement occurred in suburban and exurban places near high-conflict cities like Dayton, Columbus, and Cincinnati, which had been swing counties during the pre-CRM period. Tables 2.2 and 2.3 illustrate this pattern. Prior to the CRM, the Democratic vote was concentrated. Only forty-three counties voted Democratic in at least seven of the eight elections between 1932 and 1960. After the civil rights movement, only twenty counties remained safe Democratic counties. The Republican coalition did not, by contrast, atrophy after the CRM. Prior to the 1960s, 206 counties, most of them rural, voted at least seven of eight times for the Republican presidential candidate. Thus, even during the high-water mark of the New Deal coalition, there was substantial, if dispersed, resistance to voting Democratic in the region. After the civil rights movement, the Republican coalition retained its “never New Deal” base counties, while adding the

TABLE 2.2 RUST BELT COUNTY VOTING TENDENCIES AND DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES, 1930–1960 a

Voting Categoryb

Nc

Pop. 1930

Pop. 1960

Safe Democratic 43 Lean Democratic 70 Even 46 Lean Republican 220 Safe Republican 206

7,763,277 12,270,926 1,751,598 10,707,672 8,149,040

10,071,578 16,698,002 2,216,458 15,709,999 11,222,311

Change % Black % Black 1930 1960 (%)d 29.7 36.1 26.5 46.7 37.7

5.6 4.2 1.1 2.6 1.1

11.4 9.9 2.3 4.7 1.8

Sources: Dave Leip Presidential Atlas Custom Datafile; U.S. Decennial Census 1930, 1960. a Demographic changes are derived from U.S. Decennial Census data for the period 1930–1960. Electoral data are based on presidential election data for the period 1932–1960. b There were eight presidential elections between 1932 and 1960. “Safe” was defined as the party winning seven or eight of these elections. “Lean” was defined as winning five or six of these elections. “Even” was defined as evenly split with four election victories per party. c Rust Belt counties include all counties in the following states: Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The counties of the New York City CMSA and the Philadelphia MSA were removed. The counties of the St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Louisville MSAs were added. The total number of counties is 585. d Population change between 1930 and 1960. TABLE 2.3 RUST BELT COUNTY VOTING TENDENCIES AND DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGES, 1972–2016 a

Change % Black % Black 1970 2016 (%)d

Voting Categoryb

Nc

Pop. 1970

Pop. 2016

Safe Democratic Lean Democratic Even Lean Republican Safe Republican

20 80 34 206 245

16,730,174 14,754,306 4,606,084 12,928,071 12,439,844

14,755,475 –11.8 15,763,994 6.8 5,748,677 24.8 16,971,763 31.2 17,741,179 42.6

17.9 7.2 4.9 4.3 1.9

23.0 12.5 11.1 7.2 3.5

Sources: Dave Leip Presidential Atlas Custom Datafile; U.S. Decennial Census 1970; U.S. American Community Survey 2012–2016. a Population figures were derived from the U.S. Decennial Census data for 1970 and the American Community Survey for 2016. Electoral data are based on presidential election data for the period 1972–2016. b There were twelve presidential elections between 1932 and 1960. “Safe” was defined as the party winning eleven or twelve of these elections. “Lean” was defined as winning seven to ten of these elections. “Even” was defined as evenly split with six election victories per party. c Rust Belt counties include all counties in the following states: Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The counties of the New York City CMSA and the Philadelphia MSA were removed. The counties of the St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Louisville MSAs were added. The total number of counties is 585. d Population change between 1970 and 2016.

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aforementioned counties surrounding high-conflict cities. Mirroring the national trend of little-to-no racial differences between the parties before the CRM and growing divergence afterward, it is also clear that the Rust Belt counties that are trending or safe Democratic are significantly more African American than those that are trending or safe Republican. In 1930, there was a 4.5-point difference between the black population percentage in safe Democratic versus safe Republican seats. By 2016, the difference had yawned to nearly 20 points. There are also notable differences in the leading indicator of urban decline—population change. Before the CRM, all counties in the region were averaging growth regardless of political alignment. There was no statistical difference (using a t-test) between growth rates in Republican and Democratic counties. After the CRM, there was a sizeable and significant difference in growth rates. Safe Democratic-voting counties have, on average, shrunk since the civil rights movement, while safe Republican seats are growing at a rate even more rapid than in the pre-CRM period. This indicates a continued concentration of Democratic nonwhite votes in distressed cities in the region and a new concentration (compared to the pre-CRM period) of Republican votes in the suburbs surrounding those cities. White reaction to the black city was not only a significant factor in the production of urban decline in the region, it was also a significant factor in the political realignment in the region. Given the size and historically competitive nature of the Rust Belt, these regional racial realignment figures are thus a crucial factor in the electoral coalition undergirding the conservative movement nationally. The coordination among various aspects of the conservative movement during the past fifty years has been highly cohesive, especially when compared to its earlier fragmentation and

Urban Decline as Conservative Bonding Capital 4 95

infighting. Today, the messaging discipline across the various institutions, politicians, activists, and donors is virtually seamless. The messaging of angry white reactionaries on Twitter is not discernibly different from a Trump stump speech, which is not discernibly different from an American Enterprise Institute report, a panel on Fox News, or a research article written by a conservative economist at George Mason University. The conservative movement’s strong bonding capital makes it difficult for a fragmented Left to compete electorally. Whatever internal differences exist, conservatives are able to fall in line and support even the most flawed candidate or policy as long as he defeats an imagined Left. One bonding strategy has been the construction of common enemies, the “pathological inner city” among them. This strategy is not geographically even. It is no coincidence that Trump spent so much time using this strategy in the Midwest during his campaign. It resonates most acutely with voters who share a common understanding of the inner city as a dangerous, nonwhite place filled with “blight.” The Rust Belt is unusual among American regions in that it has higher than average black populations but only in cities. The association of blackness with “inner city” is easy to make for conservative activists seeking to gain political advantage.

 THE CONSERVATIVE MYTH OF DETROIT

T

messaging strategies discussed in chapter 2 are important for understanding the broad unifying purpose of the “pathological inner city” concept, but they are of more limited use in understanding how urban policy is formulated. The strategic deployment of distressed urban space may motivate a racially resentful voter living outside of Dayton, Ohio, but it does not help understand how conservative framing influences urban policy in Dayton itself. What are the links between the conservative construction of declining cities and the policies that are actually implemented? This chapter explores the deliberate and focused efforts of conservative professors and think-tank authors to rewrite the history of cities like Detroit so as to position the policy terrain for organized deprivation. Following Mark Blyth, I argue that policy paradigms require not only a crisis to disintegrate; there must also be a sufficiently developed replacement idea. For the Keynesian-managerialist paradigm to be replaced by organized deprivation, there had to be a movement willing and able to criticize the former and develop the latter. Most, though not all, of these efforts have been managed by conservative think tanks. Some of these, like the Manhattan Institute, are national-level think tanks that focus exclusively on urban policy. Others, like the Cato Institute, are national HE

The Conservative Myth of Detroit 4 97

think tanks that periodically focus on urban policy. Still others, like Michigan’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy or Missouri’s Show-Me Institute, are state-level organizations that challenge interventionist state legislation and promote neoliberal alternatives. Some even write legislation for conservative legislators. Together, these organizations disseminate conservative positions in press releases, quasi-academic journals, and media appearances. Sometimes these outlets are direct about their origin—e.g., the Cato Journal—while at other times the links are more disguised so as to preserve the appearance that they are not simply advancing the position of the organization in question. These organizations collaborate to convert the broad positioning discussed earlier into actual policy. An important component of their work is crafting a narrative that not only sows doubt about the previous paradigm (Keynesian managerialism) but also lays the framework for their neoliberal alternative. I argue that this narrative does not have to be convincing to adherents of the previous paradigm (and in fact it is not). It merely has to serve as a unifying force among conservative people and institutions. It must provide a quasi-intellectual explanation for why cities were abandoned. This manufactured history serves several functions, chief among them making certain (interventionist) policy pathways “politically impossible” and others (neoliberal policies) “necessary.” This chapter describes this activity and its policy functions. It focuses on Detroit, because of the city’s high visibility, but it should be noted that this conservative parable of Detroit is meant to influence (and has influenced) policy construction throughout the Rust Belt.

THE DANGER OF DETROIT On the one hand, Detroit offers a perfect case of visible failure for conservatives. As table 3.1 illustrates, despite being the

TABLE 3.1 POPULAR MEDIA AND SCHOLARLY ARTICLE MENTIONS OF LARGE AMERICAN CITIES, 1993–2013

City New York Cityd Los Angeles Chicago Houston Philadelphia Phoenix San Antonio San Diego Dallas San Jose Austin Jacksonville San Francisco Indianapolis Columbus Fort Worth Charlotte Detroit

Popular Popular Media Media Population Scholarly Scholarly 2016 Referencesc Rank Rank Citationsb Rank Populationa 8,461,961 3,918,872 2,714,017 2,240,582 1,559,938 1,555,324 1,439,358 1,374,812 1,278,433 1,009,363 907,779 856,616 850,282 846,674 837,038 815,930 808,834 683,443

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

3,474 2,455 4,578 449 1,086 527 199 523 264 144 47 159 1,442 195 145 76 105 516

2 3 1 9 5 6 11 7 10 15 18 13 4 12 14 17 16 8

1,726,907 765,543 1,039,537 237,773 194,354 153,105 218,175 178,902 176,800 63,839 67,723 88,043 320,241 51,923 50,326 20,106 10,229 254,192

1 3 2 6 8 11 7 9 10 14 13 12 4 15 16 17 18 5

Sources: U.S. Census, ACS, 2012–2016; Scopus Academic Article Search; Proquest Media Search. a Population figures and rank were derived from the U.S. Census American Community Survey (ACS) estimates for 2012–2016. b Scopus Academic Article Search was used here. Citations were limited to English-language, social science, and humanities journal articles published between 1993 and 2013. These counts refer to the number of academic articles where the city’s name appeared in the title, abstract, or keywords. c Proquest Newstand, a search engine that indexes thousands of newspaper and magazine archives, was used. The search was limited to English-language references that occurred between 1993 and 2013. d Because “New York” can refer to both a state and a city, the search (Scopus and Proquest) for this city included mutually exclusive references to “New York City,” “Brooklyn,” “Staten Island,” “Bronx,” and “Manhattan.” “Queens” was not added to this list because of the possibility of false hits for other invocations of that word.

The Conservative Myth of Detroit 4 99

eighteenth-largest city in the United States, it is one of the most frequently mentioned in the media. Much of this national coverage focuses on the city’s pathologies—economic collapse, crime, and other visible crises. Thus, it is unsurprising that various conservative figures use Detroit as a literal and figurative stage prop to promote their agenda. As the Washington Post urban affairs columnist recently mused, Republicans are obsessed with using the city for this purpose. Another pundit has deemed Detroit as “the perfect piñata” for conservatives. On the other hand, Detroit poses certain dangers to the advancement of organized deprivation. Most important, the history of urban crisis visuals has actually provoked some of the most high-profile activist or state interventions in Global North history. Friedrich Engels’s descriptions of housing conditions in mid-nineteenth-century Manchester slums were helpful at creating national and local housing reforms, not to mention helping the rise of socialism more generally. Jacob Riis’s early photographs of the Lower East Side in New York were integral for the development of housing standards and the Progressive Era more generally. Highly publicized labor catastrophes like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in lower Manhattan provoked labor laws, and some argue these events were integral for the eventual New Deal. National coverage of housing shortages helped provoke the creation of the U.S. public housing program and urban renewal. The sight of the Cuyahoga River engulfed in flames because of its high pollutant load in the early 1970s helped catalyze the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. Conservatives, of course, abhorred these interventions and still do. They are the antithesis of organized deprivation. There is thus a danger that deploying imagery of the “ruins” of Detroit might also provoke an empathetic statist response that might actually help the residents of Detroit and similar cities. So conservative ideologues

100 4 Othering the Deprived City

have been careful to provide an intricate rationale for why such imagery does not warrant an intervention other than organized deprivation. They argue that it is government help that created these problems. Central to this rationale has been a retelling of why urban decline in places like Detroit took hold. Conservatives have replaced the narrative of white reaction and structural disinvestment with one that converts the isolated nonwhite residents of such places into culprits unworthy of empathy or statist intervention. They have managed to convince a significant chunk of the United States—one of the least-taxed and unregulated economies in the OECD—that overregulation is what caused Detroit to become Detroit, and that it would be wise to further strip away spending levels on schools, infrastructure, and social services so as to avoid this fate. Much of these efforts have been facilitated by national think tanks who, like the national press, pay an unusual amount of attention to the city despite its actual position in the American urban hierarchy (table 3.2).

FRAMING DETROIT AS A COLLECTIVIST DYSTOPIA Though the conservative narrative of Detroit has been crafted recently by a variety of think tanks and conservative professors, certain elements of the narrative connect it with a much longer history of conservative activism. Albert Hirschman has shown, for example, that conservative/reactionary arguments have taken three dominant forms since the French Revolution. These rhetorical strategies have been used, he argues, to effectively contest basic political rights, suffrage, and, most recently, the welfare state. First, there is the perversity thesis, which is the notion that “any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social,

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Rankb

1,733 1,052 1,774 308 573 188 99 309 300 127 34 195 613 171 61 5 115 422

Citations 2 3 1 8 5 11 15 7 9 13 17 10 4 12 16 18 14 6

Rank

Cato Institute

2,385 1,456 1,875 448 890 243 163 361 513 175 46 228 932 236 126 56 78 789

Citations 1 3 2 8 5 10 14 9 7 13 18 12 4 11 15 17 16 6

Rank

Heritage Foundation

2,429 1,339 2,367 438 618 57 123 426 470 129 61 125 897 191 76 36 39 938

Citations 1 3 2 8 6 16 13 9 7 11 15 12 5 10 14 18 17 4

Rank

American Enterprise Inst.

5,261 1,304 1,149 318 456 35 102 296 244 353 14 122 594 90 31 25 35 488

Citations 1 2 3 8 6 14 12 9 10 7 18 11 4 13 16 17 15 5

Rank

Manhattan Institute

Sources: Website search engines for the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, and Manhattan Institute. a This includes all mentions of each city, including current and archived articles and press releases. b Population ranks are derived from the ACS 2012–2016 estimates (see table 3.1).

New York City Los Angeles Chicago Houston Philadelphia Phoenix San Antonio San Diego Dallas San Jose Austin Jacksonville San Francisco Indianapolis Columbus Fort Worth Charlotte Detroit

City

Population

TABLE 3.2 CONSERVATIVE THINK-TANK WEBSITE MENTIONS OF LARGE AMERICAN CITIES IN 2017 a

102 4 Othering the Deprived City

or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy”. Using the example of social welfare, this argument has been deployed to suggest that while welfare is wellmeaning it fosters a dependency that actually hurts the people it is intended to help. The second approach is the futility thesis. The futility thesis “holds that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to ‘make a dent’ ” because a more-powerful underlying structure renders such efforts superficial. Continuing with the social welfare example, this rhetorical strategy suggests that the underlying political marketplace will eventually defeat such redistributive efforts. In particular, people will simply move away from high-tax redistributive areas, thus bankrupting welfare efforts. Finally, the jeopardy thesis suggests that “the cost of the proposed change is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment.” Within this frame, redistributive welfare should be avoided because it draws the state into our lives in such a way that it will endanger the hard-won freedoms of the past. Each of these rhetorical approaches manages to defend the status quo by invoking a feigned concern for social progress. The narrative of Detroit (and of decline more generally) also remains reliant on a limited set of theoretical influences. Two paradigms of particular importance are the public-choice school and human-capital theory. The public-choice school is a wider effort by neoliberal economists to use the tools of neoclassical economics to understand political behavior. Public choice frames local decision making as subordinate to an equilibrating market. The putative market is both empirical (it just is) and normative (it is what ought to be). This market disciplines “foolish” local decisions and rewards market-friendly practices. It operates according to its own logic, not conscious organization. The human-capital school rests on similar assumptions—namely, that individuals and small-scale firms are the optimal scale for economic value

The Conservative Myth of Detroit 4 103

production—and that, conversely, governments, unions, and large firms are lumbering anti-innovation machines. These conservative rhetorical strategies and theoretical influences have been systematically applied to the case of declining cities like Detroit in ways that are not meaningfully different from previous applications. The manufactured history of Detroit that emerges is centered on three themes: (1) government profligacy, (2) economic inflexibility, and (3) black animus toward white residents.

The Crisis of Profligacy The crisis of profligacy is the most common theme in this revisionist history. Detroit has lost over 60 percent of its 1950 population. Residents have largely moved to its many suburbs, and state government has made it exceedingly difficult to implement any form of regionalization, much less annexation, that might have been able to manage the fiscal flight that accompanied the demographic plunge. Over the years, Detroit has been able to stave off bankruptcy through various means, including state transfer payments and casino revenues, but when both resources collapsed in 2008 along with the property tax base, the city was eventually drawn into emergency management, then bankruptcy. To conservatives, the bankruptcy and fiscal crisis are less a consequence than a cause of Detroit’s problems. The message and style of this argument are rooted in the work of public-choice theorist Charles Tiebout. Tiebout posited that residents will migrate from places with high taxes and bad services to places with low taxes and great services. This will in turn discipline even the most entrenched governments from overspending. According to this line of thought, we are now simply witnessing the longoverdue disciplining of Detroit for its reckless profligacy.

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For Cato’s Michael Tanner, the bankruptcy is the result of market blasphemy by city managers: Detroit is a model of tax-and-spend liberalism. The city’s percapita tax burden is the highest in Michigan . . . The city’s own choices, not free markets and limited government, are really responsible for Detroit’s failure.

For Tanner’s Cato colleague Dean Stansel, the path forward is simple: If high-tax, low-growth metro areas like Detroit, Milwaukee, Buffalo, and Syracuse want to be more like high-growth areas such as Dallas, Tampa, San Antonio, and Austin, they should lower their onerous burden of taxation and bring spending under control.

The framing of Detroit as a profligate wasteland has been used to motivate frequent state-level takeovers of city, school board, or infrastructure finances in the past fifty years. These efforts focus almost entirely on controlling expenses rather than providing new revenue tools or redistributing the state’s considerable wealth. The belief that Detroit’s problems are simply that it taxes and spends too much has also inspired (market) fundamentalist fantasies like Newt Gingrich’s proposal to convert the entire city into a tax-free zone, or Rodney Lockwood’s proposal to convert Belle Isle city park (to be renamed “Rand” in honor of its spiritual godmother, Ayn Rand) into a tax-free neoliberal utopian citystate that would even be able to print its own money. The actualized policy impact of this notion is unmistakable. The social economy has collapsed and community members have taken over basic maintenance of abandoned property and assumption of basic municipal services, but the bankruptcy

The Conservative Myth of Detroit 4 105

agreement (and other state takeovers) are overwhelmingly about controlling costs. The approach used by conservative activists is unbendingly loyal to the public-choice school. Rhetorically, it invokes a futility argument, suggesting that the leaders of Detroit were naïve to think they could subvert such a basic “law” of governance by spending too much.

The Innovation Deficit The second economic dimension to the neoliberal explanation of Detroit’s circumstances has been deemed “the entrepreneurial deficit.” The basic argument is that early twentieth-century Detroit was host to numerous inventive entrepreneurs like the Dodge brothers, Henry Ford, and David Buick. They fought for market share by improving their product, opening new markets, and keeping costs manageable. Innovation and wealth creation blossomed during this period. By 1930, the city was the fourth largest in the United States, and workers from the South migrated by the millions to seek employment there. The early twentieth-century period is intriguing, to be sure, and a flowering of creative engineering certainly took place, but neoliberal thinkers have utopianized the period as part of their explanation for the city’s fall. Glaeser laments that the chief problem for Detroit was turning its back on this idea-making period: “If Detroit and places like it are ever going to come back, they will do so by embracing the virtues of the great pre- and postindustrial cities: competition, connection, and human capital.” Invoking the language of perversity, Glaeser continues: The irony and ultimately the tragedy of Detroit is that its small, dynamic firms and independent suppliers gave rise to gigantic, wholly integrated car companies, which then became synonymous

106 4 Othering the Deprived City

with stagnation . . . Ford figured out how to make assembly lines that could use the talents of poorly educated Americans, but making Detroit less skilled hurt it economically in the long run.

Of course, corporations are not the only large institutions considered to be responsible for this trajectory. Within this worldview, labor unions are even more at fault for killing innovation, wealth, and the cities that depend on them. Detroit’s labor history is complicated and multifaceted, but conservative economists are unequivocal in their view that unions killed Detroit because they attracted public sympathy that translated into labor protections and drove up costs. In 1937, Walter Reuther and his fellow United Auto Workers protesters attempted to cross a bridge to the then-largest auto factory in the world, Henry Ford’s River Rouge Ford Plant, to organize its workers. They were assaulted by Ford’s violent security forces, and the attack was captured by a Detroit News photographer who eventually won the Pulitzer Prize. The subsequent publicity turned the tide toward unionization in the United States. The political prowess of the fledgling UAW was born that day. To conservatives, however, this event was unfortunate for precisely that reason—namely, it made the public more sympathetic to unions that served to steal wealth, stifle creativity, and initiate the decline of Detroit. “It was a public relations disaster for Ford and it made heroes out of the union men,” writes Glaeser. It helped hasten the end of the “golden period” for Detroit and ushered in a de-skilling, idea-killing machine, which eventually destroyed the city itself. Firms eventually decided that the cost of production was too high in Detroit and decamped for the Sunbelt, where right-to-work laws had been passed and the pathway to innovation was paved. This general narrative has been embraced by the city’s policy-making elite. “The goal,” says current Detroit mayor Mike

The Conservative Myth of Detroit 4 107

Duggan, “is to create a city where we’re a center of invention and entrepreneurialism, like we were in the early nineteen-hundreds.” This time, though, the city is not looking to boat manufacturers and machine shops for innovation. It is looking to the arts and technology sectors. These sectors openly seek to attract creative DIY types who are eager to work in a city that has few public services but abundant space. Investment is being focused around the places in which this activity was already somewhat present: midtown (and Wayne State University), downtown, and Corktown. The quest to return Detroit to its early twentieth-century idea-making roots has manifest as a plan to build arts-oriented and tech clusters that are allowed to balkanize themselves from the rest of the city. The notion is built upon an obsession with Detroit’s earlier creative period. The purveyors of manufactured decline glorify this period while scolding past policy makers for turning their back on it and thus “hurting the people their government-oriented policies were designed to help.” The allegiance to human-capital theory, wrapped in perversity rhetoric, ties this argument to a longer-term conservative strategy.

Black Racial Resentment The conservative narrative of Detroit relies on a simple set of “laws.” Conservatives have critiqued elected officials, particularly early black mayors, for ostensibly ignoring those “laws” in an alleged quest to exact retribution for racism. In Detroit, this critique centers on the city’s first black mayor, Coleman Young. Within this narrative, Young’s decision making was motivated by militancy and as such was “exceptionally foolish” because it disregarded the laws of the (white) consumer-voter. Glaeser has deemed this the “Curley effect.”

108 4 Othering the Deprived City

Before moving to the Curley effect argument, a little context is warranted. In the early twentieth century poor southern whites increasingly moved to Detroit and its abundant employment opportunities as their largely agrarian livelihoods began to evaporate with mechanization. Millions moved and joined the middle class, owning a home, being gainfully employed, and represented by a union that ensured a sustained meaningful wage rate, pension plans, and health care. African Americans followed and tried to generate a similar outcome. Hundreds of thousands moved from an impoverished sharecropping rural life in the South in hopes of joining the northern industrial middle class, but their hopes were quickly, systematically, and violently dashed in Detroit. As Thomas Sugrue writes, black people were systematically denied access to all but the most dangerous jobs in factories by racist unions and corporations intent on protecting benefits along racial lines. Municipal government initially resisted hiring black people but changed more quickly than corporations and private unions (thus explaining early concentrations of black municipal employees in Detroit). Residentially, working-class black families were denied access to white neighborhoods most systematically by the Federal Housing Administration, which refused to underwrite mortgages for developers if too many African Americans lived nearby, thus making an area “a slum.” When middle-class African Americans tried to move into white neighborhoods, they were guided away by real estate agents and neighborhood groups who would pressure and sometimes violently assault owners who dared to sell their house to black newcomers. In part to deal with housing shortages for blacks, white Detroit politicians actively pursued funds flowing from the 1949 Housing Act. They sought to demolish substandard dwellings and replace them with gleaming residential towers. But their efforts routinely resulted in a disproportionate focus

The Conservative Myth of Detroit 4 109

on demolition (particularly in black neighborhoods) rather than construction and a set of policies that made black people distrustful of urban renewal schemes. The predominately white police force not only turned the other way, they actively participated in the harassment of black people. When a small skirmish on Belle Isle expanded into a full-scale race riot in 1943, the police responded with unusual violence toward African Americans. Thirty-five people lost their lives over a three-day period, twenty-five of whom were black. In 1967, the city’s police force raided a west-side “blind pig,” an African American after-hours club, violently assaulting its patrons. The neighborhood fought back, and the city (and eventually the National Guard) was consumed in a civil disturbance that resulted in the deaths of forty-three people, again disproportionately black and disproportionately at the hands of the police or National Guard. Whites continued to move out of the city, and the 1967 uprising only accelerated this trend. Surrounding suburbs fought (with support from Lansing, the state capital) almost any meaningful attempt to regionalize the school, water, or transportation system. By the late twentieth century, the Detroit metropolitan area was the most segregated metropolis in the United States. The city of Detroit is currently 79.7 percent black, while the remainder of the region is 68 percent white. Conservatives have a very different take on these series of events. They argue that blacks, led by Coleman Young and his “unhelpful,” “angry,” social-justice ambitions, conspired to scare away whites to ensure political power. Conservatives argue that police were actually not violent enough in their response when riots broke out. When black people finally did get into office, they alienated whites by not funding the services they valued and spending too much on “black services.” Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer argue that the experience of former Boston

110 4 Othering the Deprived City

mayor James Curley is instructive in understanding the arc that occurred in Detroit and thus deem it the Curley effect. Curley was Irish-Catholic and his politics (according to the authors) were singularly focused on convincing Anglo-Saxon Protestants to vacate the city so he could more easily win elections. Making a concession (and thus laying the groundwork for the perversity thesis), Glaeser goes on to write, “It’s easy to see why Detroit’s African Americans were moved to riot,” but then scolds black Detroiters for being so “foolish” as to start a riot, largely because it scared off wealthy whites. When the riot started, police forces were not quick enough to put it down, he argues. “Cities with more cops actually had smaller riots,” he muses. “Unfortunately, draconian enforcement seems to be the only effective way to stop a riot once it starts.” Even more foolish than engaging in a riot that scared off middle-class white people was the desire to elect Coleman Young, “whose anger was understandable but unhelpful.” To Glaeser, Young did not inherit a dying city that corporations, state government, and federal officials had systematically stacked the deck against. Young created it by engaging in a Curley-esque form of racial patronage designed to scare off whites. Using the perversity thesis, and building on the apparent logic that only white people enjoy good police, fire, and garbage removal service, and only black people live in subsidized housing, he writes: Young initiated large building projects that put his supporters on the payroll. He lobbied for federally supported public housing . . . to keep his supporters, as opposed to whites, as city residents. At the same time, Young cut back on the basic services that white Detroiters valued, such as police and fire. In 1976, he cut the police force by 20 percent, which along with his other attacks on the

The Conservative Myth of Detroit 4 111

police department, perpetrated lawlessness in Detroit. Trash collection declined by 50 percent during Young’s early years.

But perhaps most damaging of all was Coleman Young’s alleged desire to subvert the laws of the market. When corporations continued to locate their businesses downtown, but residents moved to outlying suburbs, thus denying Detroit the ability to fund services for said businesses, Young and his city council attempted to institute a wage tax. This exercise, according to conservatives, generated a crisis that other, “more reasonable” cities such as New York, which elected centrist mayors, avoided. In classic perversity-thesis style, Glaeser aches for the victims of such policies: Local income taxes illustrate the problem of trying to create a just society city by city. The direct effect of Young’s income tax was to take money from the rich to fund services that helped the poor. The indirect effect of a local income tax is to encourage richer citizens and businesses to leave . . . In a declining place like Detroit, well-meaning attempts at local redistribution can easily backfire by speeding the exodus of wealthier businesses and people, which only further isolates the poor.

The Curley effect suggests that while black Detroiters may have been oppressed, they overreacted to discrimination, were coddled by police forces when they rioted, and then elected a mayor whose evident goal was to engineer the exodus of white people. Constructed as such, Detroit becomes a proving ground for the ostensible failures of black militancy and Keynesianism. Largely insulated from serious critique, this narrative is allowed to drive policy discourses in Lansing and Washington.

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THE FUNCTIONS OF MANUFACTURED DECLINE This narrative serves to achieve several policy functions for the conservative movement. First, it extinguishes the potential danger that the image of urban crisis could present in provoking an empathetic interventionist response. It inverts causation for why Detroit declined and then weaponizes it. White flight and redlining are converted into a logical response to the threat posed by black people. It portrays black leaders as misguided and naïve at best, villainous at worst. It converts sustained austerity into unrepentant profligacy. It suggests that the problem with Detroit is that black Detroiters have had it too easy and must now be disciplined. By converting the victims into the perpetrators, it lays the ideational framework for continuing to undermine what is left of the Keynesian-managerial edifice and replacing it with a deprivationist paradigm. The second important function of manufactured decline is to unify the conservative movement around a common enemy. The narrative is unconvincing to skeptics and those not already converted. Few serious scholars believe that Detroit’s current problems are about overspending. Detroit and cities like it have the lowest per capita school expenditures in their respective states and have for a generation. If anything such austerity is the cause of continued urban malaise, not the solution. No resident of Detroit is intrigued by the idea of further cutting resources to the school system. But the narrative does not have to convince nonconservatives or residents of the city. Manufactured decline was constructed for conservatives by conservatives to provide a more detailed rationale and moral justification for organized deprivation. It provides conservative lawmakers with an apparently intricate way to intellectualize their calls for organized

The Conservative Myth of Detroit 4 113

deprivation—their refusal to raise taxes to fund schools or provide affordable housing. Manufacturing decline serves to reframe their actions as helpful rather than hateful. It provides conservative voters with rationales that dovetail with their own biases. This narrative rationalizes the beliefs of racially resentful voters who think that black people have taken too much from the American economy. Paradoxically, it provides just enough language of compassion for moderates to actually believe conservatives are being benevolent by arguing for cuts to housing, health care, or education programs. Finally, manufactured decline provides a more specific template of ideas to drive actual policy. A large chunk of the policies for places like Detroit is created by white-Republican-dominated state legislatures and the federal government. Though manufactured decline does not resonate with the majority of mainstream scholars or actual city residents, it resonates deeply with conservatives living outside of the declining city. Within this mindset, Detroit and places like it are unsalvageable—their landscapes too broken and their residents too morally irredeemable to save. We should demolish the whole thing and start over. Regionalization or other forms of revenue sharing are foolish within this worldview. Manufactured decline provides suburban and outstate leaders with the narrative they need to convince themselves that they had no hand in the construction of crisis in Detroit and they owe the city nothing. Only market heroes can revive it, so we should deregulate everything. Detroit represents a highly visible and tangible form of urban decline that scholars of various political dispositions have sought to explain with an eye toward discrediting a wider ideology. Conservative scholars have framed the city as a collectivist dystopia— an object lesson of what happens if you deviate from the virtues

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of “separate but equal” classical liberalism. Conservative manufactured decline is, by far, the most important framing in terms of actualized policy. Its “lessons” are used to justify further austerity for the city and to blame Detroit (and similar cities) for problems that were created outside of the city’s boundaries. Detroit and other, similar cities have been othered—made into foreign, dangerous entities unworthy of empathy. With this ideational groundwork in place, conservatives have led the charge to deconstruct, privatize, and penalize the already deprived city. The following four chapters explore how this broad framing has translated into a variety of policy outcomes, including preemption of municipal autonomy, massive land clearance, downsizing, and land-market deregulation. These measures have had the effect of depriving the othered city.

PART II DEPRIVING THE OTHERED CITY

4

 CONSERVATIVE CITY LIMITS

P

chapters have emphasized how the declining city was marginalized by fleeing capital and people. The central point of those chapters was that these two types of flight were organized, not random or natural. The next section examines what happened when political power was realigned in the Rust Belt region. This chapter focuses on the limits imposed on the distressed black city and how those limits accelerate extant processes of decline. This is one of several ways conservatives have deprived the othered city. As outlined earlier, one of the main trains of thought for neoliberal intellectuals is the public-choice school (PCS). Public choice broadly seeks to bring the insights of neoclassical economics to the study of politics. To public-choice school theorists, collective behavior is best understood by examining the rational choices of individuals, which are ostensibly regulated by an autonomous equilibrating market. Tiebout’s intervention was one of the first, and one of the most important, in the study of urban population flows. To him, the residential choices of families could be best understood by examining their rational choice between different service packages in different cities. The consumer-voter would rationally choose between different REVIOUS

118 4 Depriving the Othered City

tax-service packages in an urban region when deciding where to live. They would be drawn to places with low taxes and great services and repelled by places with high taxes and poor services. Municipal leaders would thus be disciplined for fiscal mismanagement or inefficient provision of public goods. A city’s fortunes would decline until leaders recognized the competitive public goods marketplace and improved their offerings. Tiebout has been critiqued from a variety of angles: his neglect of other reasons that might push and pull people from place to place, such as employment opportunities or racism; dubious assumptions about perfect mobility and information about potential options; and a weak empirical record. But his broader notion that there is a more or less autonomous set of forces regulating municipalities has remained relatively unscathed (at least within the PCS paradigm). The public-choice school holds this notion to be a virtual axiom. Individuals and cities have a set of choices in front of them. If they pick rationally, they will optimize their outcomes. If they pick irrationally, they will be disciplined by the market. In 1981, public-choice theorist Paul Peterson wrote City Limits. In it, he continued to critique non-public-choice theorists for treating the city as an autonomous vehicle capable of solving matters like poverty. To Peterson, there are three general urbanpolicy functions. Allocational policies, such as those overseeing police, fire, and garbage removal, have little impact on the local economy but are the basic functions of local government. Redistributional policies are designed to provide housing or income assistance to citizens of lesser means. Developmental policies are those that positively build an industry or other forms of economic value in the city. To Peterson, redistribution and development are opposites, and the “self-interest” of a city is simple. Policy makers must limit “pernicious” redistributional policies which harm

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the local economy, while simultaneously using local statecraft for development policies (usually land development) because this will be “praised by many” and only opposed by self-interested activists working “in conflict with community interests.” Peterson departs from Tiebout on a number of points, but one of the common threads is the existence of a competitive marketplace of city governments. “Indeed,” Peterson writes, “the competition among local communities all but precludes a concern for redistribution.” It is this market that imposes the limits on cities. It is this market that provokes the collective action of residents to move out of “suboptimal” cities. This market is without conscious organization or agency—it just is. There are several critiques of this idea, but the one I wish to focus on here is the notion that city limits are generated without organization, by an autonomous, competitive marketplace. There is more than a little irony in the fact that conservatives hold public choice to be so axiomatic. Conservative state legislatures across the country have been most responsible for directly imposing the limits they insist the market will impose on its own. In fact, the market has not been responsible for preempting the ability of cities to tax citizens, regulate businesses, provide living wages, remove Confederate monuments, or impose gun control. These limits have been imposed not by an autonomous, equilibrating market but by conservative legislatures intent on punishing cities and their citizens for perceived misdeeds. This story is not unique to the Rust Belt, but it does have particular implications for cities in the region because of the concentration of urban decline there. If we understand urban decline to be the outflow of people or capital, it is not far-fetched to suggest that conservative city limits have accelerated and in some cases caused decline by limiting the ability of cities to capture revenue from firms and create a pleasant place to live.

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CONSERVATIVE CONTROLS ON CITIES Since the 1970s, conservatives have systematically chipped away at the powers of Democrat-controlled cities. They have accomplished this through coordinated interventions at both the federal and state level. They have successfully destroyed the erstwhile city-to-federal relationship that existed in the immediate postwar period and replaced it with a city-to-state relationship. In places where the state government is dominated by white rural conservatives and the cities by more racially diverse progressives, these interventions have been most impactful. The industrial Midwest is one such region. The conservative movement has positioned the Democrat-controlled city as a threat and has enacted a range of limits to neutralize it. Black municipal empowerment, crime, school integration, and affirmative action have all been framed as threats. Conservatives have used this threat-specter to mobilize a politics of controlling those putative threats, not by winning city council seats but by constricting and controlling the powers of cities. The first meaningful step toward disempowering cities came under Nixon. He and other conservatives wanted to disrupt the federal-municipal relationship (which had developed under the New Deal period) and replace it with a state-municipal interchange. The first step was the reduction of direct subsidies to cities. Remaining subsidies were converted into block grants to states (rather than cities directly), giving state government wider authority on how to (or whether to) allocate them to cities. Reagan and subsequent conservatives continued this pathway, altering the power relationship between cities and higher levels of government. With greater power to allocate money and regulate what city government could and could not do, states began to enact a range of restrictions. These restrictions were particularly severe in states

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where the political representation of cities and state government differed the most. In the industrial Midwest, with its white, ruraldominated, Republican state legislatures, and black-influenced (or black-dominated), Democrat-voting cities, the restrictions have been particularly severe. The restrictions fall under three general categories: direct removal of governing authority, limits on land acquisition, and differential funding and penality. Each removes governing power from cities and replaces it with corporate or state power (or both). Cities are expected to rescue themselves from urban decline, yet they have fewer powers to do so than any time in the past fifty years.

Direct Removal of Authority The National League of Cities recently published a report on the range of preemption laws that have been passed by conservative state governments since the 1970s. Despite running on a federalist platform of dispersed power, Republican-led legislatures have shown a remarkable inclination to simply preempt the ability of cities to govern themselves. Preemption laws have been passed in most states in the past fifty years to (among other things) limit cities from enacting antidiscrimination ordinances, removing Confederate monuments, raising property taxes, penalizing gun ownership, and enacting or continuing rent control. The overwhelming emphasis of preemption laws in the past fifty years has been conservative. There is no corollary wave of laws that has been successfully passed by states to, for example, stop police brutality or limit slumlords from exploiting tenants during eviction. The first preemption wave occurred in the 1970s and revolved primarily around tax and expenditure limitations. In response to high-profile tax revolts in California and elsewhere, state

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governments enacted limits on the ability of municipalities to raise revenue through property taxes (and in some cases income taxes). Already struggling to manage the ravages of white flight and deindustrialization, this had a particularly devastating impact on the distressed central cities of the Midwest, which were completely surrounded by incorporated suburban municipalities and increasingly unable to tap tax revenue from remaining residents because of these limitations. Over the subsequent decades, preemption laws generally paralleled the ebb and flow of Republican state power. This dynamic intensified after the Tea Party wave election of 2010 converted mixed Democrat-Republican governance into rural, conservative, Republican-dominated government, especially in the Rust Belt. Previously politically mixed states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan elected very rurally focused, socially conservative, anti-urban governors and legislatures that year, and some remain in power. Careful multivariate research has tied this surge to white racial resentment, even before Trump emerged as a national political figure. That is, despite the fact that Obama did not preside over any major civil rights legislation, his mere presence as the first black president was particularly motivational for racially resentful voters who viewed this as an erosion of their privilege. By the time President Obama left office in 2017, Republicans controlled thirty-three governorships and thirty-two state legislatures. The limitations imposed by this wave of conservatives have been severe. Twenty-four states have recently limited or prohibited their cities from increasing their minimum wage, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Seventeen states now limit their cities’ ability to require paid leave of employers. Virtually every state has tax preemption laws, and many were strengthened after 2010. Many of the efforts were organized by the conservative American Legislative Executive

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Council (ALEC), which, among other activities, creates model legislation for conservative state legislatures to adopt. Republican politicians elected from rural districts can do this in part because there is no political consequence—their rural constituents are largely unaffected by, say, limiting minimum-wage laws in the state’s main city. Many legislators rose to power precisely on the promise of limiting the perceived power of the state’s main city. Outstate politicians in Michigan openly build their state legislative campaigns on running against the perceived abuses of Detroit. In Ohio, rural white legislators ride to power on promises of limiting Cleveland. In Wisconsin, Milwaukee is the bête noire for reactionary outstate politicians. Such political figures (now dominant in the Midwest) actually benefit enormously by following through on promises to limit cities. The second prominent form of state-led municipal disempowerment has involved financial-control boards. Between 1975 and 2009, at least 120 cities and counties in the United States were placed under some form of financial supervision. In 2009, there were forty-nine active boards in fifteen states. There are a range of reasons, levels of power, and institutional arrangements behind these boards. They run the gamut from full assumption of municipal powers (as in Michigan cities under the emergency manager law) to privately managed debt renegotiations (as in the New York City financial crisis of the 1970s), but they all share a common approach to resolving these crises: austerity. Revenue-sided considerations are marginal or nonexistent in these efforts. Control boards have been devoted to imposing austerity on ostensibly profligate central cities, removing financial control from municipal governments and placing it with suburban elites and corporations. The precipitating event in each case was financial distress, and the remedy was service cuts, layoffs, and planned neglect.

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A second, more subtle form of financial takeover has also occurred in this context. As distressed minority-controlled central cities continued to hemorrhage white, middle-class people, some continued to control important forms of infrastructure that newly formed suburbs would have to purchase access to from the central city. Examples include regional transit, airports, and water, sewer, and electrical transmission systems. Kornberg writes about the Detroit Water Service (DWS). The system was sprawling and overbuilt (ironically anticipating growth outside of the city of Detroit) and as a result became incredibly expensive per capita to service. Because control was centered in the blackdominated city of Detroit, white suburbanites adopted a different perspective on the high costs. The prevailing suburban perspective was that white suburbanites had to pay too much for water because they were “subsidizing” poor inner-city people who could not pay full fare, and the system was mismanaged by “incompetent” (black) managers who were appointed by Coleman Young. It became a key policy goal of white Detroit-area suburban municipalities to control the finances of the DWS. Their first success was having the state unilaterally assign more suburban seats to control the DWS board. Immediately, they began negotiating much more suburban-friendly water contracts with little regard to the structural conditions that were making water so expensive for everyone. After emergency management in 2013, state officials had more direct control and they used it to impose austerity in the form of water cutoffs for “deadbeat” clients in Detroit. Sector-specific takeovers have also been common in the past fifty years. The most prominent sector affected has been education. States have taken over school systems across the country during the past fifty years but nowhere more prominently than in cities that have been ravaged by white flight. Majority-minority school districts in Camden, Newark, Detroit, Flint, and New

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Orleans have all been subject to state management in recent decades. The details and structures vary, but the general pattern is for a state-appointed board to take over the finances and management of the local school system in question. Often, the new board governs the school district with as much private emphasis as possible. Charter schools, vouchers, and private management replace unionized teachers, public management, and public oversight. The context, institutional design, and degree of oversight vary, but they share a number of similarities that are worth reviewing. First, most of the cases are motivated by an individuated understanding of the fiscal distress in question. The rationale for taking over finances in Detroit, Camden, or New York was not based on the inherently inequitable design of school-system funding, federal cuts in direct aid in the 1970s, or the debilitating influence of white flight. It was solely because of “financial mismanagement.” This policy frame is not designed to reform revenue tools. Rather, it is designed to justify a reduction in expenditures, taxation powers, and authority over infrastructure in a more or less permanent way. Second, in most cases, the business sector was positioned as the resolution to the problem. School systems were placed under the control of private managers in Philadelphia and New Orleans very directly because the meme that government is always corrupt or poor at management had prevailed. Sometimes the appointed managers were self-interested (e.g., the corporate-finance figures central to the New York and Detroit bankruptcies, who all held debt), and other times they were simply pure ideologues (e.g., Betsy Devos, the current U.S. Secretary of Education, forcing charters on the city of Detroit), but they share one thing in common: abysmal performance results. In both types of instances, the managers are market fundamentalists and “reform” the “mismanaged” public entity accordingly when they are given power over it by the state. Because they are not

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elected by those affected, they have little political accountability. When the state of Michigan assumed control over the Detroit school district in 1999, for example, they were faced with a structural debt. When they relinquished control over the district six years later, they left the school $200 million more in debt. When the Republican governor of Michigan assigned business managers to take over the finances and management of Flint, they left the city with poisoned water. Education researchers have found that school takeovers have either not changed the performance of schools or served as dramatic setbacks. Yet because these are officials appointed by governors who face no meaningful political consequence for their actions, the myth that private corporate takeover will help persists. When the emergency manager poisoned Flint’s water, what could residents do? The city already votes overwhelmingly for the state party (Democratic) that opposes the governor who imposed the emergency manager. So do the residents of New Orleans whose schools were destroyed by Republicans and conservative Democrats in Baton Rouge, and the residents of Detroit whose assets were stripped to the bone by the bankruptcy agreement. In short, despite the mythos of local control and its resonance in the conservative movement, Republicans have been systematic and strategic at removing local power and replacing it with state-appointed corporate officials. And the residents of affected cities can do little about it.

Limitations on Land Acquisition There have also been important limitations placed on cities wishing to acquire land for development through eminent domain (expropriation). During the urban renewal period between 1949 and the early 1970s, eminent domain was used by local

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development authorities to fundamentally restructure the landscapes of cities across the country. Entire neighborhoods were condemned, demolished, then paved over with expressways, vacant lots, public housing, and stadia. These actions were deeply resented by the increasingly minority-concentrated urban areas of the United States, but the political Right—then dominated by corporate-focused Republicans—was largely silent. To businesselite Republicans, eminent domain was a necessity of doing business. The politics of this began to change in the mid 1970s when Coleman Young, the first black mayor of Detroit, was asked by General Motors to expropriate land to expand an assembly plant GM had purchased on the border of Hamtramck and Detroit. To modernize the facility, they would need to acquire much of the land in an adjacent neighborhood named Poletown, which was then home to a majority ethnic Polish population. Because of the lessons and resentments of the urban renewal period, Young and his colleagues made generous offers to property owners and renters. Almost all eagerly took the offers, but the few holdouts were able to make a spectacle out of the event that would change the nature of eminent domain for Detroit and elsewhere. Activists fought the condemnation through court challenges, the media, and street protests that received national attention. Though they did not succeed in stopping the action—the land was eventually acquired and the plant expanded—they were very successful at impugning Young as being hostile to white neighborhoods. After this point, a wing of the conservative movement was formed to limit urban powers of eminent domain. In perhaps the most significant development, Charles Koch provided the seed money in 1991 for the formation of the Institute for Justice. The institute is a libertarian think tank whose purpose is to motivate states to limit local eminent-domain latitude. It has a $34 million annual budget to press states to make it more difficult for local government

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to acquire or condemn land for development purposes. The Institute for Justice remained relatively obscure until 2005, when they served as the counsel for Susette Kelo in her fight against the condemnation of her home in New London, Connecticut, to make way for a commercial development. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court. Kelo famously lost the case, but its political value was to place the issue front and square on the public agenda. Eminent-domain abuses are now central conservative issues. The institute provides report cards for elected state officials on how restrictive they are with eminent domain (the more restrictive the better). After the Tea Party wave election of 2010, these efforts intensified and further limitations were enacted around the country. Eminent domain was and remains a contentious subject— opposition to it is not exclusive to the political Right. But the reforms provoked in recent years are not coming from both sides of the political spectrum. Eminent domain was a non-issue for most conservatives during the urban renewal period. No one at the Institute for Justice is objecting to eminent-domain trampling of renter rights or the community-planning process (i.e., objections long held by the Left). The conservative objection revolves exclusively around property rights, and even there the interest has been a recent one. Conservatives successfully provoked state legislatures around the country to limit the permissible uses of eminent domain and make the payouts for land owners higher. As the antigovernment hysteria of the Right intensified in the 1990s, and then again with the election of President Obama, these issues became more central. Limitations on eminent domain, whatever one thinks of them normatively, have eroded one of the few tools local governments can use for economic development. For suburban fringe cities this tends not to matter as much—more land is undeveloped and owned by single owners (often farmers eager

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to sell). But for distressed inner-core cities where developable sites are often composed of thousands of parcels and hundreds of owners, eminent domain is often the only way economic development can proceed. Limiting this power constricts the ability of land-locked urban cores to enact developmental policies.

Differential Funding and Penality The least direct but most important form of state intervention lies in decisions about what types of programs receive funding and how (or whether) laws are enforced. Cities have fewer revenue tools than states, so municipalities continue to rely on state money to supplement or fully fund certain activities. The conservative influence in the past fifty years has been stark, particularly for states in the Rust Belt with very white-rural-dominated state legislatures and black central cities. Despite the professed need to cut expenditures, state legislatures have shown an unusual eagerness since the 1960s to aggressively fund policing, prison construction, and downtown economic development. By contrast, they have shown an equal eagerness to cut social services, subsidized housing, school subsidies, and drug treatment programs. Research has shown that states with large black populations are much stingier with block grant and welfare funding than whiter ones. This differential governing approach extends to the realm of penality—what behaviors are considered punishable and which are tolerated by the state. Poor, renting citizens are treated with zero-tolerance penality. Land-investor violations are, by contrast, not pursued or prosecuted lightly. Conservative governments in Madison, Lansing, Harrisburg, and Columbus have displayed a willingness to cut social expenses while simultaneously directly assisting large private capital to

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build stadia and casinos in Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Cleveland. The state governmental choice of what to fund and what not to fund becomes a de facto urban policy more powerful than what gets decided at city hall. The most direct forms of austerity drive inequality and compound deprivation in places like Cleveland’s east side, Milwaukee’s north side, and much of Detroit. Such differential funding priorities effectively dictate developmental policies and disallow redistributive (and even allocational) strategies. Distressed industrial cities in the Midwest have recently embarked on proactive plans to manage the vast amounts of vacant land within their borders. Deemed “rightsizing” by experts, such plans aim to concentrate disparately settled populations around growth corridors and to build green spaces in the vacated former neighborhoods. To enact such plans equitably, new affordable housing would have to be built, green space construction and environmental remediation would have to commence, and cities would have to be empowered to convert formerly private land into public parks. But states throughout the region have shown no inclination to allow cities to pursue rightsizing in a complete, equitable way. States have provided copious funding for demolition but not housing construction. They restrict the ability of cities to acquire land for large green spaces. Rightsizing, after going through this conservative filter, now amounts to a green-washed plan to demolish and displace the most vulnerable residents in places like Flint, Saginaw, and Detroit. These differential priorities extend to the realm of penality. Conservative governments treat crimes committed by property owners very differently than those committed by renters and poor people. Since the 1960s, state and federal governments have funded intense crackdowns on street crimes—particularly, but not exclusively, drug crimes. When drug epidemics occur, as they

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did in Detroit and Cleveland during the 1980s, state legislatures accelerated the penality for users by flooding law enforcement with resources, enacting zero-tolerance laws, and building new prisons. For a variety of reasons, this has functioned to disempower older industrial cities in the Midwest, particularly those with black majorities. First, because of differences in the way certain drug crimes have been prosecuted (e.g., powder cocaine versus crack cocaine possession), black drug users have been targeted and penalized more than white users. In cities with black majorities this, ipso facto, has more of an impact than in whitemajority cities. Second, the American penal system is unusually harsh for those who have served their time. Even after release, most ex-felons find it all but impossible to find work in the formal employment sector or to rent an apartment. This accelerates social disorder, discouraging stable families, employment, and social engagement. In places targeted in the anti-crime waves of the 1960s and 1980s, these measures devastate the basic ability of cities and their residents to improve economic conditions. Third, this hyperfunding of the prison industrial complex has led to political imbalances in the region that reinforce conservative influence. Most new prisons in the Midwest have been built in white, conservative, rural areas. By contrast, most prisoners are from larger cities. Yet some states allow the rural location housing the prison, not the city from which they were extracted, to count the prisoners for apportionment purposes. As such, rural, conservative places send more representatives to the state capitol at the expense of cities, and the priorities of state legislatures become more conservative and devoted to incarceration. By contrast, the crimes of slumlords, investors, and corporations are tolerated to a great degree either because states refuse to fund cities’ law enforcement or directly intervene to stop cities from enforcement. Tax delinquency and code violations are much

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more common among absentee owners than owner-occupiers, yet cities are not able to penalize them, because municipalities lack the resources or because states intervene. In Indiana, for example, the city of South Bend was disallowed by the state from fining landlords for problem properties but permitted to fine tenants. A recent study by Megan Hatch found that Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Missouri all have what can be deemed as pro-business, anti-renter restrictions. These laws place few limitations on how much a landlord can overcharge tenants during the eviction process. Landlords can evict tenants for less of a cause and are more immune to municipal penalties. Even in Wisconsin, which is classified as a pro-renter state, punishment for slumlords in many cities consists of “landlord school,” where predatory landlords are lectured about renting to the “wrong people.” When land owners (especially large ones) fall behind on their taxes or water bills, cities have less ability to pursue them than if they are renters or poor owner-occupiers. Crime is tolerated or lightly enforced if you are a nonresident investor. If you are a resident renter, it is not. This largely flows from the state capitols, not city halls. The conservative understanding of city governance is rooted in the paradigm of public choice. Within this frame, a cold and autonomous logic will discipline cities into becoming marketfriendly. This external force will discipline cities that enact redistributive policies and reward those that impose developmental policies. The external force is without organization or agency—it operates according to its own logic. Yet, despite the popularity of this viewpoint, it has largely not been an autonomous external market that has disciplined cities—it has been conservative lawmakers acting to limit the autonomy of cities. Their acts are not random—they are organized by groups like ALEC around

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a shared belief that cities are out of control and must be reined in. Nationally, conservative governments and institutions have systematically pared down the ability of the local state to do anything but acquiesce to the market. Cities are limited in taxation, land acquisition, and wage levels. Their residents are disproportionately affected by zero-tolerance penality, while nonresident predatory investors go unprosecuted. This has been particularly consequential for struggling cities in the Rust Belt. Not only have they had important levels of local democracy stolen from them, they have had a range of potential economic development tools removed as well. City limits are real, but it is not the hidden hand of the market imposing them. It is the very deliberate actions of organized political figures imposing limits to (re)assert social control over cities for their perceived abuses.

 LAND-MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM

L

dozens of other neighborhoods in Detroit, Heidelberg Street is a disfigured shell of its former self. Most of the houses that once dotted every parcel on the street have been demolished. Since 1950, Heidelberg Street has lost more than 90 percent of its population and over 80 percent of its housing to abandonment, arson, neglect, and eventual demolition (figure 5.1). Forty-six percent of the remaining houses are vacant—many so disfigured from arson, scrapping, and exposure as to be uninhabitable or not worth the cost of renovating. Such abandonment and deterioration are not unique to Detroit or the Rust Belt more generally. Sixty-three other neighborhoods in Detroit alone have had more than 50 percent of their housing demolished in the past forty years. There are at least 269 Heidelberg-like neighborhoods in forty-nine cities in the region. The only thing that makes Heidelberg Street truly unusual is that an estimated 200,000 outsiders visit each year to see the Heidelberg Project. Almost all other neighborhoods that have suffered severe abandonment are rarely seen by outsiders but rather are discussed superficially, exploited for their shock value by the conservative movement and others. It is also undeniably true, however, that such places pose real problems for cities and their residents. IKE

land abandonment on Heidelberg Street, Detroit.

Ellery Street

Sources that were traced: 1973 building footprints traced from aerial photos via the Wayne State University Online Map Archive; 2017 footprints traced from Google Maps

FIGURE 5.1  Extreme

Houses abandoned and demolished after 1973 Houses remaining in 2017

Benson Street

Heidelberg Street

Preston Street

Mt. Elliot Street

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At the neighborhood level, the prevalence of vacant lots and houses creates dangerous play environments for children. Vacant houses become targets for arson, vermin, scrapping, squatting, and use as drug dens. The stigma of having multiple abandonments in the neighborhood wears on the mental health and nervous systems of residents, particularly children. The occurrence of arson, abandonment, and isolation allow for certain practices that discourage mainstream investors and potential homeowners. Scrapping a house for its piping and wiring makes already distressed structures almost worthless. The presence of illegal dumping, half-burned houses, and overgrown lots discourages potential newcomers from buying into the neighborhood and banks from providing them with capital to do so. In the wake of almost no mainstream investor or homeowner interest comes a wave of less scrupulous investors who buy houses in places like this for a variety of reasons, almost none of which will build or improve the community. Some buy at tax auctions for as little as a few hundred dollars, then, doing little maintenance, rent the property to tenants who cannot find housing elsewhere. Most tenants do not complain for fear of eviction and because they are already in a precarious position—usually because of extreme poverty or a criminal record. Other investors convert the cheap properties into “rent-to-own” “opportunities” since banks will not lend to title-clouded, highly distressed neighborhoods, and the home-owning aspirations of residents are easy to exploit (figure 5.2). Other investors buy vacant lots with the intent simply of suing a nearby bar or church that has been informally using a lot for parking or gardening. These practices in turn create challenges for the city managers. Arson increases danger and the costs of fighting fires. The concentration of unscrupulous investors increases the need for code enforcement and housing inspectors. In extreme cases like Detroit and east Cleveland, the

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FIGURE 5.2  Contract

mortgage sign in Toledo, Ohio.

Photo credit: Author

collapse of population undermines the revenue source for paying for infrastructure. Policy makers in declining cities have meaningful reasons to care about land abandonment, and they spend considerable time contemplating ways to contain and reverse it, but there are real limits on what they can do. These limits are rooted in white reaction and the national deference to property rights and reinforced by conservative forces residing outside of the city. More abstractly, those limits are motivated by what Karl Polanyi once deemed the “free market utopia.” In this utopia, the market is removed from constraints designed to protect the populace from its harder edges and injustices. In this context, that utopian vision is promoted and codified by a powerful group of conservative think tanks, Republican legislators, and outstate citizens with

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victim-blaming views of places like Heidelberg Street. The language of race is absent from their policy justification even though heavy abandonment is rooted in racial reaction, and the deregulated market they wish to unleash will disparately affect the black community. In keeping with laissez-faire racism, the condition of the places like this must be a reflection of some sort of cultural deficiency or corruption, so no compassion or empathy is necessary. Within this ethos, the victims are the culprits. And with free-market utopians imposing constraints on what they or their city can do to improve their housing conditions, exposure to the ravages of the market is intensified. Already destabilized markets are converted into veritable Lord of the Flies markets, filled with scavengers and predators. Supporters of land-market fundamentalism are separated from the consequences of their ideas. Like the minimum wage preemptions discussed earlier, the radical deregulation of land markets in Detroit has no consequence for the constituents of the outstate white rural Republican legislator pushing for them. They are more powerful than the wishes of reformers, city halls concerned with land predation, or residents whose neighborhoods are being ravaged by scammers and scrappers. This chapter is about the struggle that local authorities have waged to exert greater control over the mechanics of land abandonment and the resistance they have faced from those powerful limiting forces.

RESPONSES TO LAND ABANDONMENT A variety of factors drive land abandonment, including white reaction, suburban sprawl and balkanization, housing and infrastructure aging, and economic change. Public policy cannot, of course, control all these factors. Some, like deindustrialization

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and white flight, are driven by changes occurring outside of the formally governed realm or by governments elsewhere in the region, country, or world. Other factors, like suburban building permits, are controlled by competing governments that are not likely concerned with land abandonment and predation in an adjacent city. And whatever limits there are for public policy in general, it is also undoubtedly true that central cities control an even smaller subset of these already limited powers. Most of these limiting forces are external—federal, state, or adjacent suburban municipal policies that encourage sprawl, for example—but some are more local, such as the presence of a local growth machine that is hardwired to promote land-based development policies. Despite these challenges, city governments and neighborhood groups have attempted a variety of strategies designed to reduce land abandonment and predation or find functional reuses of land after problems have occurred. There is an ongoing movement in urban planning to analyze and promote some of these methods as ways to manage decline. These techniques run the gamut. To address issues of already existent land abandonment, scholars have promoted new land uses like side-lots, community gardens, orchards, and parkettes to absorb vacant land and promote community stability. To address allied issues of investor predation, scholars have suggested limitations on buyers of distressed properties and have enhanced regulations for landlords and property owners more generally. Others have suggested that a preemptive approach may be the most sensible and have promoted the development of predictive methods for identifying problematic properties and targeting them with code enforcement or more restrictive property registration policies. However, because of the strength of outside forces and governments, there have been substantial political challenges to developing and implementing such approaches on a scale commensurate

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with the scope of land abandonment in key Rust Belt central cities. The aggregate total of these external forces discourages or prohibits cities from implementing communal, managed, or public conversions of land. Conversely, external forces necessitate market-oriented responses, even though those techniques have little proven value for distressed neighborhoods and are generally not popular there. Rather than summarize the strengths and limits of current policies being used to address land abandonment, it is perhaps more useful to aggregate such techniques into a typology of land-management paradigms that relate to the broader ideational and policy shift being discussed in this book. What follows is an analysis of how land-abandonment techniques variously enable or inhibit different state-property relationships. The four paradigms are nonmarket, managerial, entrepreneurial, and market-only (table 5.1). Nonmarket approaches promote a state-centered deprivatization of land and/or housing in a city. Managerial approaches promote a careful regulation of private land-market activity. Entrepreneurial approaches promote the use of statecraft to advance value in land markets. Market-only approaches promote the near-complete removal of land-market regulations. These should be seen as policy directions rather than categories that embody one city or another. Most cities employ a variety of approaches and are characterized by a mix of outcomes. But it is also true that the availability and possibility of entrepreneurial and market-only approaches have been animated and enabled in the current policy paradigm, while nonmarket and managerial strategies have been functionally disabled.

Nonmarket Land Governance Nonmarket techniques seek or function to decommodify land that is currently available for private consumption. The land could

Land-Market Fundamentalism 4 141 TABLE 5.1 LAND MANAGEMENT PARADIGMS FOR DECLINING CITIES

Type Nonmarket

Managerial

Entrepreneurial

Market-only

Logic To remove land from private ownership for various social or environmental purposes To penalize property owners who are not achieving certain legal or social expectations To partner with private investors who will achieve certain legal or social expectations To remove state oversight from property ownership so that capital is interested in investing

Examples Social housing on tax-reverted properties; publicly managed green space Building code enforcement; health code enforcement; property registration laws; tax delinquency enforcement Lower taxes; incentives for development

Unregulated tax auctions; absence of building, health, and tax delinquency enforcement; lower property taxes

be converted to a public park, a community garden, or nonmarket housing such as LIHTC, project-based Section 8, or a housing cooperative. Ambitious proposals even include building urban forests and resurfacing streams once buried by urban neighborhoods. A recent proposal by the nonprofit Detroit Future City, for example, suggested that large swaths of the city could be converted into space for commercial agriculture and untended forest. Proponents have suggested that methods of this sort may be sensible for several reasons. First, declining cities often have an abundance of vacant land that is not being used productively. Such methods could, in theory, improve those environments by providing parks and community amenities. Second, and related, the mere presence of such inexpensive land and housing makes

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it difficult to sell or lease other properties in the city. Converting such properties to public use and making land unbuildable creates scarcity and potentially stimulates housing demand for the remaining housing units in a given city. The first challenge in decommodifying land would be for the state to acquire it. Three means have been suggested for acquiring and converting property: tax reversion, eminent domain, and zoning. Tax foreclosure occurs when a public, tax-collecting entity (e.g., city, county, water company, school district) files a lien against a property for nonpayment of taxes by its owner. Details of this process vary by jurisdiction, but eventually such debts accumulate to the point where a city or county is permitted to auction the liens it has placed against the property to pay the debt. The opening bid is usually the value of the delinquent taxes and fees, but in highly distressed cities many properties proceed through this stage without a bid because they are deemed to be worth less than that amount. In most cases, those properties then proceed to a second, forfeiture auction where parcels are available for little more than the processing costs of selling them. In Wayne County (Detroit), the opening bid for second-auction properties is $500. In Lucas County Ohio (Toledo), the opening bid is a mere $60. Many still go unclaimed despite almost no cost barrier and are reverted to public ownership. As a result of this process, some distressed cities are formally in possession of thousands of vacant lots and derelict houses. In Detroit, 72,173 of the city’s estimated 120,000 vacant lots are publicly owned because of this process. Thus, the theoretical strength of nonmarket proposals using tax reversion is that some cities are already in possession of copious amounts of land. In theory, they should be able to convert such land into nonprivate uses that will increase amenity values and generate scarcity and thus demand for remaining housing. But there are real limits to such proposals.

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First and foremost, cities generally do not control the terms of their tax auctions. In fact, most tax-foreclosure processes are handled at the county level, which, depending on location, tends to be more influenced by suburban interests who are skeptical about (if not hostile to) suggestions that the central city might be a good manager of land. Second, and related, tax foreclosure is governed by state law. Again, variation abounds, but the general direction of state law is to make reverted property as available for purchase as possible. Those 72,173 reverted parcels in Detroit cannot be easily and permanently converted into, say, a city park. State law necessitates that they be available for purchase, and the city is so resource-starved that it lacks the ability to tend to such properties anyway. Third, there are still large numbers of people living in highly vacated neighborhoods like Heidelberg Street. Simply deprivatizing the land around these residents does not solve the infrastructure cost problems. The remaining occupancy also makes goals of large, uninterrupted forests or resurfaced streams far-fetched unless a plan is made to acquire the land of remaining owners. Others have therefore suggested more passive approaches using the zoning code. The idea here is that some land (perhaps the reverted parcels) could be unilaterally declared as unbuildable via the zoning code. This may take longer than more interventionist measures, but proponents argue that eventually cities could be rebuilt around denser, town-like nodes surrounded by public parks and untended forests. The key strength of this method would be that cities would retain nominal control over land-use planning, and no active land acquisition would be needed, so resource constraints would not be an issue. But as other scholars have pointed out, such measures would have to be pursued with caution because of the power of private property in the United States. In particular, Catherine LaCroix warns that

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“downzoning” could be seen as a taking even for future owners who buy knowing that the land is unbuildable. Within planning law, takings are unreasonable seizures of property by the state. The argument is that property owners purchased their holdings with the expectation that they could build within the current zoning code, so converting their parcel to no longer permit building would be considered a taking. This argument clearly applies to current property owners, but as LaCroix asserts, this legal argument could apply to future property owners as well, so cities face significant liability if they were to simply off-line whole neighborhoods. This is particularly an issue in highly distressed land markets populated with predatory investors who are already buying land with the express purpose of suing the city or an adjacent landowner for unwarranted seizure or use. Thus, LaCroix argues that the safest way for cities to pursue downzoning would be to allow a different type of land use, such as commercial agriculture, so city leaders could argue that they were not stealing property value—they were simply changing the terms of how that value could be derived. But the only true way to obtain such properties and then rezone them would be to acquire them with one of the remaining powers that localities possess: eminent domain. Eminent domain has been proposed as either a stand-alone method for off-lining properties or as part of a more general rightsizing program. Cities have long used this method to acquire and assemble land but most prominently for public uses (like roads and schools) and (more controversially) commercial development that might enhance the city’s tax coffers. The idea of using eminent domain to acquire existing properties that sit among already public parcels—e.g., removing the remaining homeowners on Heidelberg Street—is more problematic than other uses. Notwithstanding the limitations

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placed by counties and states on eminent domain latitude for cities, there are other acute problems in distressed neighborhoods. First, remaining homeowners and renters can be more numerous than expected. For example, if one aggregates the land that Detroit Future City proposed for either untended forest (innovation ecological) or commercial agriculture (innovation productive), there are over 150,000 residents living in those zones. The principle of eminent domain suggests that the local state should provide “fair market value” for the properties of those residents. Those are resources that few distressed cities possess, and even if the resources could be raised, they are often insufficient for allowing current residents to find comparable accommodations elsewhere. Properties in highly abandoned neighborhoods in Cleveland, St. Louis, and Detroit sell for as little as $5,000, in large part because they are in such highly abandoned neighborhoods. While that may be enough to buy a house on Heidelberg Street, it would not pay more than a few months of rent in midtown Detroit—one of the putative new town centers in Detroit Future City. Thus, cities would face a massive issue of equity even if they were able to derive the resources for expropriation. The poorest renters and homeowners would not be able to move to newly concentrated town centers—they would simply be pushed out of the city or to another distressed part of it. While there have been several compelling arguments for a spatial restructuring of distressed cities, the dominance of property rights protections, the fiscal instability of declining cities, and the influence of predatory investors make the conversion of currently private land to public use difficult if not impossible. Such ideas thus appear more in the work of academic planners and activists than in the actualized set of enactable policies in most distressed cities.

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Managerial Land Governance Managerial approaches to land-market management are premised on the idea that the state can play a positive role as referee for competing investors. The local state can embed the land market by policing property standards, adjudicating land use disputes, and providing the infrastructure necessary for maintaining property value. Recent scholarship and practice in the realm of extreme land abandonment have identified three broad managerial interventions, each of which encompasses multiple techniques: buyer restrictions, the assumption of private functions, and enforcing property mores. In a 2011 Detroit News article on predatory investors in Detroit, land-bank activist and current Michigan congressman Dan Kildee was asked what could be done to stop the damage these investors inflict on already distressed neighborhoods. His answer was simple: “Cut the supply of cheap housing off.” Investors often target the most-distressed neighborhoods with signs offering “cash for houses” and “no questions asked.” With cash in hand, they function as a mobile pawn shop, preying on homeowners with claims of how the neighborhood is going to decline further and they should get out now. Another common method for cheap property acquisition is the tax foreclosure process. Activists and scholars have advocated various interventions that might reduce the number of predatory investors and increase the presence of more scrupulous landlords and perhaps even owner-occupiers. This includes calls to exclude certain suspect buyers such as those with existing code violations or current tax delinquency on other properties. It has also included efforts (pioneered in Genesee County, Michigan) to “bundle” properties at the county auction to discourage small and medium buyers from doing further harm. A county may bundle, say,

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200 properties at an auction. If a buyer comes forward, they can then negotiate a deal with one buyer rather than 100 or 200. There is much promise in these methods, but there are still limitations, chief among them the fact that cities and counties do not make the rules governing the tax foreclosure process. It is difficult or impossible to limit buyers or even bundle properties in some cities, because it is disallowed by their states. Moreover, even where this capacity does exist, the underworld of highly distressed real estate is a labyrinth of temporary limited liability corporations (LLCs) that are, by design, difficult to link back to an individual owner. Penalizing an individual owner for past tax delinquency is difficult if you cannot prove who the owner was during the offense. Even bundling has its limitations, at least during the tax foreclosure phase. Large and medium-sized investors have been known to buy hundreds of such properties and then sell them to unsuspecting foreign buyers using carefully taken photographs. In other cases, the size of bundled deals delays the process, exposing the houses to more damage. In 2014, for example, Herb Strather led a $3.1 million bid to purchase over 6,000 parcels that had been bundled by Detroit/Wayne County. The bid took months to process and eventually fell through, exposing those housing units to further arson, scrapping, and the elements. Other practitioners and scholars have argued that the more effective intervention is to establish land banks with the power to assume certain private functions. The idea is not to replace the market per se but to become a responsible investor where none exists. Within this paradigm, there have been calls to have land banks acquire properties, then act as a more responsible realtor or landlord than would otherwise be the case with existing private entities. Being a responsible realtor consists, in this case, of screening potential buyers, providing them with maintenance resources and expertise, and in some instances providing

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mortgage assistance. Being a responsible landlord, in this case, simply consists of doing maintenance and offering a fair market rent. But while activists and practitioners often view methods like this as ideal, states have been reluctant to grant powers in this realm to land banks or cities, arguing that they will interfere with the “rights” of private property owners to invest as they please. A subtler limitation has been that most land-banking statutes demand that the organizations be self-financing if they are given these powers. They self-finance by buying and selling property in more lucrative sections of the county or city to finance regulatory activities in the more distressed sections. This limits their ability to expand responsible landlord or realtor functions when needed, so such efforts remain small in scope. A third managerial approach involves the enforcement of basic property standards. Researchers have shown how vacant or unkempt properties diminish the value of nearby properties, so cities have tried to enhance code enforcement statutes—to require that all lawns are mowed, vacant buildings are safely boarded up, and occupied property is properly maintained. Some of these measures extend to elaborate systems to predict which houses might become vacant first and then target those owners with inspections and fines. The most interventionist measures have established or strengthened property registration systems, “spot blight” capabilities, or building codes to pursue negligent slumlords. If the property owners refuse to comply with city orders, such laws enable the city to perform maintenance against a lien on the property and eventually acquire it through the foreclosure process (if the owner does not repay those debts). The most basic challenge to such programs is that most cities that need these systems do not have the resources to enforce them evenly or consistently. Predatory buyers are common and difficult to track and penalize in such environments. Most systems have become

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complaint-based rather than comprehensive because of resource and state-imposed constraints. And as will be discussed later, there has been considerable pushback from real estate agents and other property investors hoping to limit these measures, and a willing ear from conservative legislators who are certain that cities will trample private property rights if given the chance.

Entrepreneurial Land Governance Entrepreneurial urban governance involves the use of statecraft to incentivize or underwrite private profit. It is rooted, argues David Harvey, in the intercity competition unleashed by federal and state governmental changes in the 1970s. These changes entailed a shift away from large grants that cities could use for infrastructure and social services, and toward a system in which cities must compete among themselves for private investment. Within this model, the market is in the lead—the local state is simply a facilitator and partner with a few needed tools (zoning, eminent domain, taxation powers). It is incumbent on cities to use those tools to defray or lower the costs of doing business or owning property within their territorial jurisdiction. Not all of these tools apply to distressed-neighborhood development, but three have been either positioned as policy solutions or implemented in multiple locations: tax relief for investors, land assembly with eminent domain powers, and municipal bond issuance to defray the costs of development. The most direct power that cities have to defray costs is in the form of the tax rate. In the United States, property taxes are the primary source of revenue for cities. Conservatives and local growth machinists have long argued for lowered property taxes, tax increase caps (financed by service cuts), and tax

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abatements for businesses willing to invest in the city. These strategies are seen as best practices within the entrepreneurial land governance paradigm, but not all of them apply directly to distressed neighborhoods and cities. Conservatives in the United States (and the UK) have long advocated for spatially targeted tax relief for such places. Indeed, this is what Reagan promised the residents of Charlotte Street on his visit. The label for such areas has varied over the years—opportunity zones, empowerment zones, enterprise zones—but the underlying principle is the same: create a low-tax zone and investment will pour in. The mechanisms offer tax relief for businesses or investors willing to invest in the putative neighborhood. Other, more exotic measures like tax increment financing and tax anticipation notes allow cities or neighborhoods to leverage taxes that would be paid to a city into capital that can be used for real estate development. Other tax-related economic development suggestions for distressed neighborhoods involve downward assessments to discourage abandonment due to tax debt, and allowing cities or counties to expunge tax (and other) debt on foreclosed properties so that they can be sold more quickly at auction for “realistic” costs. Other approaches to entrepreneurial land management involve the use of eminent domain for land assembly. Conventional uses of eminent domain allow the local state to acquire property for public uses such as schools, roads, and other infrastructure. A more controversial strategy involves using these powers to assemble land that is then gifted or sold at a nominal cost to a commercial developer who then builds a private office, housing, or commercial space. The legal argument behind such transactions is that developed land generates more tax revenue and thus helps the city fulfill a public purpose. This interpretation is controversial—and has been a key part of conservative politics

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since the Kelo decision in 2006—but using eminent domain in this way has been a crucial economic development policy for cities, particularly in downtown areas, for large-scale development (e.g., stadia, shopping malls). The use of municipal bonding and other budgeting measures to directly finance land-based development is also favored within the entrepreneurial land governance paradigm. Cities possess the power to issue general obligation bonds to finance infrastructure. In the past fifty years, however, cities and counties have started applying their municipal bonding powers to a more applied set of districts and purposes. Among these applications are development districts established under local state powers to issue bonds that will be repaid via development fees, rents, and land sales if a project is successful. The resources raised by such bond issuances are used to remediate environmental contamination, build or improve infrastructure, and even directly finance the private development itself. Municipal bonds in general tend to be very safe and easily attract investors, but this particular application— using the powers to develop property—is considered the riskiest and has the highest default rates. Entrepreneurial measures are common, in part because the power to engage in nonmarket and managerial approaches has been systematically undermined by states, think tanks, and the local growth machine. Market-based strategies are promoted as a catch-all solution to urban decline. The underlying position is that cities are overtaxed and overregulated; if you remove those obstacles then development will occur. But the empirical record for entrepreneurial measures is mixed for downtown areas and dismal for distressed neighborhoods like Heidelberg Street. First, tax-based approaches are problematic in part because declining cities are in a poor negotiating position. With federally sponsored expressways making alternate, less contaminated, suburban

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locations easily accessible, central cities generally must offer a great deal of tax relief for corporations to locate downtown. There has been some success in the past fifty years at luring corporations to downtown using such measures, but they come at a cost to the general fund—services must still be provided, yet tax revenue is suppressed because of abatements. By contrast, these measures have an unambiguously dismal record in more distressed residential sections of cities. The experience of spatially targeted tax districts in such places is ineffective. The chief impediment to investment is not taxes per se but rather the probability that buying or building a house (or business) in a highly distressed neighborhood will result in lost value. Tax costs are marginal compared to the opportunity cost of building a house or business facility that will immediately lose value. To the extent that development occurs in highly distressed neighborhoods, it is almost always directly financed by residual state funds that are used to build housing or finance businesses. Eminent domain and municipal bond approaches suffer from similar limitations. In certain circumstances, the acquisition of land or the assumption of development costs is a development obstacle. Once resources are provided, businesses can thrive. But successful instances tend to be geographically limited to the downtown areas of cities, and even these are not always successful. For highly distressed neighborhoods, land availability and cost are not the problems per se—the underlying dynamic of plummeting house values is. Even if eminent domain and municipal bond measures were applied to highly distressed neighborhoods, it would not spawn positive inward investment. Take Heidelberg Street, for example. Remaining houses there are available for less than $10,000. If the city of Detroit were to hand over several parcels to a developer to build housing, it is unlikely the officials would find a fully private

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taker. It requires at least $120,000 to build a house to code in the United States. If a developer were to build such a house, how would they sell it when the surrounding houses are a fraction of that cost? Thus, when development does take place it is often heavily subsidized with federal money and the public essentially absorbs the loss of value by selling the property to a resident at a “realistic” cost. If Detroit officials were to use the city’s own bonding powers for this purpose, the city would be absorbing the difference between the cost of construction and the realistic sales price.

Market-Only Land Governance Neoliberal thought makers have long fantasized about a disembedded economy rid of all state intervention. Neoliberal matriarch Ayn Rand once called for the “complete separation of state and economics.” Her intellectual compatriot Ludwig von Mises declared that all forms of government intervention were antithetical to the market. Even “moderates” like Friedrich Hayek only allowed for limited state interventions, namely measures to avoid the spillover effects of irresponsible property care that could damage the value of adjacent properties. Finding specific market-only applications in the policy realm for declining city land markets is thus challenging; in its purest form, market-only land governance is marked by the absence of land-use policy. It is perhaps more fruitful to identify the political movement that such thinking has inspired and explore how that has affected efforts to enhance the power of the local state to intervene in property markets. First, market-only sentiments have inspired thought experiments and fantasies of declining cities radically transformed into neoliberal utopias. The aforementioned

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proposal by Rodney Lockwood to convert Detroit’s Belle Isle into a regulation-free and tax-free zone, and Newt Gingrich’s similar proposal to convert the entire city into a tax-free zone, stand as prime examples. But there are also more serious suggestions by academics to remove the public from declining spaces. Rybczynski and Linneman, for example, proposed that cities should consider disincorporating to liberate themselves from service burdens, and then sell or give the newly degovernmentalized land to developers. The fantasy of a stateless economy has also inspired more applied efforts to resist increases to local state capacity to intervene in land markets. The Center for Community Progress and several housing activist groups in the Rust Belt have assertively lobbied state legislators in the past ten years to increase the capacity of local land banks to more assertively intervene in distressed markets. Efforts intensified during the Great Recession, with Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, and Missouri considering legislation since 2010. Importantly, these efforts occurred after the Tea Party wave election of 2010, so they had to work with conservative state legislators who would be willing to listen to hyperbolic claims of neoliberal activist groups arguing against the legislation. Land-bank proponents argue that their strategies offer a rationalized, managed approach to the problem of abandonment and predation. Initial proposals were ambitious and included calls to give cities more power to acquire, plan, and redevelop property; expunge titles for abandoned properties; and penalize predatory land owners. But in each case these powers were pared down, removed, or complicated by conservative forces. Some states, such as Illinois, considered and then rejected reform outright. Resistance to this legislation came in two forms—selfinterested groups who felt enhanced power might reduce their

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profits, and neoliberal think tanks. Banks and financial institutions have resisted reform efforts in a number of states as part of a general effort to prevent government oversight of the economy, but real estate associations have been the most outspoken critics of reform. Real estate associations have objected to the proposals in every state in which land banking has been considered, and were particularly influential in derailing plans in Illinois and delaying them in Pennsylvania. Though the associations’ objections vary between states, their underlying motives appear to arise from member self-interest. Real estate agents profit from property transactions. Anything that might inhibit or prohibit the repetitive transfer of properties in cities or other jurisdictions— no matter how beneficial to planning efforts in that city—would likely reduce opportunities for association members. The most systematic source of opposition to land-abandonment reforms in recent years has been market-oriented think tanks such as Missouri’s Show-Me Institute and Michigan’s Mackinac Center. First, they argue that land banks in particular, and managerial local governments in general, have failed in the past, so it is foolish to try this approach again. Stahl and Spalding and other critics, for example, argue that land banks like those in Cleveland, St. Louis, and Atlanta have existed for decades and abandonment in those cities is as bad if not worse than in other shrinking cities in the United States. They single out the ineffectiveness of acquiring and assembling land in anticipation of future development and argue that land banks fail as a reinvestment strategy. Second, and highly related (in their view), they suggest that land banks represent an “open-ended” granting to government of power over the market and allow local politicians to veto land sales based on whim or venality. Critics view stock land-bank mandates about “returning land to private productive use” as disingenuous. In their view, land banks, more often than

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not, hold land and never really return it to private investors. Even more controversial than holding and allowing houses to go derelict are reforms allowing governments to rent acquired properties or bid on properties at auction using “unlimited” debt. Critics argue that it is unfair to investors, developers, and citizens when government is allowed to participate as an investor in this way. The alliance of market-oriented think tanks and real estate associations desires a policy regime that is market centered, if not market fundamentalist. They believe that property acquired through tax foreclosure should be returned to investors as quickly and inexpensively as possible and unencumbered by regulation and title problems. Existing nuisance regulations that allow for “spot condemnation” or even fines for lack of upkeep should be loosened or eliminated. Within this worldview, investors and the market in general will correct the problems facing cities— governments will only worsen them. Neoliberal activists have not achieved everything they wanted. Land banking legislation was passed in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Missouri over their objections, for example. But they were very successful at keeping the policy frame conservative so as to preserve the property-centered status quo. Such efforts scuttled the assignment of powers like eminent domain, bond raising capabilities, and in some cases the ability of government to have priority over private bidders in the tax foreclosure process. All recent legislation requires land banks to be housed at the county level, which tends to be more conservative and to be self-sustaining (usually through buying and selling real estate in the county). Thus, the capacity to adopt a managerial or nonmarket governance paradigm has not meaningfully increased. In some cases, it has actually decreased. Moreover, the most important factors in land abandonment have remained absent from these debates. Racial reaction, continued expressway construction, suburban

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segmentation, and reform for the takings clause so it does not empower predatory investors have not been considered. Public policy cannot successfully limit all sources of inner-city land abandonment. Some forces are resistant to policy, while others are dictated by governments elsewhere that have no incentive to create beneficial policies for a competing municipality. Urban public policy is even more limited even though it is at this scale that the most acute problems of land abandonment are experienced. Blind faith in property rights has led governments to limit the already limited measures that cities have at their disposal to discourage land abandonment and the investor predation that often follows. Limiting the capacity for eminent domain or for stronger land banks that could filter out predatory buyers and landlords has the effect of discouraging nonmarket and managerial approaches and necessitating entrepreneurial and marketonly approaches. The latter typically only bear developmental fruit in limited instances—when, for example, a large developer wants to build a stadium or shopping mall in a downtown area. They are not effective for converting highly distressed neighborhoods into functional land markets. And yet their track record and unpopularity matter little, because these policies are propelled by ideas and myths generated elsewhere and imposed from higher levels of government. The failure and unpopularity of fifty years of land-market fundamentalism in the east side of Cleveland matters little if it is being imposed by legislators who are more persuaded by the mythos of urban “overreach” than they are by careful research. The local state has been reduced to a business partner for downtown commercial developers—the convenient possessor of eminent domain and coordinating capacity. Local officials do not have the power to demarketize or even successfully regulate

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land markets, even though most want this and it would arguably improve the situation in their cities. What cities do despite these limits is impressive. Inspired by the efforts of groups like CCP, cities in the Rust Belt have engaged in very interesting efforts to “reclaim” their vacant properties. Throughout the region, city officials have converted vacant lots into small parks, orchards, and community gardens. These are interesting, to be sure, but they are occurring in spite of, rather than because of, organized deprivation. For every vacant lot in Detroit that is converted into a community garden, hundreds more exist that will never be anything more than untended vacant lots available to any predatory investor who wants them. Successful cases of conversion to, say, a corner park often rely on private donations, volunteered labor, and free expertise from local universities. These efforts are fascinating and should be celebrated, as they improve the environment of highly distressed neighborhoods. But they are not even close to the scale necessary to meaningfully address the problem of land abandonment and are reliant on nongovernmental financing and so are unlikely to be scaled up any time soon. The limits are not local—they are imposed by the forces of organized deprivation. Finally, race is conspicuously absent in the land-market reform policies of the past fifteen years. This is, of course, not unusual under laissez-faire racism—apparently if it is not mentioned, and the disparate impact is not being driven by open bigotry, it is irrelevant. But race is central to why such spaces exist and who will be impacted by the (free market) fundamentalist policies that will unleashed on them. The concentration of black people is central to why the bulk of the majority (white) population refuses to consider residence in such places. Race is central to why abandonment is so extreme in such places. Race is why banks have redlined such neighborhoods for 100 years, why suburban governments refuse to work with the city, and why law enforcement

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views them as a danger zone full of pathologies that have to be violently removed. There is no pure abstract market waiting to be released through deregulation. There are effectively no pecuniary obstacles to investment right now. Lowering taxes to erode the tax base further or making it easier for predatory cash-only buyers to access abandoned property is not going to change that. More than this, the market-only approach is an experiment designed by outstate legislators and think-tank gurus in places like Columbus and Lansing. The views of the overwhelmingly black populations who are viewed as mere data points in this experiment matter little within this ethos.

 DEMOLITION AS URBAN POLICY

O

Tuesday, July 19, 2016, Detroit mayor Mike Duggan, locally elected politicians, and neighbors gathered at 14097 Marlowe Street on the city’s west side to celebrate the 10,000th house demolition in two years—a momentous achievement (figure 6.1). From a lectern carefully placed in front of a vacant home with a gigantic “10,000” painted on its side, the mayor crowed, “Every time one of these houses goes down, we raise the quality of life for everybody else in the neighborhood.” Seen within a wider historical lens, this event and others like it are politically remarkable. Demolition without an affirmative plan to rebuild something on-site was once a source of great controversy. During urban renewal, many mayors (including Detroit’s at the time) became deeply unpopular for eviscerating neighborhoods with only the promise of new development to follow. Those overseeing the current wave of demolition in Detroit and beyond do not even make that promise. Detroit is not the only city to have embraced demolitiononly urban policy. Cities across the Rust Belt are using a variety of federal and state funds to demolish as much blight as they can. Some have suggested that ad hoc demolition of this sort can constitute an urban policy approach by itself and should be expanded. This notion has been supported by narrowly designed N

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FIGURE 6.1  Mayor

Mike Duggan celebrates the ten thousandth house demolition of his tenure, July 19, 2016.

Photo credit: Detroit Free Press/ZUMA Wire©, reprinted with permission

studies documenting the costs of blight, and pragmatically by a mixture of municipal-level desperation and copious demolitionfocused funding provided by federal and state governments. The logic of these efforts is most openly and unapologetically articulated in the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force (DBRTF) report, which calls for the demolition of 86,000 additional units to remove blight from the city. “Blight is cancer,” the report’s authors write, [And] just like removing only part of a malignant cancerous tumor is no real solution, removing only part or incremental amounts of blight from neighborhoods and the city as a whole is also no real solution. Because, like cancer, unless you remove the entire tumor, blight grows back.

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Like similar programs in other cities, this is not an unfunded policy fantasy. The DBRTF identifies about half of the funding they need from a range of local, state, and federal sources. The logic of the demolition paradigm is that if a city removes the houses being used for criminal activity or as targets for arsonists, or that are draining nearby house values, investors will return to the neighborhood and allow communities to grow again. Though this is often framed as a novel approach, Rust Belt cities have extensive experience with ad hoc demolition. This chapter explores what happened to housing markets and social marginality in extreme housing loss neighborhoods (EHLN) after these demolitions took place. The overall argument is as follows. First, while it is often framed as a marginal, case-by-case approach to lifting nearby property values, ad hoc demolition’s accumulated extent since 1970 is massive—well in excess of other mass demolition periods such as urban renewal in the mid-twentieth century. Second, though recent proponents argue that demolition has regenerative properties—i.e., if you demolish the housing, functional markets and neighborhoods will follow—empirical evidence suggests that affected markets and neighborhoods became more, not less, marginal after mass demolition. Given these empirical details and numerous doubts raised by critics of demolitiononly or demolition-heavy policy approaches, the strategy’s recent increase in popularity is curious. The chapter concludes with speculation about the reasons prompting continued support for demolition as urban policy despite its known limitations.

THE EVOLUTION OF DEMOLITION The act of demolition is not exclusively associated with deprivation and decline. In fact, it is arguably more often associated

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with land-market investment—the necessary step before new development in already built-up areas. But as a component of urban policy, demolition has an interesting history—one that is overwhelmingly focused on distressed neighborhoods in older American cities. The urban renewal period of the mid-twentieth century provides a crucial historical and philosophical pivot point in the evolution of demolition as urban policy. Prior to the urban renewal period, local officials in large American cities increasingly used demolition to eradicate “unhealthy” housing. Definitions of “unhealthy” varied but generally revolved around issues of sanitation (lack of indoor plumbing), unsafe construction methods, and poor ventilation. Officials in large cities like New York and Boston boasted about the number of such houses they were able to demolish in the 1920s and 1930s. Such efforts relied almost exclusively on local funds, as New Deal urban programs were decades away from coming to fruition. Demolition strategies also dovetailed with the modernizing ethos of the late nineteenth century that created the ethics and disciplines of urban planning and public health. As the United States emerged from World War II as a wealthy global superpower, the federal government embarked on an urban modernization campaign. It was largely built on earlier local efforts but amplified considerably by government resources and expanded condemnation powers. The Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, along with a number of programs that facilitated the massive expansion of expressways, were particularly important not only as enabling legislation that allowed cities to demolish whole neighborhoods but as the codification of a logic that embodied the period. This logic was underpinned by the notion that cities could become efficient machines for living if only the housing stock was upgraded and city form was built around the needs of the automobile. The top-down, rationalist planner, arguably best

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embodied by New York’s Robert Moses, was born in this period. The rationally ordered, automobile-focused city was the end that justified the means of demolishing all or part of 2,500 neighborhoods in 993 cities nationwide. By the 1960s, however, activists in a variety of cities had constructed a social movement to contest the logic and practice of urban renewal. Jane Jacobs, who famously led opposition to expressway-related demolitions in Lower Manhattan (and later a similar project in Toronto), argued that such efforts destroyed the fabric of community through misguided, top-down, often indiscriminate efforts to modernize cities. Other activists lamented that communities of color were the first and most frequent targets of demolition-heavy, development-light programs. Indeed, the association between blight and blackness was so strong among public officials that James Baldwin famously referred to slum clearance as “Negro removal.” Given that redlining, restrictive covenants, and simple violence severely restricted the residential options of African Americans, the demolition of whole black neighborhoods created overcrowding in a number of areas, and cultivated resentment that grew into uprisings and distrust of urban development that persists to this day. By the early 1970s, these relatively local activist efforts merged with a federal government that was actively trying to reduce expenditures in the wake of the worst economic downturn since the war. Urban programs, particularly those that funded and authorized widespread demolition, were increasingly replaced with block grant programs— smaller in financial scale and more local in application. Under conditions of organized deprivation, cities were increasingly left to their own devices over the ensuing four decades as federal urban expenditures continued to evaporate. In the wake of urban renewal’s demise, demolition emerged as a much more ad hoc, locally financed (and managed) process. Since

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the early 1970s, mass demolition and redevelopment have largely evaporated, with two exceptions. First, cities continue to engage in local economic development schemes that sometimes entail mass site demolition. High-profile examples like Detroit’s Poletown neighborhood, which was partially razed to make way for an expanding GM assembly plant, and New London, Connecticut’s waterfront neighborhood (which both sparked eminent domain battles), continue to occur in cities around the United States. The second major exception to the post-1970s ad hoc direction of demolition was the HOPE VI program, which destroyed thousands of public housing units in the name of mixed-use redevelopment. Whatever the similarities in logic and approach, however, these more recent efforts were not of the scale or embedded in the same modernizing logic that underpinned urban renewal. The dominant direction since 1970 has been ad hoc, houseby-house demolition. Ad hoc demolition focuses on heavily disinvested neighborhoods and is executed by local officials as a result of code violations, tax foreclosure, arson, or other safety infractions. Often, particularly in cash-strapped cities lacking the resources to demolish all such structures, demolition is complaint-based, rather than part of a systematic campaign. It is often uncoordinated and unmoored to a larger planning policy or set of reinvestment funds that might replace the felled structure. Until recently, ad hoc demolition has been more of a defensive reaction to creeping disinvestment than an urban policy. Recently, however, it has been suggested that such efforts could be regenerative in their own right—that removing the blight will generate growth and more-functional communities. The emergence of this paradigm has been paralleled and propelled by new funding sources for its execution. The emphasis on ad hoc demolition is also undergirded by theoretical, popular, and academic literature that clarifies the

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negative externalities of blight. First, scholars have argued that there are damaging physical and psychological health effects of concentrated vacancy and blight. Vacant structures attract vermin, drug activity, and arson. They can be especially dangerous places for children. Eugenia Garvin and colleagues, moreover, found that such structures have a stigmatizing effect, lowering community morale, amplifying social disorder, and provoking neighbors to turn inward as a coping mechanism. Second, a variety of scholars have documented the links between vacant housing and crime. As Kim Kinder, among others, points out, “Empty resident structures in Detroit are plentiful and notorious as havens of drug dealing, scrapping, and arson.” Others have extended this observation in studies aiming to document the precise impact of vacancy on criminal activity. A third group, perhaps most important for the expansion of ad hoc demolition into an urban policy program, focuses on the economic impact of vacant houses. Vacant structures are a strain on local resources as they generate little or no tax revenue yet come with significant service delivery costs for a city. They have an immediate impact on the property values of nearby homes, and large clusters of vacant housing generate an oversupply of units that makes adjacent homes difficult to sell, leading to severely dysfunctional markets. These factors multiply in heavily disinvested neighborhoods, creating a spiral effect on municipal revenues, property values, and investment potential. Cumulatively, this research provides a powerful argument about the negative impacts of blight and vacancy. Though much of this literature is silent, vague, or even unsupportive regarding stand-alone demolition, proponents of the paradigm have deployed it to justify an expansion of previously ad hoc efforts throughout the Rust Belt. These notions have justified, and been reinforced by, government intervention encouraging demolition. Local, state, and

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federal government have all recently been involved in expanding the resources or administrative capacity needed to facilitate demolition-heavy or demolition-only urban policy. At the federal level, the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) authorized $7 billion in funds starting in 2007 to manage vacant properties. Though only 10 percent of the funding was permitted for demolition, the focus of NSP funds in already disinvested neighborhoods has been almost exclusively on demolition. In 2010, the federal government expanded these efforts to form the Hardest Hit Fund—resources devoted to the twenty states most affected by the foreclosure crisis. In 2013, the Treasury Department announced $372 million for the Blight Elimination Program in six states. These funds came with few stipulations other than they be used on demolition and spent by December 2017. Cities have used these funds to intensify demolition efforts. In 2014 alone, Detroit demolished 3,300 additional houses using federal funds, on top of the 3,700 demolished using municipal resources. The Genesee County Land Bank (home to Flint, Michigan) garnered over $22 million from the same program to demolish 1,084 structures in Flint. In total, the state of Michigan has devoted over $100 million of its $498 million Hardest Hit Fund resources to demolition. State-level programs have also deepened the resource pool available for ad hoc demolitions. Among other examples, the Moving Ohio Forward Program was announced in 2012 “to assist communities in their economic recovery by removing blighted or abandoned structures to reclaim our neighborhoods.” As of 2014, the state had allocated $68 million of a total of $75 million of program funding for demolition. Combined with other funds, Ohio’s attorney general recently boasted, the state has financed the demolition of 12,000 more housing units than demolished through local programs. Similarly, the Blight Elimination

168 4 Depriving the Othered City

Program in Michigan allocated $25 million statewide in 2012–13 to demolish blighted structures. In recent years, states have also increased the capacity for counties and cities to foreclose and demolish housing, and to create land banks and property registration systems. Like the federal programs, the focus of these efforts in highly disinvested places remains on demolition of vacant housing. Overall, such efforts aim to expand the scope of demolition activity in already distressed cities using a combination of new funding, authority, and attention being paid to the topic. This expansion has several characteristics which, when combined, distinguish it from past demolition-focused programs. Above all, these efforts are not part of a larger campaign to reinvest in or rebuild extreme housing loss neighborhoods. They are implicitly (and increasingly explicitly) premised on the assumption that regeneration will happen if the obstacle of blight is removed— that healthy cells will grow where the cancerous ones were removed. The justifications for such programs are heavily focused on the immediate negative externalities. To the extent that justifications gesture to the wider implications of an expansion of demolition, they tend to have a teleological quality. Musing about the spontaneous renaissance that will occur in Detroit, leading growth machinist Dan Gilbert recently explained: To get the neighborhoods going, we’ve got to take down the 78,000 or so—we don’t even know the exact number of structures that need to be taken down, mostly houses. Once we can get that done, you will have open pieces of land, and you’re going to have, more importantly, hope and optimism. . . .

Demolition is increasingly seen as a stand-alone policy necessary to unleash the equilibrating tendencies of the market and

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the ostensibly community-stabilizing benefits that follow. As a recent New York Times piece on the subject put it, “For a number of American cities in the Northeast and Midwest that have lost big chunks of their population, [demolition] . . . is increasingly regarded as a path to salvation.” Ad hoc demolition has moved from defensive local maneuver to an ostensibly generative policy vehicle in and of itself. A number of scholars have, conversely, expressed grave concern with the assumption that demolition will improve the problems associated with such neighborhoods without some other form of intervention. First, some scholars argue that the putative connections between physical deterioration and social disorder are spurious or overstated. Mike Benediktsson, for example, argues that the actualized relationship between vacancy and disorder is socially constructed rather than physically predetermined based on a level of blight and dependent on intracommunity relationships and other social filters. In particular, researchers have found that respondents see more blight when black people are present in images of urban distress. Second, some have suggested that demolition may actually accelerate rather than slow processes of disinvestment. By applying the highly problematic logic of triage to neighborhoods or houses, planners risk accelerating the underlying process when they label something as beyond hope. Demolition is perhaps the clearest signal a city could send that a neighborhood has been left for dead within this troubling triage analogy—a signal that rapidly becomes a selffulfilling prophecy. Third, some have drawn upon the almost universally criticized urban renewal experience to suggest that the demolition model did not work then and should not be replicated even if the underlying justifications for past and current programs are marginally different. Hollander and Nemeth have argued, for example, that current demolition plans threaten to replicate the

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top-down planning flaws of the urban renewal period. Others argue that urban renewal’s demolition focus did indeed change the landscape but not in a way that improved neighborhood livability or the lives of poor people. Finally, even two recent hedonic modeling studies that are frequently cited to promote the demolition approach point to real limitations. Both studies do indeed find a negative relationship between house values and proximity to a vacant house, but both also find a (smaller) negative relationship between house values and the proximity to a vacant lot. In the more sophisticated of the two studies, researchers also found that while the relative gains in property value justify the expense of demolition in middle-class neighborhoods, the costs of demolition exceed the potential benefit of property-value gain in more distressed areas (i.e., EHLNs). In short, serious, carefully articulated, empirically grounded concerns have already been raised from several different perspectives, but they have had almost no visible impact on the current policy turn. In the past five years, the overwhelming policy intervention in heavily disinvested Rust Belt neighborhoods has been accelerated demolition that is disconnected from wider development plans or resources. The remainder of this chapter considers the experience and impact of demolition on neighborhoods in the 1970 to 2010 period to reflect on the challenges of the more recent turn toward accelerated housing removal.

EXTREME HOUSING LOSS NEIGHBORHOODS IN THE RUST BELT The focus here is on the forty-nine cities in the Rust Belt that contained at least one extreme housing loss neighborhood. Extreme housing loss neighborhoods (EHLNs) are defined as census

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tracts that lost more than half of their housing between 1970 and 2010, unless one of the following was true: (a) the tract contained fewer than 500 housing units in 1970, thus indicating that it is likely not a primarily residential area (or most of the housing was demolished during an earlier period such as urban renewal during the 1950s and 1960s), or (b) the tract lost more than 80 percent of its housing in a single decade, likely indicating mass demolition as part of a commercial or institutional development project. EHLNs are among the most disinvested neighborhoods in the Rust Belt. Once selected, the cities were then combined into a database and their tracts separated into three neighborhood categories: (1) EHLN, (2) moderate housing loss neighborhoods (MHLNs)—tracts that lost between 0 and 49.9 percent of their housing between 1970 and 2010, and (3) growing neighborhoods, which added housing units during that span (see table 6.1). Not only is there no identifiable spatial cluster to these cities (they are fairly evenly dispersed throughout the region), but it becomes evident that high-profile cases like Detroit are not even the most affected in relative terms (table 6.2). Though Detroit possesses the greatest absolute number and areal coverage of census tracts affected and parcels cleared, other cities like Highland Park (Michigan) and East St. Louis (Illinois) have much higher percentages of land affected. As table 6.2 illustrates, just 2.9 percent of the total land area in the forty-nine affected cities is composed of EHLNs, but this belies huge variation. Highland Park, for example, is 70.6 percent EHLN, while Springfield (Illinois) contains just one EHLN (0.1 percent). Moreover, some cities have a difficult combination of extreme and moderate housing loss neighborhoods. East Chicago (Indiana) and Gary (Indiana), for example, are almost entirely composed of EHL or MHL neighborhoods. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Bloomington (Indiana) has just one EHL neighborhood and the remainder of the city

1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

1,731,280 1,102,487 805,069 643,864 491,207 564,275 392,678 291,734 227,668 178,852 629,865 455,546 359,460 286,881 236,210

Amount — −36.3 −27.0 −20.0 −23.7 — −30.4 −25.7 −22.0 −21.4 — −27.7 −21.1 −20.2 −17.7

Decade (%) 8,761,861 7,300,045 6,605,144 6,172,419 5,324,260 2,916,125 2,664,493 2,452,751 2,323,361 2,062,359 3,089,369 2,913,601 2,743,396 2,625,379 2,471,956

Amount — −16.7 −9.5 −6.6 −13.7 — −8.7 −7.9 −5.2 −11.2 — −5.7 −5.8 −4.3 −5.8

Decade (%)

MHLNc

6,506,210 6,537,345 6,521,785 6,876,442 7,198,443 2,119,825 2,486,300 2,612,867 2,800,648 2,971,428 2,201,332 2,622,429 2,786,130 2,987,889 3,279,669

Amount — 0.5 −0.2 5.4 4.7 — 17.3 5.1 7.2 6.1 — 19.1 6.2 7.2 9.8

Decade (%)

Growing d

16,999,351 14,939,877 13,931,998 13,692,725 13,013,910 5,600,225 5,543,471 5,357,352 5,351,677 5,212,639 5,920,566 5,991,576 5,888,986 5,900,149 5,987,835

Amount

— −12.1 −6.7 −1.7 −5.0 — −1.0 −3.4 −0.1 −2.6 — 1.2 −1.7 0.2 1.5

Decade (%)

Total

Source: Geolytics Neighborhood Change Database. a Includes cities in the following states: New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. St. Louis and Louisville were added because they are large cities whose MSAs spill into the study area, and New York City was eliminated because of its qualitative differences with cities in the Midwest. b Extreme housing loss neighborhoods (EHLN) are census tracts that lost more than 50 percent of their housing between 1970 and 2010, unless one of the following was true: (1) the tract contained fewer than 500 housing units in 1970 (thus indicating that it might not be a primarily residential area), or (2) the tract lost more than 80 percent of its housing in a single decade (thus indicating mass demolition as part of a commercial or institutional conversion). c Moderate housing loss neighborhoods (MHLN) are census tracts that lost between 0 and 49.9 percent of their housing units between 1970 and 2010. d Growing neighborhoods are census tracts that gained housing units between 1970 and 2010.

Housing Units

Households

Population

Year

EHLNb

TABLE 6.1 POPULATION, HOUSEHOLD, AND HOUSING UNIT CHANGE IN THREE RUST BELTa NEIGHBORHOOD TYPES, 1970–2010

Demolition as Urban Policy 4 173 TABLE 6.2 SUMMARY STATS OF THREE NEIGHBORHOOD TYPES IN THE AMERICAN RUST BELTa

Variables Total number of census tracts Total population (2010) Total land area in affected cities Percent of total land area in affected cities High percent of total land area Low percent of total land area

Extreme Moderate Housing Loss Housing Loss Growing Neighborhoodsb Neighborhoodsc Neighborhoodsd

Total

269

1,884

1,830

3,983

491,207

5,324,260

7,198,443

13,013,910

412.8 km2

2,632.6 km2

11,299.1 km2

14,344.5 km2

2.9

18.4

78.8

100.0

70.6 (Highland Park, MI) 0.1 (Springfield, IL)

96.9 (East Chicago, IL) 0.0 (Brockport, NY)

98.9 (Bloomington, IN) 0.0 (East St. Louis, IL)

– –

Source: Geolytics Neighborhood Change Database a Includes cities in the following states: New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. St. Louis and Louisville were added because they are large cities whose MSAs spill into the study area, and New York City was eliminated because of its qualitative differences with cities in the Midwest. b Extreme housing loss neighborhoods (EHLN) are census tracts that lost more than 50 percent of their housing between 1970 and 2010, unless one of the following was true: (1) the tract contained fewer than 500 housing units in 1970 (thus indicating that it might not be a primarily residential area), or (2) the tract lost more than 80 percent of its housing in a single decade (thus indicating mass demolition as part of a commercial or institutional conversion). c Moderate housing loss neighborhoods (MHLN) are census tracts that lost between 0 and 49.9 percent of their housing units between 1970 and 2010. d Growing neighborhoods are census tracts that gained housing units between 1970 and 2010.

is growing. These mixtures represent very different burden levels for the cities involved. Those with high percentages of land in this condition generally have the most severe fiscal problems given the reliance on property taxes for municipalities. Given that most demolitions in the sample were the result of site-specific code violations and safety matters, most research on

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the matter does not aggregate their impact. This is unfortunate, because the aggregated impact is much greater than that of more prominent examples. Take, for example, urban renewal. Following Talen, I view the urban renewal period as being propelled by both the major Housing Acts in 1949 and 1954 and the various highway construction bills of the mid-twentieth century. Using this broader definition, Talen derives a conservative national estimate of 910,000 housing unit demolitions on 57,000 acres (230.7 sq. km) between 1949 and 1971. Approximately 125,000 units were rebuilt on these sites, leaving a net loss of 785,000 housing units. Applying these figures to the study area, the approximate urban renewal impact was 295,763 units demolished, 40,627 rebuilt, for a net loss of 255,136 housing units. This is useful as a broad barometer but provides no information about individual cities, so case studies are beneficial. White’s case studies of urban renewal (just the housing programs) in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis are beneficial in this regard (see table 6.3). While urban renewal sites were much bigger per project than ad hoc demolition, they amounted to much less cleared land in total. Using an average parcel size of 5,000 square feet and applying it to 393,655 housing units removed after 1970 in all cities in the study area, approximately 38,987 total acres (157.8 sq. km) were cleared as a result of these processes. Individual city comparisons also show important differences. As table 6.3 indicates, unit losses from ad hoc demolition were higher in all sample cities, as were areal coverage totals. Only in Chicago were more census tracts affected by urban renewal than ad hoc demolition during the post-1970s period being evaluated here. And table 6.3 examines only EHLN, which is a very conservative way to measure ad hoc demolition, because it excludes the hundreds of thousands of units removed in moderate housing loss neighborhoods (which can have rates of loss as high as 49.9 percent), and the many cities in the region

Demolition as Urban Policy 4 175 TABLE 6.3 COMPARISON OF URBAN RENEWAL AND POST-1970 AD HOC DEMOLITION IN SELECTED CITIES

Urban Renewal, 1949–1974a Ad Hoc Demolition, 1970–2010b Selected Cities Chicago Cleveland Detroit St. Louis

Total Projects Acres 32 7 16 4

1,539 600 986 690

Tracts Affected 85 15 16 14

Net Unit Change −50,454 −28,321 −117,211 −36,294

Acres

Tracts

5,791 3,251 13,454 4,166

39 22 63 20

a Total projects, acres, and tracts affected for urban renewal period were derived from Michael White, “Estimates of Urban Renewal Site Clearance,” in Urban Renewal and the Changing Residential Structure of the City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 73. White’s counts only include projects related to the 1949 and 1954 Housing Acts. b These estimates only include housing units contained within extreme housing loss neighborhoods (i.e., those that lost more than 50 percent between 1970 and 2010). Acreage counts were derived by multiplying the number of units removed by an average lot size of 5,000 square feet (then converting to acreage to be consistent with White’s earlier estimates).

that have multiple MHL neighborhoods but not EHL neighborhoods (and thus were eliminated from the study altogether). Nevertheless, it is clear that ad hoc demolition has cumulatively affected more housing units and land than urban renewal. Beyond its quantified extent, however, the central question remains: Did ad hoc demolition stabilize markets and communities?

MARKET CHANGE AFTER AD HOC DEMOLITION To measure market changes in EHL neighborhoods, I employed a simple approach involving five variables: owner-occupancy rate, renter-occupancy rate, vacancy rate, house values, and contract rent values. The conceptual idea is that by comparing

176 4 Depriving the Othered City

EHL neighborhoods to other neighborhoods in the same cities, many city-level (and regional) factors are controlled for (which would not be if EHLN figures were compared to national averages). For each variable, medians were recorded and then compared to figures for growing neighborhoods in the study area. For percentage-based variables (i.e., owner-occupancy, renteroccupancy, and vacancy rates), the relative differences were gauged via subtraction. So, for example, if the median owneroccupancy rate in 1980 for EHLN was 28.4 percent, while for growing neighborhoods it was 68.4 percent, subtraction was used to find the difference of −40.0 points. For nominal medians (i.e., house values and contract rents), the differences were expressed as ratios. For example, if the median rent in 1990 for EHL neighborhoods was $330, versus $441 in growing neighborhoods, the values were divided to derive the ratio of 0.75. To make the different types of resulting figures comparable, nominal data ratios were then converted into percentage point differences between EHLN and growing neighborhoods (see table 6.4). Using the latter example, the ratio of 0.75 would be represented as −25.0 percentage points (relative to growing neighborhoods). What follows is a description of changes in the five market variables, paying particular attention to whether the differences between EHL and growing neighborhoods converged, diverged, or remained at similar levels. The description here centers around table 6.4, which summarizes the changes illustrated in the other tables. At 30.1 percent, the 1970 owner-occupancy rate in EHL neighborhoods was substantially lower (−39.8 points) than the growing-neighborhood figure, but the figures converged significantly over the following forty years. By 2010, the median owneroccupancy rate in EHLN had fallen to 26.9 percent, but the difference with growing neighborhoods had narrowed, because

TABLE 6.4 SUMMARY OF EXTREME HOUSING LOSS NEIGHBORHOOD STATISTICS RELATIVE TO GROWING NEIGHBORHOODS IN SELECTED RUST BELT CITIES, 1970–2010

Variable

1970 Positiona 2010 Position

Trajectoryb

50%+ Trajectoryc

Market Owner-occupied units

Substantially lower (−39.8)

Substantially lower (−25.7)

Converging Growing city significantly

Renter-occupied units

Substantially higher (+34.0)

Similar (+8.7)

Converging EHLN significantly

Vacant units

Similar (+6.3)

Moderately Diverging higher (+15.8)

EHLN

House value

Substantially lower (−45.0)

Substantially lower (−49.0)

Diverging

Growing city

Contract rent

Moderately lower (−24.0)d

Moderately lower (−17.0)

Converging

EHLN

Substantially higher (+76.4)

Substantially Diverging higher (+77.5)

EHLN

White population Substantially lower (−76.4)

Substantially lower (−67.6)

Converging

Growing city

Other population

Similar (+0.1)

Similar (−4.0)

Diverging

Growing city

Household income

Substantially lower (−39.0)

Substantially lower (−43.0)

Diverging

Growing city

Unemployed population

Similar (+5.6)

Moderately Diverging higher (+14.2)

EHLN

Less than HS diploma

Substantially higher (+25.9)

Moderately Converging higher (+13.5)

EHLN

College or more

Moderately lower (−10.9)

Moderately lower (−16.4)

Growing city

Social Black population

Diverging

Source: Geolytics Neighborhood Change Database. a Position equals the EHLN rate relative to the growing city. The figures are classified as higher or lower, then further classified by the degree of difference. “Substantially” = +/−25 points; “moderately” = 10–25 points; “similar” = within 10 points. b Trajectory refers to the change in relative difference between 1970 and 2010. The figures are classified as “converging” or “diverging” (from the growing city figures) then further classified if they are “significant” = >10 points change. c This column refers to which variable change affected the trajectory the most. For example, if the unemployment rate difference between EHLN and growing city was converging but the EHLN rate was constant (while the growing city rate grew), then the growing city would be responsible for more of the shift than EHLN change. d Contract rent figures are for 1980–2010.

178 4 Depriving the Othered City

the rate for the latter had fallen substantially (to 52.6 percent). There were important fluctuations between 1970 and 2010. During the 1990s, for example, convergence was so significant that by 2000 the difference was only 16.8 percentage points as the EHLN rate soared in absolute and relative terms. In the most recent decade (to 2010), almost all of that convergence disappeared as rates of foreclosure disproportionately affected the most heavily disinvested areas. Rental-occupancy rates display an inverse pattern. The rental-occupancy rate median for EHLN in 1970 was 60.1 percent, substantially higher than both the national average (32.7 percent) and the growing-neighborhood median (26.1 percent) for that year. Over the next four decades, the EHLN rental-occupancy rate converged substantially with the growing-neighborhoods rate. By 2010, the EHLN median (45.9 percent) was similar to the growing-city median (37.2 percent). Here, the convergence has been more linear (than owneroccupancy statistics) and associated with a mix of EHLN decreases (in rental occupancy) and growing-neighborhood increases. The goal of lowering vacancy rates is one justification for ad hoc demolition programs—the logic being that a removal of excess housing stock will, by definition, lower the percentage of unoccupied housing. Yet, the pattern since 1970 tells a different story in EHLN. The vacancy-rate median for EHL neighborhoods in 1970 was 9.1 percent, higher than both the national (8.8 percent) and growing-neighborhoods median (2.8 percent), but not radically so. The similarity with both barometers evaporated during the ensuing four decades as the EHLN rate grew to 24.0 percent in 2010, 15.8 points higher than growing neighborhoods for the same year. Median house values in EHL neighborhoods were only 55 percent of the median for growing neighborhoods, and 90 percent of the national average, in 1970. Over the ensuing four decades

Demolition as Urban Policy 4 179

relative (to national rates) house values fell for both EHL and growing neighborhoods, but more rapidly for the former. By 2010, the EHL median house value was 51 percent of that in growing neighborhoods, indicating a slight divergence. But this rate represents a slight improvement on even lower ratios in 1980, 1990, and 2000. Both categories (EHL and growing neighborhoods) weakened considerably against national figures during the time span. The gap between rent values in EHL and growing neighborhoods has been less significant than the difference in house values over the last three decades. In 1980 (the first year for which reliable data are available), the median rent in EHL neighborhoods was $193, which was 76 percent of the growing-city total and 79 percent of the national figure for that year. Over the next three decades, rent levels grew faster in EHLN than growing neighborhoods, so that by 2010, the median for the former was 83 percent of the latter. Overall, and unsurprisingly, EHL neighborhoods contained substantially different markets compared to growing neighborhoods in 1970. EHLN held substantially higher rental-occupancy and vacancy rates, and substantially lower owner-occupancy, house value, and contract rent levels. Over the ensuing four decades, change was not linear, but several patterns emerged. Owner- and renter-occupancy rates in EHLN became, paradoxically, more similar to those in growing neighborhoods, while changes in the difference between house values and rent levels remained relatively static, and vacancy rate differences grew. Massive ad hoc demolition does not appear to be associated with significant changes in the markets targeted. EHL neighborhoods had substantially weaker markets compared to growing neighborhoods in 1970. After removing 63 percent of the housing in those neighborhoods, they emerged in 2010 with similarly weaker markets and much higher vacancy rates.

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SOCIAL MARGINALITY AFTER AD HOC DEMOLITION A similar method was employed to evaluate broad changes in social marginality. The idea is to evaluate whether EHL neighborhoods became more or less socially marginalized after the four decades of intense demolition activity. The tract medians of eight variables were evaluated: black population, white population, neither population, household income, unemployment rate, population with less than high school education, and population with college or more education. As with the market statistics, what follows is an analysis of medians within each neighborhood category, with a focus on the relative changes between EHL and growing tracts. The generalized changes are summarized in table 6.4. Of the variables assessed here none differ as much as the ethnoracial characteristics in EHL versus growing neighborhoods. Put simply, EHL neighborhoods were substantially more African American (+76.4 points) and less white (−76.4 points) in 1970. By 2010, EHL neighborhoods became even more black (88.3 percent of population) and less white (7.7 percent of population), though the relative differences in relation to the latter variable diminished somewhat because growing neighborhoods also became somewhat more African American during this time. Interestingly, the neighborhood differences (EHLN versus growing) are more significant than even differences with the national figures. Almost all the ethnoracial difference was in black-and-white terms—very little of the population self-identified outside of these categories in 1970 (0.3 percent for EHLN and 0.2 percent for growing neighborhoods), and by 2010 the picture had changed very little (2.0 percent for EHLN and 6.0 percent for growing neighborhoods). The level of ethnoracial segregation still evident in such cities raises distressing equity questions for planners, especially

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considering that EHL neighborhoods are, by definition, the overwhelming targets of demolition schemes, today and yesterday. Though less severe, similar household income differences were revealed during the timeframe in question. Although nominal median household incomes increased in all neighborhood categories, the relative differences between EHL and growing neighborhoods increased from their already high levels. In 1970, the median household income for EHL neighborhoods was $6,808, a mere 61 percent of the income level in growing neighborhoods. Though the ratio fluctuated during the 1970–2010 period, the EHLN figure never exceeded that threshold. By 2010, the EHLN median was $30,809, 57 percent of the growing-neighborhood median (which had itself fallen markedly in relation to national figures). Some of this difference is explained by the yawning gap in employment rates between the two neighborhood categories. In 1970, the two neighborhood types had (more) similar rates of unemployment (8.7 percent for EHLN and 3.1 percent for growing neighborhoods), but by 2010 the rates and gap had increased markedly. By 2010, the 23.1 percent unemployment rate in EHL neighborhoods was 14.2 points higher than the rate in growing neighborhoods. This was actually an improvement for EHL neighborhoods from their peak unemployment level of 25.6 percent (and a 20.3-point gap with growing neighborhoods) in 1990. Finally, education statistics reveal worsening social marginality in EHL neighborhoods between 1970 and 2010. In 1970, the percentage of EHLN adult residents with less than a high school diploma was 71.4 percent, 25.9 points higher than in growing neighborhoods. Over the next four decades, national rates of high school attendance and completion increased across the board, so the EHLN rate had dropped to 26.3 percent, marking a convergence but one likely due more to the normalization of high school than to gains relative to growing neighborhoods. Similar

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gaps are revealed when evaluating the opposite end of the educational spectrum, those who have completed at least some college. In 1970, a median of only 6.8 percent of EHLN residents fell into this category, but such educational attainment was also relatively rare in growing neighborhoods (17.7 percent). By 2010, both categories had grown in absolute terms, but the gap between them had yawned to 16.4 points, revealing a divergence in advanced educational attainment. In general, EHLNs were considerably more African American, less white, poorer, less employed, and less educated than growingneighborhood populations in 1970. By 2010, social marginality had become even more acute. Only two EHLN variables converged with the growing-city rates—black population and less than high school diploma—and only one of these variables was due to absolute improvements in EHL neighborhoods. Black population concentration actually increased in EHL neighborhoods, but the relative difference decreased somewhat because growing neighborhoods also became more African American. The broader notion that demolition will stabilize markets, which will in turn stabilize neighborhoods, appears not to have come to fruition, if measured by degree of social distance with the growing city.

DEMOLITION AS ORGANIZED DEPRIVATION Demolition in urban policy has a long history in the United States, but it has been increasingly supplanted by demolition as urban policy in certain Rust Belt neighborhoods. This transition has been fueled by new government resources in the wake of the Great Recession and justified by narrowly designed studies focused on local externalities and away from the larger-scale problems identified by other scholarship. If you remove the

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cancerous cells, the thinking goes, healthy ones will grow in their place. Or, using the language of neoclassical economics, if you remove the institutional barriers and cloudy land titles, the market will soon take advantage of next-to-zero land values and return to forgotten neighborhoods. But the experience of extreme housing loss neighborhoods seems to suggest otherwise. There are 269 neighborhoods in forty-nine Rust Belt cities with at least one neighborhood where more than 50 percent of the housing has been removed in an ad hoc manner (almost all of it through demolition) since 1970. The total land area and unit losses experienced exceed even changes during the urban renewal period. There is thus an adequate basis upon which to make judgments about the potential efficacy of demolition-only or demolitionheavy urban policy. In the most affected neighborhoods, there has been no definitive market stabilization, and struggling communities have become even more socially isolated from growing areas than they were in 1970. And it is dubious to argue that demolition did not go far enough in these neighborhoods: in many cases almost all of the pre-1970 housing has been removed. This research affirms some of the concerns being raised by scholars and local officials about past uses of demolition as a stand-alone device, namely, that absent some other form of affirmative development, disinvested neighborhoods do not autonomously revive. The logical corollary question is why, given this mixed (at best) evidence, is there a call to expand demolition with comparatively little call for publicly led reinvestment to follow? In this instance, the pathologization of urban space is the driving ideational force. Sometimes this pathologization works to facilitate the market making; sometimes it is driven by racial animus. Much of the time, it is a complicated assemblage of both. Whatever its initial justification, the pathologization of urban space is a powerful influence on the assumptions and interventions

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of policy makers—one that is rooted more in assumptions about inner-city spaces and the people that occupy them than about the exact impact of demolition on nearby house values. From this vantage point, already disinvested spaces are dangerous, hopeless, even dead according to a variety of voices and institutions at various scales. These narratives justify a number of interventions that are not about fixing the problem per se; they are about removing it entirely. Demolition, within this paradigm, is not about community building as much as it is about making the problem disappear. Already disinvested neighborhoods are framed as already moribund or dead. Accelerated demolition is merely a form of state-sponsored burial. Understanding the demolition paradigm in this way is helpful for comprehending the motivations of those who do not have to answer to the remaining residents of such neighborhoods, but it is less helpful for understanding why local officials might pursue such a strategy. Even the most heavily disinvested neighborhoods still contain some residents who presumably would be less supportive of such measures. Presumably, there would be at least some local political consequence for treating these residents’ neighborhoods as “dead zones” slated for removal. Notwithstanding the intricate (and often successful) efforts of local officials to couch such efforts in more hopeful language like “rightsizing,” the more likely influential variable has to do with the nature of urban policy production in the United States. The acceleration of demolition is largely being driven by outsiders—those fully invested in the pathologization of “blighted” spaces and who actually benefit from related demagoguery. The actual impact of demolition on market making is minimal at the neighborhood level, but it is far more consequential in the larger sense of enabling cities to build and reinforce narratives about their “renaissance” based on

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profitable land investment elsewhere in the city. Local growthmachine members thus often fully embrace the strategy while affected residents and city officials are frequently more divided. Demolition authority, resources, and the narratives that pathologize urban spaces are more often than not derived from outside of those spaces. In this case, state legislatures and a federal government that are overwhelmingly white-dominated, rural, and Republican, particularly in the Rust Belt, authorize the money for demolition and little else to occur. Local officials may be more ambivalent about demolition-only strategies, but antiurban officials in state legislatures have been unwavering about their intent. Removing the building stock is less about improving nearby property values than it is about removing sections of cities deemed too dangerous or moribund to be allowed to survive.

 SAVING THE CITY TO KILL IT

I

2012, as Detroit was hurtling toward bankruptcy and much of the rest of the United States still deeply bruised by the Great Recession, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and a consortium of liberal nonprofits released Detroit Future City: a glossy, stylish rethinking of the entire city. The premise of their intervention was that the layout of the city was unsustainable given its incredible population loss. As they wrote: N

Detroit has large, centralized infrastructure systems that were designed to support a population of at least 2 million, with large areas of heavy industry. As a result, today’s Detroit has systems that are oversized for the current population and are no longer aligned with where people and businesses now reside or will likely be in the future.

The document went on to suggest that the remedy to this problem was to functionally off-line whole sections of the city—delink the infrastructure and turn them into untended forests or even large scale agricultural land. This would reconcentrate the population around more sustainable nodes, allow the city to return to better financial footing, and most of all improve the environment.

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Detroit Future City (DFC) was not the first exercise of its sort. In fact, distressed American cities have been toying with the idea of deurbanization since at least the mid-twentieth century. Whether it was the efforts of Anthony Downs to rescale parts of St. Louis in the 1950s, the proposal by New York City chief planner Roger Starr that sections of the city go through “planned shrinkage,” or the various musings of officials throughout the years that places like Detroit be downsized, the idea of reconfiguring the infrastructure and landscape of a city to match its population size is not new. The idea underlying all of these efforts is that it is necessary to kill the city, or part of it anyway, to save the entire entity. By removing infrastructure obligations to heavily abandoned neighborhoods with only a fraction of the houses that they once had, the city would save money that could be used to improve services for the remaining sections. Earlier efforts to implement deurbanization all went down in flames, its promoters vilified by the residents of those sparsely settled streets for writing them off. It is one thing to argue that parts of St. Louis or the Bronx are dead if you live in the suburbs and know little more about the city than the caricaturized version that has been fed to you by various figures. It is quite another if you live in one of the areas that have been labeled as moribund or a burden on the city. The authors of DFC were aware of these earlier efforts and spent a great deal of time wordsmithing a way to be different. Unlike past efforts to resize cities that used language like “triage” and “planned shrinkage,” or contemporaneous efforts that invoked the “cancer” of blight, Detroit Future City was brimming with optimism. DFC, argued its authors, would revive the city for all. It would lower costs, build open space, create carbon sinks that would improve air quality, and make the sewerage system more sustainable. Detroit Future City and the spate of similar exercises in other distressed midwestern cities was palpably and

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deliberately hopeful. This was an opportunity, not a burden or unfortunate necessity like those earlier efforts were. This is not the proud organized deprivation of the Mackinac or Cato Institute— rightsizing was, and remains, filled with the progressive language of hope and city salvation. This chapter argues that the current framing of rightsizing as a city-saving technique is misplaced. The appropriate aphorism is not “killing the city to save it” but rather the reverse “saving the city to kill it.” That is, the language of city salvation and progress are being used (whether deliberately or not) to hasten the demise of the most abandoned spots of the city. There are real problems associated with extreme abandonment—those should not be denied. But equitable resolution to those problems is being blocked by austerity, state-level preemptions, and regional political fragmentation. There is no realistic opportunity to enact the progressive goals discussed in DFC or other similar documents. Rather, the language of progress is being used to shield what amounts to a reincarnation of previous efforts. Rightsizing is a rationalization of austerity. The language of “save the city” progress is merely a thin veil on that agenda.

RIGHTSIZING AND THE PROBLEM IT SOLVES Rightsizing is the suggestion that distressed cities with copious vacant land effectively downsize. This could involve the construction of greenways and parks where neighborhoods once stood. It might further involve facilitating the movement of remaining residents to a few vibrant town-like cores in the city. This, its proponents argue, would create more functional communities and reduce the infrastructure footprint for a city to make it more

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fiscally sustainable. Greenways might also remediate years of environmental contamination and provide carbon sinks for ongoing CO2 emissions. Activists and scholars have expressed a number of concerns. Some suggest that rightsizing is a veiled attempt by growth machinists to acquire land. Others are concerned that it is the reincarnation of urban renewal and merely a top-down attempt by outsiders to impose order. Under urban renewal, concerns about housing overcrowding and racial segregation were exploited by bureaucrats to justify the mass demolition of whole neighborhoods and the destruction of cities. These are legitimate critiques of rightsizing, but it is also undoubtedly true that extreme land abandonment is a serious problem for affected communities, not just an imaginary one deployed by conservatives, planners, and selfinterested developers to get their way. Extreme land vacancy does promote social isolation and fiscal stress. It does make it more difficult for a city to finance and service its sprawling infrastructure. Extreme abandonment invites unwanted activities like arson and illegal dumping. Extreme housing loss neighborhoods (EHLNs) tend to be more environmentally contaminated, infrastructurally underserved, and socially isolated than other neighborhoods. These problems disproportionately affect the impoverished communities of color who populate EHLNs in the Rust Belt. There are thus locally legitimate reasons to consider rightsizing as a way to improve distressed cities and neighborhoods. But those locally legitimate concerns and desires have been mangled through the organized deprivation policy filter. If growth, robust state expenditures, and a rational-scientific planning paradigm converted the locally legitimate reasons for urban renewal into the unrepentant “federal bulldozer” that it became, the forces of organized deprivation have converted rightsizing into a form of barely varnished austerity urbanism. Austerity urbanism involves

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reducing government resources for city residents due to specific budget crises. But it is also an actively maintained condition nurtured by a host of political allies and institutions seeking to divert policy conversations away from revenue increases (i.e., taxes), Keynesian countercyclical investments, and regional revenue sharing, while focusing policy makers’ attention on the perceived excesses of municipal labor unions, the parasitic dependency of urban residents, and the profligacy of city governments. The recent condition is undergirded by a long-wave structural shift away from Keynesian managerialism and toward speculative entrepreneurial urbanism that required cities to take greater risk and borrow more money to fund their social economy and placate their growth machine. When the crash took place in 2008, most cities faced not only the reduction in transfer payments from higher levels of government but also crushing debt schedules derived from their embrace of previously free-flowing credit. Pro-austerity forces used these conditions to successfully set the agenda for what was possible and what was not: taxes and social expenditures were out; belt-tightening and “realistic” spending were in. Rightsizing has been converted into austerity urbanism, above all because it is being implemented under conditions of organized deprivation. Just as high growth rates and surpluses dictated what was possible during the urban renewal era, so do stagnation, austerity, and an organized conservative movement predetermine the possibilities for rightsizing. Actualized rightsizing is far more focused on erasure than creation. In this way, it is a reincarnation of triage, wherein distressed neighborhoods are left for dead or even smothered by state action. The vast majority of people living in “dying” or “dead” neighborhoods in the Rust Belt are black. Racial animus produced those spaces. Racial animus continues to provoke white people to assume that those spaces are more disorderly simply because

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of the presence of black people. Racial indifference suggests that it is progressive for technocrats to sell the virtues of greening the city as a reason to remove black neighborhoods from the map. Despite these connections, race is almost entirely absent from rightsizing plans and policies. Even the progressive language of the “green city” is superficial compared to the goals and constraints of organized deprivation. Greening not only serves to mask other (very relevant) social problems—it serves as a way to soften the fact that even greening will not take place. The putative remedy for “dying neighborhoods” is plain in all of the reports: demolition of housing and auctioning of property to the highest bidder. Many of the progressive principles outlined by rightsizing theorists—greening, in particular—are mentioned but unfunded. Plans for service cuts, demolition, and land acquisition for developers are, by contrast, specific and funded by state resources. Finally, the views and desires of the impoverished communities of color are secondary to the already-hatched desire to demolish without development. The most meaningful questions— about development, demolition, and equity—are predetermined and top-down. “Community input” consists primarily of an elaborate effort to legitimate such decisions through local assistance in determining what houses should be demolished.

READING RIGHTSIZING PLANS This chapter is based on a reading of rightsizing plans for Detroit, Flint, Rochester, Saginaw, and Youngstown. All have experienced considerable population loss since the mid-twentieth century. Other cities are likely involved in similar exercises, but these were chosen because they have codified these impulses into official or quasi-official plans intended to guide actual future development

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and demolition efforts. Thus, while rightsizing is still an evolving project, these cities offer the most advanced examples of its implementation. This chapter consists of a critical read of the plans produced in the five cities. In most cases, the planning framework was distilled into one document, but in others it involved several. Several areas received focus in the short descriptions below: (1) details on the planning process, (2) specifics on neighborhoods where intensified demolition has been proposed and funding sources that might be used, (3) details on affordable housing options (if any) potentially available to those whose homes are demolished, and (4) proposed ownership of land after demolition occurs. A basic summary of these plans is provided in table 7.1.

2012 and 2014 2013 2009 2011 2005

• • •

•

•

•

• • • •

• • •

• • •

Green Preservation Funds Named

Blight Removal Funding Named

Flint Rochester Saginaw Youngstown

Detroit Future City and Every Neighborhood Has a Future Imagine Flint Project Green Saginaw Master Plan Youngstown 2010

Downsized Neighborhood Mapped

Detroit

Year Rightsizing Documents Published

Official City Participation in Exercise

City

Official Master Plan

TABLE 7.1 FEATURES OF RIGHTSIZING PLANS IN SELECTED RUST BELT CITIES

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There are, of course, limitations in reading plans in the American context. American planning, like the polity within which it is ensconced, is highly diffuse and dissimilar to other models throughout the world where a plan is more likely to lead to a result similar to what was proposed. Laws that favor property owners over public entities, a culture of antigovernmentalism, and the reality of extreme political fragmentation at the metropolitan scale all limit the implementation capacity of planning exercises in the American context. But by the same token, and for many of the reasons discussed earlier, planning exercises are now intricate efforts to provide local legitimacy for a wide range of economic and social realities. They often involve elaborate consultations with thousands of stakeholders and result in a distillation of a variety of concerns and viewpoints. Given the austerity environment, they likely represent a discursive high point for progressive deployments of the state. By that I mean it is unlikely that an affordable housing program, for example, will emerge if it is not mentioned in the master plan (it is unlikely even if it is mentioned). In a sense, the master plan is the necessary condition for certain development and housing goals to be achieved—whether they are or not is a very different question. But in this we can read priorities—whether, for example, officials feel obliged to even gesture to certain progressive goals or how specific they are about funding sources, future ownership, and the like.

Detroit, Michigan Detroit is the most visible case of urban decline in the United States, perhaps the world. Detroit’s rightsizing vision is spelled out with two ostensibly unofficial but influential documents:

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Detroit Future City and Every Neighborhood Has a Future. They were both written while the city was under emergency management and because the city’s formal planning apparatus has been emaciated by generational austerity, such informal documents have more influence on the city’s future than ostensibly official ones. Detroit Future City (DFC) is a comprehensive planning document organized by a variety of foundations in the city. The more recent Every Neighborhood is more narrowly focused on the demolition side of rightsizing but was authored by a powerful board whose efforts are backed by very specific funding sources, so it is more likely to be realized. Released in December 2012, Detroit Future City was the culmination of a two-year process that involved “hundreds of meetings, 30,000 conversations, connecting with people over 163,000 times, over 70,000 survey responses and comments from participants, and countless hours spent dissecting and examining critical data about our city.” The plan was financed and managed by a number of local foundations (in particular the Kresge Foundation) assisted by nonprofits like Data Driven Detroit. It involved participation by city officials but is not an official master planning document. The plan seeks to address the fact that “Detroit’s population has been in decline for decades and this trend is expected to continue.” One emphasis is the cost of maintaining street, sewer, and utility infrastructures that sprawl across the city’s vast landscape for a population that is less than half its mid-twentieth century size. To ameliorate this challenge, Detroit Future City outlines several rightsizing land use ideas, none more provocative than naming vast sections of the city as “innovation productive” and “innovation ecological.” Innovation productive landscapes will be used for large-scale commercial farming, while innovation ecological areas will be allowed to return to nature—urban forests and prairies. Approximately

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20 percent of the city’s land area has been mapped in Detroit Future City as innovation ecological. Evidently worried about the optics of off-lining an area with more than 100,000 (mostly African American) people still living in it, the plan directly confronts the legacy of urban renewal with promises that every resident who wants to stay can do so: Detroit will lead the world in . . . in transform[ing] vacant land areas into community assets that remediate contaminated land, manage storm water and highway runoff, and create passive recreational amenities to improve human health and elevate adjacent land values—all without residential displacement, a big change from the urban renewal efforts of the 1960s and 1970s.

But as Lucas Owen Kirkpatrick has argued, it is difficult to understand how the goal of infrastructure downsizing might be achieved without displacement or forced removal. If, for example, officials were able to demolish seven of ten remaining houses on a given street, the city’s utilities would still have to serve the same length of pipe, wire, and road for the remaining three houses. Without moving the remaining three “off of the grid” or inducing them to relocate, it is difficult to understand where the infrastructure cost savings would be realized. Detroit Future City is light on details of how this would be possible. The plan is more concrete about affordable housing opportunities: Residents who choose to stay in the highest-vacancy areas of the city will continue to receive services, while residents who formerly had no choices will have opportunities to move to different neighborhoods if they wish, with new incentives such as “house swap” programs and progressive efforts that help increase family wealth and access to affordable homes throughout Detroit.

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The details and financing for the putative “house swap” program are not developed further than this, and it is doubtful that the city has the resources to embark on such a program. Detroit Future City is arguably the most-discussed document in the city’s planning circles right now, but the city’s subsequent emergency management, then bankruptcy, have ratcheted up the urgency to achieve certain goals. One outgrowth of this context was the publication of Every Neighborhood Has a Future, a report by the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force (DBRTF) in May 2014. The task force was cochaired by Glenda Rice of the Detroit Public Schools Foundation, Linda Smith of U-SNAPBAC, and most famously Dan Gilbert, owner of Quicken Loans and numerous commercial buildings in downtown Detroit. The committee involved participants from the city and state, the emergency manager, and various nonprofits and foundations. The name derives from the campaign slogan of the current mayor, Mike Duggan, who wanted to distance himself from the perception (provoked by the previous mayor, Dave Bing) that certain neighborhoods would simply be erased. Though the scope is different, in many ways Every Neighborhood picks up where Detroit Future City left off. In fact, the Detroit Blight Removal Task Force report devotes an entire chapter to spelling out how cohesive and integral their vision is with DFC and the mayor’s plan. Whatever their similarities, however, the DBRTF report differs in a number of respects, most pertinently that it is focused solely on demolition and that it specifies how blight removal will be funded. Every Neighborhood is built on an impressive data-gathering exercise wherein community members organized by Data Driven Detroit were given digital tablets and asked to comb through neighborhoods in search of blighted housing (which is defined specifically in the report). They found that 30 percent of the city

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currently consists of vacant lots and that a further 80,000 parcels will either require demolition or remediation of some sort. The plan boldly suggests demolishing these structures, about half of which are currently privately owned (and many currently occupied by tenants and owners), as soon as possible. The DBRTF report openly invokes the language of “triage” and specifies certain neighborhoods where current demolition efforts would be best focused. Beyond this, the report suggests involving community members to identify blighted houses in their neighborhood for demolition and identify specific pots of money to execute this vision. The report’s authors estimate that the tasks will cost approximately $850 million and that they already have about half of this on hand from municipal, state, and federal sources. The report lacks the sentimentality and greening themes of the DFC and the other reports but does seem to indicate an understanding of the importance of local input. Elaborate protocols are created to solicit help to find the houses to demolish. The report also features a more specific (compared to the others presented here) vision for what should happen to the parcels after the structures are demolished. The report is explicit that they should be auctioned with clear title as soon as possible and the writers are confident that once “cancerous blight” has been removed, auction interest will exist. In total, the rightsizing vision outlined by Detroit Future City and Every Neighborhood is arguably the boldest, and certainly the largest-scale, of the plans being discussed here.

Flint, Michigan Flint was once one of the wealthiest cities in the country and remains the symbolic home of the American labor movement. Like many Rust Belt cities, however, the city’s manufacturing

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employers, followed by the population, fled in the second half of the twentieth century. City officials began the process of planning around a smaller city in 2012, because “a population decrease of the magnitude experienced by Flint places challenging stresses on every system, from infrastructure and government services, to education and economic development.” The eighteen-month process culminated in a document entitled Imagine Flint, an official master plan that would guide future development or shrinkage in the city. The process took place in multiple stages, involved over 5,000 city residents and officials, and involved numerous stakeholders with an interest in the city. An optimistic document, it sought to use nongrowth principles to rethink the city, first by reframing the decline. “Flint’s population decline,” they write, “presents an opportunity to reorganize the community, transforming the city from an outward sprawling community to a compact, mixed use city situated along dense, urban corridors with a vibrant city core.” The plan unveils a variety of strategies, including a number that fall in line with rightsizing principles. Throughout the city there will be more attention to demolishing vacant structures, working with adjacent owners to acquire the properties, and encouraging provisional uses like community gardens. The plan identifies six cluster areas where specific strategies will be more intense than others. Area Six, northeast of downtown and adjacent to the Flint River, has already experienced a great deal of housing abandonment and depopulation. The plan identifies this area as most appropriate for green innovation, open space, and urban agriculture, but stops short of codifying this into the zoning map or even suggesting intensified demolition as is the case in the other plans under scrutiny. This is the most spatially specific target in the plan, but the document invokes the language of rightsizing throughout. The plan suggests that a goal will be to “work with the Land Bank to

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acquire properties around parks for limited park expansion, particularly along waterways” but does not specify exactly where this would be. It then suggests that it may be necessary to “transition green neighborhoods that experience steep population decline to Community Open Space.” But later, in an evident attempt to reassure residents currently living in such places, the plan states that, “In instances where an existing use is not permitted within a place type, and therefore not recommended in the Place-Based Land Use Plan, that should be grandfathered in.” Though it does not yet attach this to a particular neighborhood, the plan is clearly concerned with the (majority-black) neighborhoods north of the downtown area where decline has already been the most severe. Here it seeks to create “green neighborhoods” defined by “large lots, community gardens, and well-maintained open space.” Should growth return to Flint, the city might allow continued development, but the main goal of large-lot living will be to create “self-sufficient households.” Should decline accelerate, the plan warns that it may be necessary to transition these spaces to “community open space.” The details of who would own such open spaces remain vague. There is a promise to consult with neighborhood officials to decide on matters of this sort, but gestures to converting land to some public use such as a park remain speculative. They write that it would be beneficial to “aggressively pursue funding opportunities from a range of sources including Federal, State, and local grants to assist with parkland acquisition and maintenance,” but offer little more than this in terms of potential public land. Other gestures include ongoing efforts to sell vacated side-lots to adjacent owners and vague calls to work with the county land bank. The implication is that much of this land would still technically be available for private purchase should legitimate development interest occur in the future. The need for demolition is addressed less equivocally. Funding

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strategies, criteria for demolition, and mechanics for executing these plans were all identified in this document and have generally been followed since its publication. Affordable housing opportunities in intensified clusters downtown were not mentioned explicitly. In fact, housing in general was given little attention in the report, perhaps because the city appears to be overbuilt. It does, however, state that: Once the city’s population has been stabilized, the city should turn its sights on growth. The city should seek to add a combined 15,000 housing units to the Downtown and Innovation District areas, and provide additional new housing in Flint’s Traditional Neighborhood and Mixed Residential areas.

It remains unclear as to whether any of this housing would be subsidized. Overall, the Flint plan embodies a number of features that are similar to the other plans, including an emphasis on restraining unmoored development, building green infrastructure, and targeting neighborhoods that have already experienced a great deal of population loss. The document stands out in its gestures to creating publicly owned open space but is notably vague about how that would be funded or where exactly it would be. Also unique (among this set), the report seems to openly use a sliding scale—e.g., “development can occur under the following conditions”; “naturalization will occur under these conditions.”

Rochester, New York In 2009, the City of Rochester published Project Green, a rightsizing report that has since been used to guide spending and development priorities. The report begins with a gesture to the need to plan for a smaller city:

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Faced with limited resources and a decreasing population, the city must take bold steps to ensure that Rochester remains a vital, successful, and thriving community. Growing smaller does not have to mean declining.

As the title implies, the approach is to invest in greening approaches for the city of Rochester, but fiscal realities of infrastructure provision are foregrounded. The plan seeks to break the ad hoc pattern of past demolitions with something more focused on certain troubled areas: The current trend of random, opportunity-based demolition does little to stabilize large areas of Rochester. Significant stabilization measures can be taken on a site by site basis but the “broken teeth” of the neighborhood is perpetuated. Coinciding with the administration’s Priority Investment Strategy, the Project Green strategy focuses demolition and reconstruction around new neighborhood green assets.

Specific (majority-black) neighborhoods north of downtown are identified and mapped as potential targets for this activity. With a gesture to the troubling urban renewal analogy, the report’s authors attempt to convey sensitivity: No redevelopment strategy that has a significant demolition component can proceed in the United States without the humbling reminder of the consequences of “slum clearance” in the 1960s and early 1970s. Crucial concerns for social equity, citizen involvement, environmental sustainability, and historic preservation must be reflected in any Project Green effort.

Only this portion of urban renewal’s legacy, not the more problematic destruction and nonreplacement of housing, is invoked. Several

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citizen participation methods are invoked to “overcome” these legacies—to utilize community input in deciding what structures to demolish. The document spends time trying to allay concerns with a sort of green optimism. The language of “opportunity,” similar to the other reports, appears throughout Project Green. “Project Green will enable a link between natural and built systems within the city in ways that improve the quality of life and the long term health of residents and the environment.” Specific “opportunities” include the possibility of “mining” vacated housing for nice fixtures that might be sold to wealthier residents in the region. The report identifies a $3 million budget for demolitions, but when it comes to identifying money that might be used to create and maintain parks or recreation space with the parcels the language becomes more circumspect. To achieve these goals, “capital and grant funding can be pursued for park development.” Moreover, gestures to park development (or some other green infrastructure permanence) are overshadowed by the proposal that vacated land will simply be warehoused until growth returns to the city. Writing in reference to land that might be temporarily leased for private parks and urban agriculture, the report suggests that “the city may wish to lease this land on a medium- to longterm basis, rather than selling outright, in order to retain control of the land should market conditions change in the long term and the residential market returns.” Project Green mentions the hypothetical possibility that relocation of affected communities may need to take place in the future. One of its main recommendations is to establish the institutional capacity to execute such a plan: Establish and fund a multi-purpose city of Rochester land-bank program that strategically decommissions surplus public infrastructure, acquiring abandoned properties (e.g., tax-delinquent or seriously blighted sites), and relocating of households within

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distressed neighborhoods by removing from the housing inventory 2,988 dwelling units in a strategic block by block clearance of all structures in order to re-establish a functioning housing market.

Project Green does invoke the possibility of generating affordable housing elsewhere in the city but seems more concerned with controlling this supply than building it near established nodes: The current affordable housing development program draws almost exclusively from existing city residents. Those affordable projects, in effect, exacerbate the neighborhood vacancy rate. On the plus side, they provide safe and healthy habitable shelter. On the negative, they increase the number of vacant units. In order to mitigate the negative impacts of newly constructed affordable housing developments, the city should be removing three to five existing substandard vacant units for every one new affordable housing unit constructed.

While Project Green is not a master planning document, it does have significant buy-in from a variety of elected officials and community members. Like the other plans, Project Green identifies specific neighborhoods with specific funds for blight removal but does not provide much specificity on affordable housing options that might be needed for those displaced or on how greening might be achieved in a permanent way if the land will simply be available for development afterwards.

Saginaw, Michigan Saginaw is a small Rust Belt city of just over 50,000 that experienced the pressures of deindustrialization like others of its kind.

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In 2011, the city embraced the principles of rightsizing in a City of Saginaw Master Plan. More recently, it reaffirmed some of the rightsizing strategies in a City of Saginaw Annual Action Plan that spells out spending priorities for 2014 and 2015. The Master Plan begins by setting the context of population loss like the others examined here, but it also invokes the larger financial crisis affecting the city, that “has left the city further scarred with an abundance of vacant housing, and subsequently, a lack of demand for this housing stock.” The plan goes on to explain how rightsizing can help the city: “As a mature urban center, the city of Saginaw was at one time fully built-out. But over time, there has been population loss, building demolitions, and growing rates of vacancies, all of which presents a unique opportunity today for the City of Saginaw to begin right-sizing.” The plan outlines several goals to achieve this, but none more directly than the creation of a new land use category called “green reserve opportunity areas.” As the plan’s authors explain, “This category includes lands that are envisioned to be converted to attractive low-maintenance natural areas intended to beautify and enhance key areas in the city through parkways, landscaped roadway buffers, gateways, landscaped open areas, and open meadows.” They note that blight is widespread throughout the city, but they take particular aim at one neighborhood northeast of downtown along the Saginaw River. This area, currently home to about 1,000 people (over 80 percent of whom are black) and subject to decades of disinvestment, was deemed the “Green Zone.” Here they will focus exclusively on demolition to create a green reserve opportunity area: “This area will only receive funds for blight elimination,” writes the city in its recent Action Plan. Funding sources are then identified for the demolitions that will take place. Perhaps recognizing the political complications of so specifically targeting one (majority-black) neighborhood, the Master

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Plan makes several recommendations that gesture to a troubled urban renewal past. For example, it notes, “This general area has been identified in prior planning efforts by the city as maintaining separate yet competing uses—residential and industrial—and by acknowledging how prior planning decisions have affected this area, it is important to not recommend displacement of residents.” But by the same token, the plan does not mention potential housing options elsewhere in the city for those currently living in the Green Zone. There is also a palpable attempt to sell the green benefits of this strategy: “For the long-term, these areas will be returned to a natural state, but are still connected to the urban fabric through green space, landscaped gateways, community gardens, and can be used for passive outdoor recreational uses.” But while “green” is prominent in the report, the suggestion that the larger motive is a temporary warehousing strategy for future development also occurs in numerous places. “For the Green Zone portion of the grant,” write the plan’s authors, “grant funds are directed toward blight removal through demolition, with vacant properties then placed in the Saginaw County Land Bank for future redevelopment considerations.” The Saginaw plan is the most direct at invoking the language of rightsizing and, by identifying one particular neighborhood, is one of the most specific in terms of what might actually happen. But in the end, there are still many questions left open that might trouble residents of the Green Zone or other, similar sections of the city. In particular, if “displacement is to be avoided,” how would the city actually save money on infrastructure costs if residents are allowed to stay? This question is left open, but the plan gestures to a future that might involve the removal of services or perhaps some relocation: Based on the level of decline described earlier in this plan, the city will need to re-examine what infrastructure is important and how

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to provide it. In some cases, because of reduced revenue streams, there may be a need to right-size some services.

How this plan would be managed and where the residents would go are left as open questions. Less ambiguous, however, is the city’s desire to emphasize demolition (with funding sources identified), their lack of interest in developing affordable housing near growth clusters, and the fact that “greened” land should remain available for development in some form.

Youngstown, Ohio Published in 2005, the Youngstown 2010 Citywide Plan is considered a pathbreaking exercise by shrinking-city scholars. It spends a great deal of verbiage (more than other plans) trying to convince readers of the necessity of planning for a smaller city. As the plan’s authors write, “The Youngstown 2010 Citywide Plan is based on a new vision for the new reality that accepts we are a smaller city that will stabilize at 80,000 people.” It also includes more gestures to social investments than the other four plans. Youngstown 2010 identifies a multifaceted strategy centered on “making the city competitive again.” Key among these facets is confronting the physical blight that years of disinvestment brought to the city. A central problem, explain the plan’s authors, is the infrastructure costs associated with a city where such abandonment has occurred. There are too many abandoned properties and too many underutilized sites. Many difficult choices will have to be made as Youngstown recreates itself as a sustainable mid-sized city. A strategic program is required to rationalize and consolidate the

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urban infrastructure in a socially responsible and financially sustainable manner.

They outline a number of rightsizing principles that will be applied city-wide, including reducing the city’s residential land by 30 percent. But the most focused downsizing efforts will target the city’s majority-black south side, where disinvestment is most severe. In the Lower Gibson area in particular, the city will divert resources away and inhibit development: The city will not consider Lower Gibson a priority area for the allocation of housing rehabilitation funds and will resist any requests for future housing development. There are other places on the South Side where such endeavors are more viable.

Like the other plans, the Youngstown plan is quick to assert that existing residents will not be forced to leave: “It must be reiterated that this does not mean existing residents will be forced out; under nonconforming use regulations, they can stay as long as the existing use continues without interruption.” But it is also unclear how exactly the city would save on infrastructure costs unless remaining houses still connected to existing systems were forced or incentivized to leave. As in the other plans, rightsizing is framed as an “opportunity” and “greening” themes are promoted, but the plan does differ in some respects from the others studied here. First, the city appears to be using a newly formed zoning category called “Industrial Green” to deal with vacated areas. Industrial Green is “characterized by office uses, research, business support services, warehouses, distributors, and light manufacturing uses which do not produce any levels of noise, vibration, dust, smoke or pollution and do not include outdoor storage.” Elsewhere in the report they mention

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applying to the state of Ohio for funds to permanently conserve some land, though this remains speculative and unlikely within the organized deprivation funding climate. While some land may be theoretically available for sale after demolition, it will not be simply auctioned to the lowest bidder through the tax reversion system as is proposed for other cities. A second distinguishing feature involves the mention of affordable-housing development. The Youngstown rightsizing approach does not specifically mention affordable housing options as replacement housing for downsized neighborhoods, but it does note the importance of developing it in organized ways. None of the other plans is as explicit about affordable housing. Nevertheless, the plan leaves open the same possibilities as the other plans. Funding and commitments to “remove blight” are far more specific than plans to create publicly owned recreation space. Infrastructure savings are mooted but so is the insistence that existing residents of downsized neighborhoods will be allowed to stay. With existing water, sewer, and street systems, it is difficult to imagine how those goals could be simultaneously achievable. And the permanency of green space, while more imaginative and less open to auction than other plans, seems uncertain and dependent on funds that will likely not materialize.

RIGHTSIZING AS SPATIAL AUSTERITY The ideas of clustering development, creating permanent or semipermanent green zones, and offering less contaminated, segregated, and dilapidated living possibilities to the city’s poorest are not regressive or misguided goals. The ideas stem in part from very real problems faced by an isolated, racialized, disempowered population in the Rust Belt. But the juridical authority

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to implement such ideas, and the necessary funding resources, are not exclusively, or even primarily, local. Actualized rightsizing invokes these goals as credibility-building window dressing for a paradigm that is indifferent or hostile to them. The material changes provoked or suggested by actualized policies do more to codify austerity through neighborhood triage than to legitimately address the problems faced by impoverished black city residents. First, while the language of greening is omnipresent, each of the plans is only superficially committed to a permanent or semipermanent implementation of these goals. The language of greening is actively deployed to sell the virtues of demolition but disappears from the narrative when the question turns to the future of greened spaces. Plans to create permanent or semipermanent open space are either rejected outright or made contingent on writing a grant proposal to the state’s park department. In most cases, land that is cleared for green space will immediately, or eventually, be made available to some sort of private development. In some cases, the proposal is to auction it to the highest bidder immediately. Second, there is a mismatch between the scale of the sprawlinginfrastructure problem and the scale of the solution. It is undoubtedly true that infrastructure—water lines, electrical transmission, sewer systems—sprawls for dozens of unused square miles and could be more efficiently concentrated around tax-paying population nodes for a more sustainable network. But only relatively small areas of each city are being targeted—only the poorest, most African American, most disinvested neighborhoods. Even if successful, the cost savings of delinking such a small part of each city would likely be minimal. And in all cases, the current plan is to let residents of even those communities stay in place should they desire, making the prospect of infrastructure savings dubious.

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If there is a continued effort to save money on infrastructure in the future, it is difficult to imagine that there will not be pressure to remove the remaining users of that infrastructure in certain areas. This is problematic, not least because many residents remain in such neighborhoods because their prospects for finding alternative housing options are extremely limited. The idea that they could just move elsewhere is questionable—many are on fixed incomes and inherited their house, which would be difficult or impossible to sell if the city formally zoned their neighborhood as “open space.” Finding an equivalently valued unit elsewhere in the city is a complicated prospect at best. And yet, the plans all possess a third common characteristic—the evident lack of interest in building affordable housing near one of the putative clusters. In some cases, the necessity for such housing is dismissed using the logic of neoliberal economists who suggest that affordable housing is the last thing such communities need, because there is already “too much.” Or if the problem is addressed, it is invoked in highly contingent ways—e.g., “building housing will take place after growth has returned.” The vagueness about affordable housing and greening stands in stark contrast to the specificity of plans to demolish blighted housing. While the former goals are contingent on getting a grant, demolition goals (and means) are very specific. Neighborhoods have been mapped, methods have been established for selecting target houses, and monetary sources have been identified. Concerns about the striking similarity that rightsizing plans of this sort bear to repudiated urban renewal appear to be in the minds of each plan’s authors. All of the reports gesture to or directly invoke the urban renewal era. But the chief lesson seems to be exclusively process based—namely, to make sure there is local input on which houses will be demolished and promises that displacement will

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not occur. Whether demolition should take place, what affordable options will be created elsewhere, and whether demolished property should be made available to investors do not appear to be negotiable items. Beyond the cherry-picked “lessons learned” from urban renewal, I would suggest that the analogy is misapplied in any case. For all of its flaws, urban renewal sought to replace one order with a different, utopian one: premodern shanty-slums replaced by a modern metropolis created by rational-scientific planners. Urban renewal never, of course, delivered, and did much damage trying, but actualized rightsizing does not even bother to make the promise. The current proposed scale of demolition is equally vast as urban renewal, but the vision of what will replace it is piecemeal, speculative, and investment driven. Public spaces, affordable housing, and other nonmarket community goals are linked to funding sources that will likely never materialize. Even if they did, issues of ownership and stewardship are still vague and likely to favor future investors more than future residents. Actualized rightsizing is not urban renewal redux; in many ways, it is worse. Austerity urbanism is the more apt way to understand rightsizing. These plans are not only occurring under organized deprivation, they are adopting many of its features, particularly the lack of state support for a social economy. Rightsizing without a redistributive state is just austerity with green packaging, and more recent plans do not even bother to hide this. The laudable principles outlined by proponents of rightsizing have little relevance in this context. The forces and funding sources underwriting blight removal and neighborhood erasure are specific, in place, and ready to be deployed. More progressive proposals for greening the urban environment or concentrating the population are vague and unlikely to materialize in favor of

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the poorest residents. This does not make proponents of rightsizing shills for austerity, but it should lead practicing planners and affected residents to be skeptical of plans that invoke this language so optimistically. Actualized rightsizing is not a postgrowth epiphany; it is an attempt to reset growth by converting the most expensive parts of the territorial social economy into a new investment opportunity.

CONCLUSION Urban Decline Was Planned

T

most modern conservatives, the market is (and ought to be) supreme. Attempts to subordinate the market to societal norms not only cause decline—they inhibit the emergence of the most just and efficient version of the market. This version of the market, conservatives insist, is what we should all aspire to, the “free-market utopia.” The dream is built on the notion that progressive interventions to embed the market—labor and environmental regulation, a taxation rate sufficient to build a social economy, basic economic and housing rights—are impediments to the natural order. The market is natural, autonomous, and equilibrating, while government intervention is artificial and arbitrary. Goals such as egalitarianism disrupt the natural order. As Barry Goldwater wrote in his iconic Conscience of a Conservative, O

An egalitarian society  .  .  . does violence both to the charter of the Republic and the laws of Nature. We are all equal in the eyes of God but we are equal in no other respect. Artificial devices for enforcing equality among unequal men must be rejected if we would restore that charter and honor those laws.

To conservatives, declining cities are the embodiment of artificial devices. They are filled with unfree, unnatural interventions like

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unions, regulations, and high taxes. If we remove those artificial interventions, prosperity and freedom will abound because the nature of the market will be unleashed. The modern conservative position on urban decline is not dissimilar from the worldview of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury economists that Polanyi chronicled in The Great Transformation. Looking back at the previous 150 years of laissez-faire economic ideology, Polanyi noted how earlier conservatives (they were called liberals then) also insisted that the market was natural and that government intervention was an artificial intrusion that would only make matters worse. Conservatives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rejected all forms of governmental regulation and planning on the grounds that they would disrupt the natural order of things. If we only removed these planned interventions, we would be able to achieve freedom. But to conservatives, planning included only the measures enacted to limit capitalists from exploiting people. The immense effort of the state to facilitate the exploitation of labor—the penal system, bankruptcy laws, absorbing costs for infrastructure like ports and roads, contract law—were not considered “planning.” They were just considered faithful obedience to the free and natural market. Polanyi pointed out the absurd hypocrisy of this position and flipped it on its head: “Laissez-faire was planned; planning was not.” To Polanyi, the powerful juridical mechanisms put in place, and justified by conservative economists, were indeed planning. They involved forethought, execution via statecraft, and a political and intellectual movement to defend them. By contrast, the mechanisms that so frustrated economic conservatives—laws, for example, requiring employees to have made it to their teenage years—were merely spontaneous reactions to an unleashed market. These measures, Polanyi argued, were defensive positions taken by an increasingly exploited society. The planned movement toward a free-market utopia provoked a countermovement to protect society against it.

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Today, “natural” explanations of urban decline come from many corners, not all of which are conservative. Some explanations simply point to the inexorability of the global economy. A disembodied, almost natural, deindustrialization sunk places like Detroit, Cleveland, and Gary. An equally disembodied globalization finished them off. The market is autonomous, sometimes natural, but certainly beyond the capacity of local government to change. Conservatives have taken this fairly common understanding of urban decline and weaponized it to facilitate organized deprivation, which has in turn produced and exacerbated urban decline. If a city has failed, conservatives argue, it is because its leaders were too incompetent or venal to properly read the signals of the larger market economy. Like their classical liberal predecessors, the purveyors of such views base their worldview on an incomplete at best, mythological at worst, set of “facts.” Conservatives have converted self-serving myths of this sort into unquestioned truths through conscious organized activism. Those truths have muddied popular and even scholarly explanations of urban decline. It wasn’t leaders attacking the market that caused Detroit’s precipitous decline. It was the withdrawal of capital and people. That withdrawal was planned and significantly facilitated by the attempted actuation of a free-market utopia for fleeing white people. This attempt involved and continues to involve institutions, organization, common purpose, and intent. Urban decline is, in short, planned.

PLANNING MODALITIES Peck and Tickell’s “Neoliberalizing Space” is a classic in the study of conservative social movements and a useful frame within which to understand the planned nature of urban decline. The authors identify two basic modalities through which

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neoliberalism has advanced. First, they argue that neoliberal forces seek to roll back Keynesian or socialistic juridical measures that were implemented during an earlier period—for example, cutting previously implemented taxes or social programs. Then (or simultaneously), they seek to roll out a series of juridical measures that might will advance neoliberal goals or make alternatives more difficult to enact—for example, imposing a constitutional limit on future property tax increases. Though the authors were primarily interested in the advance of neoliberalism, their heuristic can be usefully adapted to the planned urban decline of the broader conservative movement. As this book and other work has detailed, conservative governments have engaged in rolling back advances made during the Keynesian-managerial period in the United States. Fair housing, affirmative action, and school desegregation measures have been gutted or eliminated. Landlord and absentee property owner restrictions have been loosened. Welfare, education, medical, and social economy funding from Washington and state capitals have been cut mercilessly since the 1970s. Reliance on the private market has intensified in the wake of these rollbacks. But it is not just that Keynesian relics have been removed. It is also true that conservative laws and practices have been rolled out. These laws make it difficult for cities to choose alternative paths that might embed the market and protect citizens from its roughest edges. Some of the rollout has occurred through direct measures, such as minimum-wage limits and tax ceilings, but much of the conservative assault has been subtler, consisting of measures that either enable conservative ideas or make alternative pathways impossible in less detectable ways. Enablement of conservative futures has occurred by subtly increasing the benefits for choosing a particular pathway. Cities are offered greater state aid, for example, if they use their eminent-domain powers

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to open land for large-scale downtown investment or agree to engage in zero-tolerance policing. The flip side of subtly enabling conservative city policies is an even more influential destruction of alternative pathways resulting from increases in the opportunity costs of choosing alternatives. This too can occur both in juridical and ideational ways. Juridically, controlling the purse strings of state and federal government is the most direct method for destroying or undermining potential alternatives. Sometimes these acts are barely concealed acts of extortion, as in the case of Tennessee threatening to cut state funding to the city of Memphis if it decided to remove Confederate monuments, or the federal government threatening the same punishment unless cities eliminate their sanctuary-city statutes. Choosing an alternative to the directive handed down by the state is obviously not fully in the hands of the most-affected local governments or residents. Combined, these measures make it possible for nonresidents to visit, work in, and use the resources of the city without fully paying for them. They impose law-and-order solutions on an inner-city populace that frequently does not support them. They protect the resources of privileged nonresidents to use and profit from the city without consequence. They convert the commercial downtown into a suburban-owned enclave separated from the neighborhoods of actual residents. These measures undermine the general fund, and, above all, they make changing the system more difficult in the future. Arguably even more powerful than the legislative and judicial changes has been the ideational battle waged by conservatives. Not only have they simply changed laws that affect impoverished cities, they have also made even the public mention of alternatives “impossible,” “unrealistic,” or “naïve.” Taxation is unrealistic in this climate because it inhibits growth. Redistribution and

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regulation are a slippery slope to socialism, feudalism, or worst of all, Detroit. The public-choice school dictum that all state action can be reduced to the venality and self-interest of politicians has become an axiom for conservatives. It serves both to impugn the motives of progressive elected officials and to inoculate the conservative movement when one of its elected officials is brought down by corruption. The hard side of this worldview is communicated by Cato Institute fellows who have open hostility for the social economy, but the soft side is equally important. It is willingly communicated by moderates appealing to innovation and flexibility, while dismissing justice as a virtue-signaling unrealistic luxury. These are the ideas that undergird the conservative movement. And given that conservatives have majorities in state legislatures across the Rust Belt, conservative mythology becomes the functional reality for residents of the pathologized inner city. Rolled-out conservatism imposes a reality that is democratically illegitimate to the people it affects most directly. These measures not only advance an ideology, they also advance decline. The necessary condition for decline reversal is an infusion of capital. That will only come in geographically limited and selfinterested doses from private capital. Some form of sustained government infusion of resources is necessary to stop or reverse urban decline in the Rust Belt. But because the conservative movement has so effectively advanced the canard that programs like Model Cities and the War on Poverty were extravagant forms of socialism that caused urban decline, they have made state spending an impossible resolution for the decline. Private market governance comes with serious consequences. Development and special purpose districts, tax increment financing (TIF) zones, tax ceilings, and the like are popular with nonresident investors, but they starve the city’s general fund. Downtown development is similarly popular with outside investors, particularly when they have no

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obligation to hire local contractors or workers, but these schemes starve residents of wages and wealth. Such measures make the othered city a less desirable place to live and accelerate the flight of people and capital. When sustained over time, they do so much damage that the problem becomes almost impossible to fix.

THE FREEDOM TO DEPRIVE When the policies and actions of the conservative movement are framed in this way, they seem sinister, almost too nefarious to believe. Conservatives love to dismiss such characterizations as “conspiracy talk,” partly to obfuscate the very real organization of ideas, institutions, and political figures implicated, but also because they have constructed a centuries-old method for sanctifying such efforts. To conservatives, these actions are not interventions at all. They are merely protections against an omnipresent state seeking to take their freedom. To conservatives, the act of the state forcing citizens to submit to paying taxes or demanding that businesses not pollute the drinking water or insisting that landlords not deny an apartment unit to a black family is the real tyranny. The state is an external other controlled by a small cabal bent on denying the freedom of individuals. “Throughout history,” Barry Goldwater wrote, “government has proved to be the chief instrument for thwarting man’s liberty.” Organized collective acts with a common purpose such as white people fleeing black neighborhoods or firms driving down wages do not count as tyranny—only state actions do. Much of this seems basic and affective, serving to sanctify a simple and ugly lack of empathy toward anyone unable to fully fund their own existence. But there have been attempts to build a more theoretically sophisticated version of this rationalization as well.

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Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Freedom” is arguably the most sophisticated rationalization of this worldview ever written. The essay was adapted from a lecture he gave at Oxford in 1958. In it, the famous anti-Marxist philosopher explains two types of freedom—negative and positive. To Berlin, “You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by human beings.” The goal of a truly free society is to preserve for individuals an area of noninterference from the state. This is “negative liberty.” It can be thought of as the freedom from intervention from governmental action. Berlin contrasts this with “positive liberty,” which is simply the ability to act collectively or individually according to one’s own worldview via statecraft. Positive freedom is the freedom to impose your group’s worldview on another. He wrote this during the 1950s to contrast true freedom from what he saw as an erosion of negative liberty in the various social movements of the day. Berlin argued that the anticolonial movements in Africa and the civil rights movement in the United States were simply efforts to exert the wishes of one group upon another (positive freedom). Conservatives, then as now, have used Berlin’s basic framework to justify opposition to even the most popular progressive legislation. Ayn Rand once applied this selective reasoning to the Civil Rights Act: That absurdly evil policy is destroying the moral base of the Negroes’ fight . . . The “civil rights” bill, now under consideration in Congress, is another gross infringement of individual rights. . . . It has no right to violate the right of private property by forbidding discrimination in privately owned establishments. . . . If that “civil rights” bill is passed, it will be the worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history in that respect. It is an ironic demonstration of the philosophical insanity and the

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consequently suicidal trend of our age, that the men who need the protection of individual rights most urgently—the Negroes—are now in the vanguard of the destruction of these rights.

The goal, as Berlin, Goldwater, Rand, and others insist, should not be to replace the tyranny of one group with the tyranny of another (positive liberty). It should be to preserve a space of noninterference for every individual in society. This basic distinction has served to sanctify the motives and actions of conservatives for centuries. To conservatives, only measures like fair housing, taxation, and government-provided medical care are planned intrusions on freedom. Within this narrative, conservatives are heroes seeking to remove the yoke of government tyranny—a tyranny that forces citizens to pay for things they do not approve of and businesses to serve people they do not want to serve. Conservatives seek to preserve the freedom from taxation and oversight. Only progressives seek to impose their agenda on the rest of us. Conservatives are the champions of the only pure form of freedom: negative liberty. There are, of course, skeptics of this logic. Among other critiques, skeptics argue that this worldview relies on a willful blindness to how state and nonstate actions of the majority affect various minority groups. Conservatives are eager to reduce the debate to a conversation about freedom from or freedom to, but have been almost entirely unwilling to consider, in good faith, the question of freedom for whom. Conservative economists and philosophers have long been disinterested in this question. Berlin muses briefly about the ways that the actions of one group—say, the capitalist class—can interfere with the autonomy of another (laborers), but ultimately dismisses this concern as secondary. And in doing so, he fits nicely within the larger conservative tradition of willful blindness toward collective

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acts of one group that interfere with others’ negative liberty. This allows the freedom-seeking conservative to righteously blind himself to the ways that his actions interfere with others. The freedom to avoid the taxes of the central city undermines the general fund of that city, which must continue to service freeloading suburbanites. The freedom to pollute and to pay minimal wages are obvious incursions on the realities of people whom conservatives simply do not recognize. The freedom for white families to move at the first sign of a black family undermines the ability of remaining residents to live in an integrated neighborhood. The act of moving away is organized by a common purpose and assisted by the state and realtors. It is as planned as any state action, but it is not recognized by conservatives because there is no actual law forcing white people to move from black neighborhoods. The narrative of negative freedom is thus hollow in at least two ways. First, freedom from a tyrannical government is a concept that only works if you do not recognize citizens who are harmed by the formal and informal actions of the majority. The freedom of those affected by conservative policies and actions does not matter as long as the negative freedom of those who believe their tax dollars are being stolen from them is honored. Second, while conservatives have long positioned revolutionary and progressive movements as representing impure (positive) freedom, it is undoubtedly true that conservative freedom is more like Berlin’s conception of positive, rather than negative, freedom. It is majority rule to move at the first sign of a black family. It is majority rule to create an incarceration system that ruins many black lives based on the conceptions of frightened white suburbanites. No matter how much conservatives want to sanctify their motives and movement, theirs is the simple absolutism of majority rule that Berlin and others claim to revile.

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UNPLANNING DECLINE Urban decline was planned, but can it be unplanned? How might we think about the various defensive measures enacted by cities to counteract decline, or more ambitiously about a movement that might build something more humane? To the extent that there is any dialogue about this question, it tends to revolve around small-scale techniques that distressed cities can deploy to make life a little better for residents. Techniques like improving the appearance of vacant lots, employing locals for greenspace maintenance, and using green infrastructure to alleviate the strain on aging sewer systems are all being actively discussed at this moment. Considerable technical and social expertise are necessary to implement such ideas, so this conversation has spanned several academic fields and involved many practitioners. And to be sure, these initiatives can improve the lives of those involved. Few would argue that the owner of a house next to a formerly overgrown vacant lot has not benefited from a tended orchard being built in its place. Similarly, it would be churlish to suggest that the unemployed former felon who found work with a nonprofit to maintain that orchard is not in a better position because of such initiatives. But it is also surely just as true to note that such initiatives are not at the “scale of the problem,” to use the language of the Kerner Report. They are often funded with foundation grant money, assisted by volunteer labor, small in scale, and temporary by design. They occur in spite of, rather than because of, the current deprivationist political economy. They cannot grow to the scale of the task unless wider change occurs. But what would it take for such change to occur? This is, of course, a mind-bendingly complex question. There is no detailed road map for such a transition, but there are aspirational goals that can, ironically, be

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derived and adapted from the political success and durability of the conservative movement. The conservative movement is now virtually hegemonic, but it only achieved that through conscious, planned political organizing. It provoked and sustained a systemic change away from Keynesian managerialism and in so doing cast a policy frame for declining and nondeclining cities alike. But how did such change occur? Blyth centers the probability of systemic change—à la the great transformation—on three conditions: a crisis, a sufficiently developed alternative, and an institutional framework for legally and ideationally changing the previous order. Crisis is perhaps the easiest precondition to apply to the context of urban decline. It is difficult to see much of Detroit, for example, as anything other than a slow-motion crisis, but it takes empirical work to explain it. Part of remedying the situation is simply making the effort to do so, but the rest is much more difficult. Fox News is never going to allow a critique of, say, an American Enterprise Institute worldview on one of its shows, but there are other ways the crisis of decline can be brought to a wider audience in a sympathetic way. Matthew Desmond’s Evicted is a recent example. In it, the best-selling sociologist chronicles the challenges of marginalized Milwaukee families trying to eke out an existence. Awareness of such stories is not sufficient to change the policy paradigm, but it is a necessary condition for change to occur. Crisis is already underway for poor, non-white residents of Milwaukee, Detroit, and Cleveland. There is an audience for this message. The challenge is effectively advertising and explaining that crisis. The second necessary condition for systemic change, according to Blyth, is a sufficiently developed alternative. Blyth points out how relatively minor Swedish economists toiled in obscurity at universities during the 1920s advocating an expanded role for government in the economy but were largely ignored until crisis

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occurred. Once the crises of the 1930s began to unfold, and sympathetic politicians were elected, the ideas of this once-obscure group were positioned to form a framework for policy making. Sweden now has one of the most robust social economies in the world. Other lessons can be learned by studying the American Right. It is sometimes easy to forget that while Friedman and Hayek are now essential reading for mainstream economists and elected Republicans, this was not always the case. The leading historian of liberal philosophy rightly deemed both thinkers part of the lunatic fringe as recently as the 1960s. Friedman himself understood the importance of developing an idea even if no policy maker immediately adopted it. Once a sufficiently severe crisis hit, then those ideas, he argued, would gain value and potential as actual policy solutions. Critical scholarship should not be defined by how quickly it topples the current hegemon; that is an absurd standard. Its immediate efficacy should not be its source of value. Its eventual basis as an alternative should. Third, Blyth points to the importance of institutions and institutional pathways for implementing and sustaining an alternative policy idea. Institutions include idea-making machines like think tanks and media networks but also the juridical authority to convert ideas into policy form. This third element is, of course, the most daunting and challenging element of any potential transformation. It is relatively easy to critique a hegemonic idea and even to discuss alternatives. It is much more challenging to build  a set of institutions that could counter conservative solutions and a greater challenge still to implement an alternative. It would take a sustained investment of time and resources to build institutions as influential as the Right currently has and to capture even part of the state it has currently captured. But it should be remembered that the Right was not always this politically powerful. It has been almost fifty years since the Powell Memorandum

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was written. When it was penned, right-wing think tanks were relatively obscure—now they are central to policy making. The bare skeleton for such a network on the Left exists in the form of institutions like the Service Employees International Union, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, among many others. These networks will never have the financial power of organizations like Cato and Heritage, but they could conceivably enjoy the cohesion from which institutions of the Right benefit. Finally, something Polanyi had very little to say about, but which is as important as any other element of unplanning decline: race. Any transformation must account for social differentiation— particularly, but not exclusively, race. Most questions of urban decline pivot on the labor economy: bring back jobs and prosperity will follow. This is clearly insufficient in the context of Rust Belt urban distress. There must be some recognition that other forms of social division affect the flow of people and capital to and from places. These are not add-on ideas, they are central. Nonwhite people in the United States were effectively excluded from the shift toward Keynesian social democracy in the 1930s. To the extent that a partial transformation emerged during the civil rights movement, it was limited in scope and was followed by five decades of angry conservative reaction. White reaction has as much to do with urban decline as deindustrialization. Racial animus is necessarily part of any tenable theory of decline. Progressive idea development cannot be blind to the legacy and ongoing impacts of racial animus. Not all forms of inequality gravitate back to a strict Marxian understanding of class. The story of the conservative movement also offers tactical insights that could be adopted by a progressive alternative. Above all, the focus of critical activism, scholarship, and journalism should center on two mutually reinforcing tactics: undermining

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the hegemon and developing an alternative. One tactic that the Right frequently deploys is the refutation of obvious patterns and facts to support their causes—myth-building. A progressive alternative could deploy a similar tactic but simply center it on myth-busting. It is impossible, for example, to advance an alternative set of policies for declining cities without first challenging the assumptions undergirding organized deprivation. The United States is not an overtaxed, overregulated society. Early black mayors were not socialist Trojan horses. The actions of dominant groups do not have to be written into law to be pernicious or damaging to the negative freedom of another group. White flight hurts black equity, schools, and cities—it is as real as any law. These assumptions are held by too few. Many critical scholars dismiss such battles as beneath them, while officials from groups like the Heritage Foundation continue to dominate the popular airspace with their self-interested mythology. A second tactical aspiration has to be the Right’s level of cohesion. The Right is composed of as many fragments as the Left, yet it is able to paper over those differences and unify around a common purpose much more effectively than any progressive force. Recent efforts on the Left have attempted to find common purpose. For example, progressive academics joined forces in an attempt to derive common purpose during the Occupy Wall Street uprisings. But the presence of such scholars was ultimately awkward. There was no common purpose to be found, and the attempt by academics taking the Acela train from New Haven and Princeton to theorize one seemed ham-fisted and churlish. The Right may be fragmented, but many conservatives, regardless of their prioritized issues, are drawn to the imagined obedience and hierarchy of a previous era. The Left does not share this same basic sensibility for the most part, so while it may be far-fetched to find a common purpose, it would be less

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so to find a common enemy. The Right has made great strides in bridging their divides. I see no reason why the violence of a racist, disembedded market that benefits only a small segment of the population cannot be similarly positioned as a common enemy. Part of this could be achieved with a healthier relationship between the Left intelligentsia and the grassroots. Much of the Left has been consumed with the ultimately internecine tension between top-down and grassroots approaches to social change. Dating at least to Marx but animated by subsequent developments, the notion is that top-down ideas developed by academics, leaders, or activists are illegitimate at best and dangerous at worst. Truly progressive ideas must emerge organically, and solely, from the marginalized, according to this reasoning. In response to this concern, a great deal of effort within activist circles has revolved around a passive approach to facilitating the ideas of those who are affected and to carefully avoiding idea construction that might appear to be imposed from above. But as Susan Fainstein, among others, has pointed out, this pathway toward justice is highly problematic. There is no utopia and critical scholars should not try to craft one, but hope is important. Big ideas that help people are not automatically top-down and unjust. Grassroots participation does not automatically equal progressive justice. The myth that progressive idea development automatically constitutes a top-down, unjust imposition has functioned more to disable progressive politics than to advance grassroots democracy. The Left needs an intelligentsia too. Idea development and dissemination are not sufficient conditions for unplanning decline, but they are certainly necessary. To be sure, the challenge is formidable. The forces of organized deprivation are powerful and entrenched. The trope of the “pathological inner city” has been used to advance tax decreases, deregulation, and white supremacy that represent considerable

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material and psychic value to their beneficiaries. No clever quip on Twitter, online petition, or short-term activist campaign will reverse that fact or allow an easy adoption of a more progressive policy frame. Any proposition for a different system must be sober to be realistic. But by the same token, the forces of organized deprivation were politically constructed—there is nothing natural or inevitable about them. Urban decline was planned, but it is also surely just as true that it can be unplanned through conscious, careful, and sustained organization. The resolution is political not technical.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: ORGANIZED DEPRIVATION IN THE AMERICAN RUST BELT 1. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (NACCD), The Kerner Report (1968; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 2. NACCD, The Kerner Report, 207. 3. NACCD, The Kerner Report, 2. 4. Julian Zelizer, “Introduction to 2016 Edition,” in The Kerner Report. 5. Richard Nixon, “Remarks on the NBC Radio Network: ‘A Commitment to Order,’ ” March 7, 1968, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents /remarks-the-nbc-radio-network-commitment-order. 6. Jason Riley,“50 Years of Blaming Everything on Racism,”Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/50-years-of-blaming -everything-on-racism-1520381047. 7. Neil Smith argues that the punitive bent in American urban policy can be usefully compared with the activities of the “revanchists” in late nineteenth-century France. Revanchism was a reactionary movement built around constructing policy that would punish those responsible for the short-lived Paris Commune. See Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996). 8. Lucas Owen Kirkpatrick, “Urban Triage, City Systems, and the Remnants of Community: Some ‘Sticky’ Complications in the Greening of Detroit,” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 2 (2015): 261–278. 9. Nancy Kleniewski, “Triage and Urban Planning: A Case Study of Philadelphia,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 10

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10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

(1986): 563–579; Peter Marcuse, Peter Medoff, and Andrea Pereira, “Triage as Urban Policy,” Social Policy (Winter 1982): 33–37. Patrick Cooper-McCann, “The Trap of Triage: Lessons from the ‘Team Four Plan,’ ” Journal of Planning History 15, no. 2 (2016): 149–169. Roger Starr, “Making New York Smaller,” New York Times Magazine, November 14, 1976, 32–33, 99–106. Rogers Worthington, “What to Do with Vacant City Lots? ‘Mothball’ Them, City Official Says,” Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1993, https://www .chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1993-05-05-9305050086-story.html. In a mid-1990s interview (twenty years after his infamous proposal and well after his retirement), Roger Starr noted that he was still getting angry phone calls from residents calling him racist and genocidal for his planned shrinkage work. See Witold Rybczynski, “Downsizing Cities,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1995, https://www.theatlantic.com /magazine/archive/1995/10/downsizing-cities/308395/. I use quotation marks here to emphasize that there is no uniform definition of “blight.” Its meaning has changed over time, but its association with race, particularly the presence of black people, has been relatively consistent. See Swati Prakash, “Racial Dimensions of Property Value Protection Under the Fair Housing Act,” California Law Review 101 (2013): 1437–1498; Vacant Property Research Network, Charting the Multiple Meanings of Blight: A National Literature Review on Addressing the Community Impacts of Blighted Properties (Washington, DC: Virginia Tech University, 2015), http://vacantpropertyresearch.com /blight-literature-review/. Emily Talen, “Housing Demolition During Urban Renewal,” City and Community 13, (2014): 233–253. Deborah Wallace and Rodrick Wallace, “Consequences of Massive Housing Destruction: The New York City Fire Epidemic,” Building Research and Information 39 (2011): 395–411. John T. Metzger, “Planned Abandonment: The Neighborhood LifeCycle Theory and National Urban Policy,” Housing Policy Debate 11, no. 1 (2000): 7–40. Joshua Akers, “Making Markets: Think Tank Legislation and Private Property in Detroit,” Urban Geography 34, no. 8 (2013): 1070–1095; Joshua Akers and Eric Seymour, “Instrumental Exploitation: Predatory Property Relations at City’s End,” Geoforum 91 (2018): 127–140.

Introduction 4 233 19. Jeff Crump, Kathe Newman, Erik Belsky, Phil Ashton, David Kaplan, Daniel Hammel, and Elvin Wyly, “Cities Destroyed (Again) for Cash: Forum on the U.S. Foreclosure Crisis,” Urban Geography 29, no. 8 (2008): 745–784. 20. Harvey Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 2 (1976): 309–332; Clarence Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1989). 21. This tends to be the case in part because localities control land use more than any other policy realm, and certain business actors (land owners) have much to gain by manipulating local elected leadership. 22. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); Fred Block and Margaret Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi’s Critique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Timothy Weaver, Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United Kingdom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 23. Block and Somers, The Power of Market Fundamentalism. 24. David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation of Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler B 71 (1989): 3–17. It should be noted that Harvey is using the term “managerial” differently than many public-administration scholars do; see, for example, Richard Kearney and Steven Hayes, “Reinventing Government, the New Public Management, and Civil Service Systems in International Perspective,” Review of Public Personnel Administration 18, no. 4 (1998): 38–54. Public-policy scholars refer to the managerial approach and the “new public management” as based on the argument that public bureaucrats should have the autonomy to make decisions like private executives. Harvey uses the term to describe the local state that is a steward and arbiter for the market. 25. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944). 26. Hackworth, Neoliberal City. 27. Polanyi, The Great Transformation. 28. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism; Hackworth, Neoliberal City.

234 4 Introduction 29. Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 30. Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Jason Stahl, Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 31. Stahl, Right Moves. 32. Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016). 33. Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 34. Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1992); Randolph Hohle, “The Color of Neoliberalism: The ‘Modern Southern Businessman’ and Postwar Alabama’s Challenge to Racial Desegregation,” Sociological Forum 27, no. 1 (2012): 142–162; Randolph Hohle, Race and the Origins of American Neoliberalism (London: Routledge, 2015). 35. See, for example, Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 36. Heather Hall, “Slow Growth and Decline in Greater Sudbury: Challenges, Opportunities, and Foundations for a New Planning Agenda,” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 18, no. 1 (2009): 1–26; Christopher Leo and Kathryn Anderson, “Being Realistic About Urban Growth,” Journal of Urban Affairs 28, no. 2 (2006): 169–189; Henry Mayer and Michael Greenberg, “Coming Back from Economic Despair: Case Studies of Small- and Medium-Sized American Cities,” Economic Development Quarterly 15, no. 3 (2001): 203–216. 37. Robert Beauregard, “Urban Population Loss in Historical Perspective: United States, 1820–2000,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 41, no. 3 (2009): 514–528. 38. Robert Sampson, “Disparity and Diversity in the Contemporary City: Social (Dis)order Revisited,” British Journal of Sociology 60, no. 1 (2009): 1–31.

Introduction 4 235 39. Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush, “Seeing Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of ‘Broken Windows,’ ” Social Psychology Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2004): 319–342. 40. Courtney Bonam, Hilary Bergsieker, and Jennifer Eberhardt, “Polluting Black Space,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 145, no. 11 (2016): 1561–1582. 41. Sampson and Raudenbush, “Seeing Disorder”; Sampson, “Disparity and Diversity.” 42. Herbert Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Pacific Sociological Review 1 (1958): 3–7. 43. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 44. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid. 45. Lawrence Bobo, “Whites’ Opposition to Busing: Symbolic Racism or Realistic Group Conflict?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45 (1983): 1196–1210; Hana Brown, “Racialized Conflict and Policy Spillover Effects: The Role of Race in the Contemporary U.S. Welfare State,” American Journal of Sociology 119, no. 2 (2013): 394–443; David Eitle and John Taylor, “Are Hispanics the New ‘Threat’? Minority Group Threat and Fear of Crime in Miami-Dade County,” Social Science Research 37, (2008): 1102–1115. 46. Lawrence Bobo, James Kluegel, and Ryan Smith, “Laissez-Faire Racism: The Crystallization of a Kinder, Gentler, Antiblack Ideology,” in Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change, ed. Steven Tuch and Jack Martin (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 15–42; Lawrence Bobo and Ryan Smith, “From Jim Crow Racism to Laissez-Faire Racism: The Transformation of Racial Attitudes,” in Beyond Pluralism: The Conception of Groups and Group Identities in America, ed. Wendy Freedman Katkin, Ned Landsman, and Andrea Tyree (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 182–220. 47. Bobo, Kluegel, and Smith “Laissez-Faire Racism,” 16. 48. It should be noted that notions of biological inferiority never completely died. The popularity of Charles Murray’s noxious book The Bell Curve in conservative circles suggests that the idea is not even that marginal. 49. Bobo and Smith, “From Jim Crow Racism,” 186.

236 4 Introduction 50. Adam White, “Who Receives Food Assistance in Ohio? Implications for Work Requirements for SNAP Enrollment across Racial, Ethnic, and Geographic Divisions,” Center for Community Solutions, October 8, 2018, https://www.communitysolutions.com/research/receives-food -assistance-ohio-implications-work-requirements-snap-enrollment -across-racial-ethnic-geographic-divisions/. 51. Elizabeth Hinton, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, and Vesla M. Weaver, “Did Blacks Really Endorse the 1994 Crime Bill?” New York Times, April 13, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/opinion/did-blacks -really-endorse-the-1994-crime-bill.html. 52. Jason Hackworth, Faith Based: Religious Neoliberalism and the Politics of Welfare in the United States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 53. Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York: Guilford, 1995). 54. Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 4. 55. Ian Haney-Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 56. Haney-Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics. 57. Joseph Schilling and Alan Mallach, Cities in Transition: A Guide for Practicing Planners (New York: Routledge, 2012). 58. Brent Ryan, Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 59. It is also true, as table 0.1 illustrates, that population stagnation is associated with the difficulties of annexing suburban areas. Columbus, Indianapolis, and Louisville, for example, have all experienced population spikes that are nearly completely attributable to the expansion of their municipal boundaries since 1950.

1. RACIAL THREAT AND URBAN DECLINE 1. For a more complete review of these explanations, see Jason Hackworth, “Race and the Production of Extreme Land Abandonment in the American Rust Belt,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 42 no. 1 (2018): 51–73.

1. Racial Threat and Urban Decline 4 237 2. Henry Mayer and Michael Greenberg, “Coming Back from Economic Despair: Case Studies of Small- and Medium-Sized American Cities,” Economic Development Quarterly 15, no. 3 (2001): 203–216; Sean Safford, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rust Belt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); George Hobor, “Surviving the Era of Deindustrialization: The New Economic Geography of the Urban Rust Belt,” Journal of Urban Affairs 35, no. 4 (2013): 417–434; Margaret Cowell, Dealing with Deindustrialization: Adaptive Resilience in American Midwestern Regions (London: Routledge, 2015). 3. Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, and Happier (New York: Penguin Press, 2011); Dean Stansel, “Why Some Cities Are Growing and Others Shrinking,” Cato Journal 31 (2011): 285–303. 4. G. E. Breger, “The Concept and Causes of Urban Blight,” Land Economics 43, no. 4 (1967): 369–376; Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, “Urban Decline and Durable Housing,” Journal of Political Economy 113, no. 2 (2005): 345–375; George Galster, Driving Detroit: The Quest for Respect in the Motor City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 5. David Harvey, “The Urban Process Under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2, nos. 1–3 (1978): 101–131; Neil Smith, “Gentrification and Uneven Development,” Economic Geography 58, no. 2 (1982): 139–155. 6. Kristin Perkins and Robert Sampson, “Compounded Deprivation in the Transition to Adulthood: The Intersection of Racial and Economic Inequality Among Chicagoans, 1995–2013,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 1, no. 1 (2015): 35–54. It should be noted that Perkins and Sampson are using this term somewhat differently than I use it in this book, but the logic is similar. They are interested in the neighborhood features that combine to reproduce poverty for residents, and not all of their variables are explicitly related to race. 7. The Geolytics Neighborhood Change Database was used for its normalized tract boundaries. 8. Hackworth, “Race and the Production of Extreme Land Abandonment”; Christopher Prener, Taylor Braswell, and Daniel Monti, “St. Louis’ ‘Urban Prairie’: Vacant Land and the Potential for Revitalization,” Journal of Urban Affairs (2018).

238 4 1. Racial Threat and Urban Decline 9. Extreme housing loss neighborhoods are census tracts that have lost more than 50 percent of their housing units between 1970 and 2010. For more elaboration on this concept, see Hackworth, “Race and the Production.” 10. Jason Hackworth, “Why There Is No Detroit in Canada,” Urban Geography 37, no. 2 (2016): 272–295. 11. Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Halifax, NS: Fernwood Press, 2017). 12. Racially restrictive covenants were challenged in the gated community of Beach O’Pines, Ontario, in this Supreme Court case. The covenant read as follows: “The ownership of no lot on plan 269 and no part of the low-water beach aforesaid shall be transferred by sale, inheritance, gift or otherwise, nor rented, licensed to our occupied by any person wholly or partly of negro, Asiatic, coloured or Semitic blood, nor to any person less than four generations removed from that part of Europe lying south of latitude 55 degrees and east of longitude 15 degrees east.” Canada’s Human Rights History Online Encyclopedia, “Restrictive Covenants,” accessed March 20, 2019, https://historyofrights.ca/encyclopaedia/main -events/restrictive-covenants/. 13. According to Statistics Canada, there are eight partial exceptions to this statement insofar as their populations are composed of more than 50 percent visible minorities when all groups are aggregated. But in no case was a single group a majority, and in only one case (Richmond, BC) does a single group constitute more than 40 percent. Moreover, the most sizeable group is “East Asian,” within which there are significant national origin differences. Additionally, all of the Ontarian cities (Brampton, Markham, Mississauga, Richmond Hill) in this category are relatively prosperous suburbs, so their residents are not coming to Canada as marginalized in terms of economic class. 14. David Harris, “ ‘Property Values Drop When Blacks Move in, Because . . .’: Racial and Socioeconomic Determinants of Neighborhood Desirability,” American Sociological Review 64 (1999): 461–479; Ingrid Gould Ellen, Sharing America’s Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); David Harris, “Why Are Whites and Blacks Averse to Black Neighbors?” Social Science Research 30 (2001): 100–116.

1. Racial Threat and Urban Decline 4 239 15. Stephen Elkin, City and Regime in the American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Clarence Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1989). 16. Neil Kraus and Todd Swanstrom, “Minority Mayors and the HollowPrize Problem,” PS: Political Science and Politics 34, no. 1 (2001): 103; see also Robert Caitlin, Racial Politics and Urban Planning: Gary, Indiana 1980–1989 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1993). 17. Gary Becker, The Economics of Discrimination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971 [1957]); Ayn Rand, “Racism,” The Objectivist Newsletter 2, no. 9 (1963): 33–36. 18. Glaeser, Triumph of the City. 19. Glaeser, Triumph of the City. 20. Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer, “The Curley Effect: The Economics of Shaping the Electorate,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 21 (2005): 2. 21. George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1982, http://www .theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/. 22. Stansel, “Why Some Cities Are Growing.” 23. Glaeser, Triumph of the City. 24. As one gauge of its popular importance, Google the phrase “Detroit and decline” and note the frequency of racist memes and images from anonymous conservative activists. 25. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Norton, 2017). 26. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 27. Arnold Hirsch, The Making of the Second Ghetto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Carol Anderson, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). 28. Rashad Shabazz, Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). 29. Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Press, 2009).

240 4 1. Racial Threat and Urban Decline 30. Restrictive covenants were outlawed in the Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer 334 U.S. 1 (1948) under the Equal Protection Clause. 31. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid. 32. The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act requires banks to record and report the ethnoracial characteristics of mortgage applicants so that regulators and researchers can assess bias. The Community Reinvestment Act requires banks to issue a certain (constantly negotiated) percentage of their loan portfolios to “underserved” (i.e., redlined) markets. 33. Calvin Bradford, “Financing Home Ownership: The Federal Role in Neighborhood Decline,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 14, no. 3 (1979): 313–335; John T. Metzger, “Planned Abandonment: The Neighborhood Life-Cycle Theory and National Urban Policy,” Housing Policy Debate 11, no. 1 (2000): 7–40; Maria Krysan and Kyle Crowder, Cycle of Segregation: Social Processes and Residential Stratification (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017); Richard Sadler and Don Lafreniere, “Racist Housing Practices as a Precursor to Uneven Neighborhood Change in a Post-industrial City” Housing Studies 37, no. 2 (2017): 186–208. 34. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” Atlantic Monthly, June 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for -reparations/361631/. 35. See, among many others, Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Andrew Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 36. Before the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, only 2 percent of government-discounted (FHA) mortgages went to nonwhite people. See Krysan and Crowder, Cycle of Segregation. 37. John Logan, Brian Stults, and Reynolds Farley, “Segregation of Minorities in the Metropolis: Two Decades of Change,” Demography 41, no. 1 (2004): 1–22. 38. Jason Hackworth, “Demolition as Urban Policy in the American Rust Belt,” Environment and Planning A 48, no. 11 (2016): 2201–2222.

1. Racial Threat and Urban Decline 4 241 39. Ellen, Sharing America’s Neighborhoods; Harris, “Why Are Whites And Blacks Averse.” 40. Samuel Kye, “The persistence of white flight in middle-class suburbia,” Social Science Research 72 (2018): 38–52. 41. See the following for other effective refutations of the racial proxy thesis: Maria Krysan, Reynolds Farley, and Mick Couper, “In the Eye of the Beholder: Racial Beliefs and Residential Segregation,” Du Bois Review 5, no. 1 (2008): 5–26; Maria Krysan, Mick Couper, Reynolds Farley, and Tyrone Forman, “Does Race Matter in Neighborhood Preferences? Results from a Video Experiment,” American Journal of Sociology 115, no. 2 (2009): 527–559; Sapna Swaroop and Maria Krysan, “The Determinants of Neighborhood Satisfaction: Racial Proxy Revisited,” Demography 48 (2011): 1203–1229. 42. Jackelyn Hwang and Robert Sampson, “Divergent Pathways of Gentrification: Racial Inequality and the Social Order of Renewal in Chicago Neighborhoods,” American Sociological Review 79, no. 4 (2014): 726–751. 43. Hackworth, “Race and the Production.” 44. Richard Rothstein, The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of its Troubles (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, October 15, 2014), http://www.epi.org/publication/making-ferguson/epi-toc-2; Spanish Lake, directed by Phillip Morton (Amberdale Productions, 2014). 45. Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Crown Publishers, 2016). 46. Desmond, Evicted, 322. 47. Adolph Reed, “The Black Urban Regime: Structural Origins and Constraints,” in Comparative Urban and Community Research: An Annual Review, ed. Michael Peter Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988), 138–189; Kraus and Swanstrom, “Minority Mayors.” 48. Paul Friesema, “Black Control of the Central City: The Hollow Prize,” American Institute of Planners Journal 35, March (1969): 75–79; Chris Hayes, Colony in a Nation (New York: Norton, 2017). 49. Reed, “The Black Urban Regime.” 50. For example, Glaeser, Triumph of the City. 51. Friesema, “Black Control,” 78. 52. Margaret Weir, “Poverty, Social Rights, and the Politics of Place in the United States,” in European Social Policy: Between Fragmentation and

242 4 1. Racial Threat and Urban Decline

53.

54. 55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

60. 61.

62.

Integration, ed. Stephan Leibfreid and Paul Pierson (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995), 329–354. Dana Kornberg, “The Structural Origins of Territorial Stigma: Water and Racial Politics in Metropolitan Detroit, 1950s–2010s,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40, no. 2 (2016): 263–283. Friesema, “Black Control,” 77. Elvin Wyly, Mona Atia, Holly Foxcroft, Daniel Hammel, and Kelly Phillips-Watts, “American Home: Predatory Mortgage Capital and Spaces of Race and Class Exploitation in the United States,” Geografiska Annaler B 88, no. 1 (2006): 105–132. Hilary Botein, “From Redlining to Subprime Lending: How Neighborhood Narratives Mask Financial Distress in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn,” Housing Policy Debate 23, no. 4 (2013): 714–737. It was revealed that Wells Fargo employees used this language in Mayor and City Council of Baltimore (MCCB) v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. and Wells Fargo Financial Leasing, Inc., No. 1:08-cv-00062, 2010, U.S. District Court, District of Maryland, Baltimore Division. Michael Porter, “The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City,” Harvard Business Review (May-June, 1995), https://hbr.org/1995/05/the -competitive-advantage-of-the-inner-city. The article remains influential. As of this writing, Google Scholar records 1,420 citations of the English-language version of this article alone. Susan Fainstein and Mia Gray, “Economic Development Strategies for the Inner City: The Need for Governmental Intervention,” Review of Black Political Economy 24, no. 2 (1996): 29–38. Stone, Regime Politics. In order, these comments were quoted in: Robert Whelan, Alma Young, and Mickey Lauria, “Urban Regimes and Racial Politics in New Orleans,” Journal of Urban Affairs 16, no. 1 (1994): 7; Kornberg, “The Structural Origins,” 273; and Reginald Stuart, “The New Black Power of Coleman Young,” New York Times, December 16, 1979, 4. For an example of the tendency to blame city hall, see Bryan Jones and Lynn Bachelor, The Sustaining Hand: Community Leadership and Corporate Power, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993). For a study of the hostility that black city halls faced, see Reed, “The Black Urban Regime.”

1. Racial Threat and Urban Decline 4 243 63. Michael Sances and Hye You, “Who Pays for Government? Descriptive Representation and Exploitative Revenue Sources,” Journal of Politics 79, no. 3 (2017): 1090–1094. 64. Rothstein, The Making of Ferguson; Hayes, Colony in a Nation. 65. Loic Wacquant, “Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality,” Thesis Eleven 91 (November 2007): 66–77; Loic Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity, 2008); James Rhodes, “Stigmatization, Space, and Boundaries in De-industrial Burnley,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35, no. 4 (2012): 684–703. 66. Elijah Anderson, “The White Space,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (2015): 13. 67. Kelling and Wilson, “Broken Windows”; Hayes, Colony in a Nation; Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 68. It should be noted that despite convergence around “law and order” policies by both parties, Republican-appointed judges are statistically more likely (than those appointed by Democratic officials) to convict and assign more punitive sentences to black defendants than white ones for the same crimes. See Max Schanzenbach and Emerson Tiller, “Reviewing the Sentencing Guidelines: Judicial Politics, Empirical Evidence, and Reform,” University of Chicago Law Review 75, no. 2 (2008): 715–760; Alma Cohen and Crystal Yang, “Judicial Politics and Sentencing Decisions,” NBER Working Paper Series no. 24615 (2018). 69. Peter Wagner and Alison Walsh, “States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2016,” Prison Policy Initiative, June 16, 2016, https://www.prison policy.org/global/2016.html. 70. Leah Sakala, “Breaking Down Mass Incarceration in the 2010 Census: State-by-State Incarceration Rates by Race/Ethnicity,” Prison Policy Initiative, May 28, 2014, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/rates. html. Black men are even more overrepresented in the carceral system. The African American male incarceration rate is 4,347 per 100,000. See Lauren Glaze, “Correctional Populations in the United States, 2010,” U.S. Department of Justice Bulletin, December 15, 2011, https://www.bjs .gov/index.cfm?iid=2237&ty=pbdetail.

244 4 1. Racial Threat and Urban Decline 71. United States Sentencing Commission, Report on the Continuing Impact of United States v. Booker on Federal Sentencing, 2012; Joshua Fischman and Max Schanzenbach, “Racial Disparities Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines: The Role of Judicial discretion and Mandatory Minimums,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 9 (2012): 729–764; Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper, The War on Neighborhoods: Policing, Prison, and Punishment in a Divided City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018). 72. Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 97, no. 3 (2010): 703–734. 73. Heather Ann Thompson, “How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America,” Atlantic Monthly, October 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com /national/archive/2013/10/how-prisons-change-the-balance-of-power -in-america/280341/. 74. STRESS is an acronym for “Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets.” See Mark Binelli, “The Fire Last Time,” New Republic, April 6, 2017, https:// newrepublic.com/article/141701/fire-last-time-detroit-stress-police -squad-terrorized-black-community. 75. Anderson, White Rage, also notes that the spike in cocaine trafficking was largely fueled by right-wing Central American criminal gangs, like the Contras, who were seeking a way to fund their military activities. Reagan’s CIA actively helped them develop markets for cocaine in the United States by suppressing local and DEA efforts to pursue traffickers. 76. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid. 77. Margery Turner, Stephen Ross, George Galster, and John Yinger, Discrimination in Metropolitan Housing Markets: National Results from Phase 1 HDS 2000 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2002). 78. Devah Pager and Hana Shepherd, “The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets,” Annual Review of Sociology 34 (2008): 188. 79. Alicia Munnel, Geoffrey Tootell, Lynn Browne, and James McEneaney, “Mortgage Lending in Boston: Interpreting HMDA Data,” American Economic Review 86, no. 1 (1996): 25–53; Pager and Shepherd, “The Sociology of Discrimination.”

2. Urban Decline as Conservative Bonding Capital 4 245 80. Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, “Compounding Inequalities: How Racial Stereotypes and Discrimination Accumulate Across Stages of Housing Exchange,” American Sociological Review 83, no. 4 (2018): 627–656. 81. Pager and Shepherd, “The Sociology of Discrimination.” 82. Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” American Economic Review 94, no. 4 (2004): 991–1013. 83. Devah Pager, Bart Bonikowski, and Bruce Western, “Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment,” American Sociological Review 74, no. 5 (2009): 777–799; Devah Pager and Lincoln Quillian, “Walking the Talk? What Employers Say Versus What They Do,” American Sociological Review 70, no. 3 (2005): 355–380. 84. A tester is a person hired to perform the audit study. Devah Pager, “The mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology 108, no. 5 (2003): 937–975.

2. URBAN DECLINE AS CONSERVATIVE BONDING CAPITAL 1. The Overton window refers to the zone of policy acceptability for a given issue. It is aptly named after Joseph Overton, head of the conservative think tank the Mackinac Institute. He and others in the conservative think tank world have successfully pulled the Overton window to the right for the past fifty years. 2. Harry Girvetz, The Evolution of Liberalism (New York: Collier, 1963); Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). 3. Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Random House, 2007); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jason Stahl, Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 4. Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007 [1960]). 5. Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative, 61.

246 4 2. Urban Decline as Conservative Bonding Capital 6. Within the social capital literature, there are at least two types of “capital”: (1) bonding capital, which seeks to build linkages within a selfdefined group, and (2) bridging capital, which seek to build linkages between groups. See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 7. Jason Hackworth, Faith Based: Religious Neoliberalism and the Politics of Welfare in the United States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 8. David Walsh, “How the Right-Wing Convinces Itself that Liberals Are Evil,” Washington Monthly, July-August, 2018, https://washingtonmonthly .com/magazine/july-august-2018/how-the-right-wing-convinces-itself -that-liberals-are-evil/. 9. Ian Haney-Lopez, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 10. George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011); James Rhodes and Laurence Brown, “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Inner City’: Race, Space and Urban Policy in Postwar England,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2018), forthcoming. 11. Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 12. Social Security initially disallowed agricultural workers from obtaining benefits. African Americans were, at the time, disproportionately employed in agricultural work. This exemption was widely seen as a concession to southern Democrats. 13. Leah Wright Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 14. The night of the 1964 Civil Rights Act passage, Johnson reportedly told an aide, “I think that we have just delivered the South to Republicans for a long time to come.” Quoted in: Bill Moyers, Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Times (New York: New Press, 2004), 167. 15. Steven Tuch and Michael Hughes, “Whites’ Racial Resentment in the Twenty-First Century: The Continuing Significance of Racial Resentment,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 634 (2011): 134–152; Adam Enders and Jamil Scott, “The Increasing Racialization of American Electoral Politics, 1988–2016,” American Politics Research 47, no. 2 (2019): 275–303.

2. Urban Decline as Conservative Bonding Capital 4 247 16. Rigueur, Loneliness of the Black Republican. 17. New York Amsterdam News, “Landon and Knox Win Praise from Leaders of Negroes in G.O.P.,” June 27, 1936, p. 11, col. 5. 18. Rigueur, Loneliness of the Black Republican. 19. Michael Rogin, “Politics, Emotion, and the Wallace vote,” British Journal of Sociology 20, no. 1 (1969): 27–49. 20. Rick Perlstein, “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy,” The Nation, November 13, 2012, https://www .thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview -southern-strategy/. 21. Quoted in The Neshoba Democrat, “Transcript of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba County Fair speech,” November 15, 2007, http://neshobademocrat .com/Content/NEWS/News/Article/Transcript-of-Ronald-Reagan-s -1980-Neshoba-County-Fair-speech/2/297/15600. 22. William Raspberry, “Reagan’s Race Legacy,” Washington Post, June 14, 2004, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39345-2004Jun13 .html. 23. The National Urban League is a civil rights organization. It was founded in 1910 as the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes. 24. The previous day’s activities, the trip to Philadelphia, were organized by Reagan’s southern chairman, and eventual Trump campaign chair, Paul Manafort. Stone and Manafort eventually formed a political consulting firm during the 1980s. 25. Carter had visited the same street four years earlier with promises of redevelopment. 26. Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), “Global Revenue Statistics Database,” accessed March 20, 2019, http:// www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/global-revenue-statistics-database.htm; Gosta Epsing-Anderson, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). 27. Michael Tesler, “The Return of Old-Fashioned Racism to White Americans’ Partisan Preferences in the Early Obama Era,” Journal of Politics 75, no. 1 (2013): 110–123; Christopher Parker, “Race and Politics in the Age of Obama,” Annual Review of Sociology 42 (2016): 217–230; Rachel Wetts and Robb Willer, “Privilege on the Precipice: Perceived Racial Status Threats lead White Americans to Oppose Welfare Programs,” Social Forces 97, no. 2 (2018): 793–822.

248 4 2. Urban Decline as Conservative Bonding Capital 28. Martin Gilens, “ ‘Race Coding’ and White Opposition to welfare,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 3 (1996): 593–604. 29. Douglas Kneeland, “Reagan Urges Blacks to Look Past Labels and Vote for Him,” New York Times, August 6, 1980. 30. Stephanie Akin, “A Poverty Backdrop for Politics in Anacostia,” Roll Call, June 9, 2016, http://www.rollcall.com/news/home/anacostia-hope-c. 31. Jenna Johnson, “Donald Trump to African American and Hispanic Voters: ‘What Do You Have to Lose?’” Washington Post, August 22, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/08/22 /donald-trump-to-african-american-and-hispanic-voters-what-do-you -have-to-lose/. 32. Roberto Suro, “The 1991 Election: Louisiana; Bush Denounces Duke as Racist and Charlatan,” New York Times, November 7, 1991, https:// www.nytimes.com/1991/11/07/us/the-1991-election-louisiana-bush -denounces-duke-as-racist-and-charlatan.html. 33. Alison Mitchell, “The 2000 Campaign: The Texas Governor; Response Polite as Bush Courts the N.A.A.C.P.,” New York Times, July 11, 2000, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/07/11/us/the-2000-campaign-the -texas-governor-response-polite-as-bush-courts-the-naacp.html. 34. Melissa Chan, “Donald Trump Refuses to Condemn KKK, Disavow David Duke Endorsement,” Time, February 28, 2016, http://time.com /4240268/donald-trump-kkk-david-duke/. 35. Dan Baum, “Legalize It All: How to Win the War on Drugs,” Harper’s, April 2016, https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/. 36. J. Brian Charles, “Justice Department Ends Era of Pushing Police Reform,” Governing, September 28, 2017, http://www.governing.com /topics/public-justice-safety/lc-sessions-justice-police-reforms-trump -doj-milwaukee.html. 37. Paul Waldman, “The GOP’s Racial Dog Whistling and the Social Safety Net,” American Prospect, March 24, 2014, http://prospect.org/article /gops-racial-dog-whistling-and-social-safety-net. 38. Quoted in Rachel Black and Aleta Sprague, “The Rise and Reign of the Welfare Queen,” New America Weekly, September 22, 2016, https://www .newamerica.org/weekly/edition-135/rise-and-reign-welfare-queen/. 39. J. Brian Charles, “As Fair Housing Act Turns 50, Landmark Law Faces Uncertain Future,” Governing, April 11, 2018, http://www.governing .com/topics/urban/gov-fair-housing-lyndon-johnson-lc.html.

2. Urban Decline as Conservative Bonding Capital 4 249 40. Stephen Labaton, “Ex-official Is Convicted in HUD Scandal of 80s,” New York Times, October 27, 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10 /27/us/ex-official-is-convicted-in-hud-scandal-of-80-s.html; Jonathan Chait, “Ben Carson May Be the Perfect Trump HUD Secretary,” New York Magazine, December 6, 2016, http://nymag.com/intelligencer /2016/12/ben-carson-may-be-the-perfect-trump-hud-secretary .html. 41. Charles, “As Fair Housing Act Turns 50.” 42. Charles, “As Fair Housing Act Turns 50.” 43. Alana Semuels, “The End of Welfare as We Know It: America’s OnceRobust Safety Net Is No More,” Atlantic Monthly, April 2016, https:// www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/the-end-of-welfare-as -we-know-it/476322/. 44. Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 45. Allison Graves, “Did Hillary Clinton Call African-American Youth ‘Superpredators?’ ” Politifact, August 28, 2016, https://www.politifact .com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/aug/28/reince-priebus/did-hillary -clinton-call-african-american-youth-su/. 46. Chan,“Donald Trump Refuses”; Rick Klein,“Trump Said ‘Blame on Both Sides’ in Charlottesville, Now the Anniversary Puts Him on the Spot,” ABC News, August 12, 2018, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump -blame-sides-charlottesville-now-anniversary-puts-spot/story?id =57141612; Kori Rumore, “When Trump Talks About Chicago, We Track It: ‘The Crime Spree Is a Terrible Blight’,” Chicago Tribune, October 8, 2018, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking /ct-trump-tweets-quotes-chicago-htmlstory.html. 47. Libby Nelson, “ ‘Why We Voted for Donald Trump’: David Duke Explains the White Supremacist Charlottesville Protests,” Vox, August 12, 2017, https://www.vox.com/2017/8/12/16138358/charlottesville-protests -david-duke-kkk. 48. Pete Williams, Rich Schapiro, Adiel Kaplan, and Corky Siemaszko, “Pipe Bomb Suspect Cesar Sayoc is a Registered Republican and a Trump Fan with a Criminal Record,” NBC News, October 26, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mail-bomb-suspect-cesar -sayoc-custody-allegedly-sending-pipe-bombs-n924856.

250 4 2. Urban Decline as Conservative Bonding Capital 49. Dara Lind, “The Conspiracy Theory that Led to the Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting, Explained,” Vox, October 29, 2018, https://www.vox .com/2018/10/29/18037580/pittsburgh-shooter-anti-semitism-racist -jewish-caravan. 50. Mike Levine, “ ‘No Blame’? ABC News Finds 17 Cases Invoking ‘Trump’ in Connection with Violence, Threats or Alleged Assaults,” ABC News, November 5, 2018, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/blame-abc-news-finds -17-cases-invoking-trump/story?id=58912889. 51. Gallup Polling, “Presidential Approval Ratings—Donald Trump, November 2018,” https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval -ratings-donald-trump.aspx. 52. In Ohio, for example, 37.6 percent of the nonagricultural labor force was represented by unions in 1964. Barry Hirsch, David Macpherson, and Wayne Vroman, “Estimates of Union Density by State,” Monthly Labor Review July (2001): 51–55. By 2017, that figure had dropped to 13.6 percent. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Online Table: Union Membership Historical Table for Ohio,” https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data /unionmembershiphistorical_ohio_table.htm. 53. “Rust Belt counties” include all counties in the following states: Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, and Wisconsin. The counties of the New York City CMSA and the Philadelphia MSA were removed. The counties of the St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Louisville MSAs were added. The total number of counties is 585. 54. Wallace received 14.1 percent of the vote in Macomb County in 1968. 55. The difference was significant at the .000 level using a two-tailed t-test. 56. The difference was significant at the .000 level using a two-tailed t-test. 57. This pattern (of nonsignificance) held for both a comparison of “safe” (Republican and Democratic) and “all” counties. 58. The difference was significant at the .000 level using a t-test (two-tailed).

3. THE CONSERVATIVE MYTH OF DETROIT 1. Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 2. Jason Stahl, Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

3. The Conservative Myth of Detroit 4 251 3. Jamie Peck, “Liberating the City: Between New York and New Orleans,” Urban Geography 27, no. 8 (2006): 681–713. 4. Jason Hackworth, “The Limits to Market-Based Strategies for Addressing Land Abandonment in Shrinking American Cities,” Progress in Planning 90 (2014): 1–37. 5. Joshua Akers, “Making Markets: Think Tank Legislation and Private Property in Detroit,” Urban Geography 34, no. 8 (2013): 1070–1095 6. An example of this is the Journal of Law Economics and Organization. It is published by Oxford University Press but receives funding support from the John Olin Center for Law Economics and Public Policy— a pro-free-market think tank housed at Yale. Olin, one of America’s most prominent conservative donors, established a foundation to set up and fund dozens of such organizations upon his death. See Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016). 7. I use the term “quasi-intellectual” because the narrative is isolated from careful (university-based) peer review. The majority of scholarship in this area consists of articles, press releases, and books produced by think tanks. 8. Emily Badger, “The Odd Republican Obsession with Detroit,” Washington Post, August 8, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp /2016/08/08/why-republicans-are-obsessed-with-detroit/. 9. Hadas Gold, “Detroit, the Right’s Perfect Piñata,” Politico, August 18, 2013, http://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/detroit-michigan-conservatives-95630.html. 10. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Scribner, 1902). 11. The Economist, “Triangle Shirtwaist: The Birth of the New Deal,” March 19, 2011, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2011/03/17 /the-birth-of-the-new-deal?story_id=18396085. 12. David Stradling and Richard Stradling, “Perceptions of the Burning River: Deindustrialization and Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River,” Environmental History 13 (2008): 515–535. 13. Albert Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). As Hirschman points out, these rhetorics are neither unique to the Right (others use them too) nor inclusive of all of the strategies used by the Right. These are simply dominant rhetorics that have been used by reactionaries since the French Revolution. Hirschman’s scheme was chosen here

252 4 3. The Conservative Myth of Detroit

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

because of its historical emphasis—that is, a history of reactionary argumentation styles provides a basis on which to suggest that contemporary efforts rigidly adhere to a form that has been around for several centuries. Hirschman, Rhetoric of Reaction, 7. Hirschman, Rhetoric of Reaction, 7. Hirschman, Rhetoric of Reaction, 7. David Ranney, Global Decisions, Local Collisions (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003); Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). The work of Harvard’s Edward Glaeser is central to the manufactured history of Detroit. Not only has he written much of it, but unlike other Manhattan and Cato Institute fellows, he has a prestigious university appointment. His work is frequently cited and retweeted by think-tank staff as though it were inarguable truth. His work both embodies the range of views expressed from the neoliberal thought machine and comes in a variety of forms ranging from academic articles, to media appearances, to popular writing. His work is drawn from the neoliberal view and, importantly, is seminal in its own right. See Jamie Peck, “Economic Rationality Meets Celebrity Urbanology: Exploring Edward Glaeser’s City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40, no. 1 (2016): 1–30. June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013). Karen Pierog and Joseph Lichterman, “Analysis: Gambling Revenue at Heart of Detroit’s Dilemmas, New and Old,” Reuters, January 20, 2014, http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/20/us-bankruptcy-detroit -casinos-analysis-idUSBREA0J0X920140120. Michael Tanner, “Government, Not Globalization, Destroyed Detroit,” Cato Institute, July 24, 2013, http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary /government-not-globalization-destroyed-detroit. Charles Tiebout, “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures,” Journal of Political Economy 64 (1956): 416–424. Tanner, “Government, not globalization.”

3. The Conservative Myth of Detroit 4 253 25. Dean Stansel, “Why Some Cities Are Growing and Others Shrinking,” Cato Journal 31 (2011): 285–303. 26. Tom Henderson, “Newt Gingrich: Give Detroit Businesses 10-Year Tax Holiday,” Crain’s Business Detroit, June 6, 2010; John Gallagher, “Utopian Belle Isle Vision Meets Skepticism; How Enclave Would Aid Detroit Isn’t Clear,” Detroit Free Press, January 22, 2013. 27. For discussions of DIY urbanism, see Mark Binelli, Detroit City Is the Place to Be (New York: Picador, 2013); Kimberley Kinder, DIY Detroit: Making Do in a City Without Services (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 28. Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, and Happier (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). 29. Steven Klepper, “The Origin and Growth of Industry Clusters: The Making of Silicon Valley and Detroit,” Journal of Urban Economics 67 (2010): 15–32. 30. Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 49. 31. Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 43. 32. Stephen Walters, “Unions and the Decline of U.S. Cities,” Cato Journal 30 (2010): 117–135. 33. Glaeser, Triumph of the City. 34. Binelli, Detroit City. 35. Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 50. 36. Walters, “Unions and the Decline”; Glaeser, Triumph of the City. 37. Quoted in Paige Williams, “Drop Dead, Detroit! The Suburban Kingpin Who Is Thriving Off the City’s Decline,” New Yorker, January 27, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/27/drop-dead-detroit. 38. It is important to note that while the current mayor and private officials see such changes as important for Detroit’s future, many others remain unconvinced. As in other struggling cities, some institutions are building policy around the so-called “eds and meds” strategy—that is, deliberately foregrounding the economic role of large institutions, in this case universities and hospitals, as an economic development pathway. 39. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Princeton Classic Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 40. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.

254 4 3. The Conservative Myth of Detroit 41. June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013). 42. Thomas, Redevelopment and Race. 43. “Blind pig” was the colloquial name for informal social clubs where parties and gatherings were often held. 44. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 45. Glaeser, Triumph of the City; Steve Malanga, “The Real Reason the Once Great City of Detroit Came to Ruin,” Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2013, A13. 46. Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer, “The Curley Effect: The Economics of Shaping the Electorate,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 21 (2005): 1–19. 47. Glaeser and Shleifer, “The Curley Effect.” 48. Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 54. 49. Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 55. 50. Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 58. 51. Glaeser and Shleifer, “The Curley Effect,” 13. 52. Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 59.

4. CONSERVATIVE CITY LIMITS 1. Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking, 2017). 2. Charles Tiebout, “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures,” Journal of Political Economy 64 (1956): 416–424. 3. Williams Lyons, David Lowery, and Ruth DeHoog, The Politics of Dissatisfaction: Citizens, Services, and Urban Institutions (New York: Sharpe, 1992); Kevin Smith and Christopher Larimer, The Public Policy Theory Primer, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2013). 4. Paul Peterson, City Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Peterson is a professor of political science at Harvard but has been active in conservative circles during his career. He remains a fellow at Stanford’s iconic Hoover Institute—the leading university-based conservative think tank—and has been a lifelong advocate for school vouchers.

4. Conservative City Limits 4 255 5. Peterson, City Limits, 41–44. 6. Peterson, City Limits, 38. 7. Researchers have found that states with larger nonwhite populations are stingier with welfare benefit allocations they receive through the block granting process. See Alana Semuels, “Which States Are Stingiest with Government Benefits?” Atlantic Monthly, June 6, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/race-safety-net -welfare/529203/. 8. National League of Cities, City Rights in an Era of Preemption: A Stateby-State Analysis (Washington, DC: National League of Cities, 2017), http://www.nlc.org/article/city-rights-in-an-era-of-preemption-new -report-from-national-league-of-cities. 9. In 2018, the state of Tennessee removed $250,000 in state funding to punish Memphis for removing Confederate statues and passed legislation to make it easier for the state to punish other cities for doing so. See Jordan Buie, “Senate Passes Bill that Would Punish Cities for Removing Historical Monuments,” The Tennessean, April 25, 2018, https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2018/04/25/tennessee -confederate-monuments-memphis-statues/549760002/. As of 2018, forty-two states have preempted the ability of municipalities to enact gun-control legislation in their city. See Everytown for Gun Safety, “State Firearms Preemption Laws Factsheet,” https://everytownresearch .org/fact-sheet-preemption-laws/. See also David Graham, “Red State, Blue City,” Atlantic Monthly, March 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com /magazine/archive/2017/03/red-state-blue-city/513857/;National League of Cities, City Rights; and Reid Wilson, “Alabama Moves to Protect Confederate Monuments,” The Hill, May 26, 2017, http://thehill.com /homenews/state-watch/335283-alabama-moves-to-protect-confederate -monuments. 10. Many of the laws that do allow cities to meaningfully penalize landlords were passed before the 1980s. 11. National League of Cities, City Rights. 12. Michael Tesler, “The Return of Old-Fashioned Racism to White Americans’ Partisan Preferences in the Early Obama Era,” Journal of Politics 75, no. 1 (2013): 110–123”; Christopher Parker, “Race and Politics in the Age of Obama,” Annual Review of Sociology 42 (2016): 217–230; Rachel Wetts and Robb Willer, “Privilege on the Precipice: Perceived

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13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

Racial Status Threats lead White Americans to Oppose Welfare Programs,” Social Forces 97, no. 2 (2018): 793–822. National League of Cities, City Rights. Bryce Covert and Evan Popp, “The Conservative Backlash Against Minimum Wage and Paid Sick Leave Victories Sweeping the Nation,” Think Progress, June 16, 2016, https://thinkprogress.org/the-conservative -backlash-against-minimum-wage-and-paid-sick-leave-victories -sweeping-the-nation-61f26429300a; Max Rivlin-Nadler, “Preemption Bills: A New Conservative Tool to Block Minimum Wage Increases,” New Republic, February 29, 2016, https://newrepublic.com/article/130783 /preemption-bills-new-conservative-tool-block-minimum-wage -increases. William Tabb, The Long Default: New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1982); Carla Minet and Joel C. Arbasetti, “The Silent Expansion of Fiscal Control Board in the U.S.,” Shelterforce Blog, June 2, 2017, http://www.rooflines.org/4869 /the_silent_expansion_of_fiscal_control_boards_in_the_u.s/. Minet and Arbasetti, “The Silent Expansion.” Graham, “Red State, Blue State.” Dana Kornberg, “The Structural Origins of Territorial Stigma: Water and Racial Politics in Metropolitan Detroit, 1950s–2010s,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40, no. 2 (2016): 263–283. Joshua Akers, “Separate and Unequal: The Consumption of Public Education in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36, no. 1 (2012): 29–48; Dan Cohen and Chris Lizotte, “Teaching the Market: Fostering Consent to Education Markets in the United States,” Environment and Planning A 47, no. 9 (2015): 1824–1841. Akers, “Separate and Unequal.” Douglas Harris, “Betsy Devos and the Wrong Way to Fix Schools,” New York Times, November 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25 /opinion/betsy-devos-and-the-wrong-way-to-fix-schools.html. Mark Binelli, Detroit City Is the Place to Be (New York: Picador, 2013). There has been a legal consequence to the Flint water crisis—as of 2018, fifteen former state officials have been indicted—but not a political one: Governor Rick Snyder, who appointed the emergency manager and was not entirely straightforward with the public when the crisis

4. Conservative City Limits 4 257

24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

was unfolding was reelected as governor of the state in 2014. See Irwin Redlener, “We Still Haven’t Made Things Right in Flint,” Washington Post, March 7, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we -still-havent-made-things-right-in-flint/2018/03/07/5c700692-2211 -11e8-badd-7c9f29a55815_story.html. Center for Popular Democracy, State Takeovers of Low-Performing Schools: A Record of Academic Failure, Financial Mismanagement, and Student Harm (Washington DC: Center for Popular Democracy, February 2016), https://populardemocracy.org/news/publications/state-takeovers -low-performing-schools-record-academic-failure-financial. Bryan Jones and Lynn Bachelor, The Sustaining Hand: Community Leadership and Corporate Power, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993). Initial opposition was not spearheaded by the Right. Rather, Ralph Nader’s organization was responsible for much of the Poletown activism. However, since the case worked its way through to the Michigan Supreme Court and became known to the wider public, the libertarian Right has mounted the most sustained activism in the area. Christopher Niedt, “The Politics of Eminent Domain: From False Choices to Community Benefits,” Urban Geography 43 (2013): 1047–1069. Semuels, “Which States Are Stingiest.” As but one recent example, in the summer of 2015, conservative darling (and Wisconsin governor) Scott Walker committed the state to spending $250 million to assist billionaire Herb Kohl to build a new stadium for his basketball team in downtown Milwaukee. Walker was also, of course, famous for brutally slashing subsidies for schools, universities, and healthcare in the state. But he is not unusual in the region (or the country for that matter). Jason Hackworth, “Right-Sizing as Spatial Austerity in the American Rust Belt,” Environment and Planning A 47, no. 4 (2015): 766–782. Most states do not allow ex-felons to vote. The only complete exceptions are Vermont and Maine, where very low percentages of nonwhite people live. See Brent Staples, “The Racist Origins of Felon Disenfranchisement,” New York Times, November 18, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19 /opinion/the-racist-origins-of-felon-disenfranchisement.html. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Moynihan, Mass Incarceration, and Responsibility,” Atlantic Monthly, September 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics

258 4 4. Conservative City Limits

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

/archive/2015/09/moynihan-mass-incarceration-and-responsibility /407131/. Joshua Akers, “Making Markets: Think Tank Legislation and Private Property in Detroit,” Urban Geography 34, no. 8 (2013): 1070–1095; Jason Hackworth and Kelsey Nowakowski, “Using Market-Based Policies to Address Market Collapse in the American Rust Belt: The Case of Land Abandonment in Toledo, Ohio,” Urban Geography 36, no. 4 (2015): 528–549. Jeff Parrott, “Bill Would Stop South Bend from Holding Landlords Liable for Nuisance Properties,” South Bend Tribune, March 21, 2017, http://www.southbendtribune.com/news/local/bill-would-stop-south -bend-from-holding-landlords-liable-for/article_fb568f6b-0454-5db7 -84b1-077fdaca6125.html. Megan Hatch, “Statutory Protection for Renters: Classification of State Landlord-Tenant Policy Approaches,” Housing Policy Debate 27, no. 1 (2017): 98–119. Within the study area of this book, Wisconsin and Kentucky had laws that were a mix of tenant- and landlord-friendly; New York and Minnesota were classified as having pro-renter laws. Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Crown Publishers, 2016); Alec MacGillis, “Jared Kushner’s Other Real Estate Empire,” New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/magazine/jared-kushners-other -real-estate-empire.html. Desmond, Evicted, 88.

5. LAND-MARKET FUNDAMENTALISM 1. Jason Hackworth, “Race and the Production of Extreme Land Abandonment in the American Rust Belt,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 42 no. 1 (2018): 51–73. 2. The Heidelberg Project is a folk-art installation initially created in 1986 by longtime resident Tyree Guyton. 3. Eugenia Garvin, Charles Branas, Shimrit Keddem, Jeffrey Sellman, and Carolyn Cannuscio, “More than Just an Eyesore: Local Insights and Solutions on Vacant Land and Urban Health,” Journal of Urban Health 90, no. 3 (2013): 412–426; Arline Geronimus, Jay Pearson, Erin Linnenbringer, Amy Schulz, Angela Reyes, Elissa Epel, Jue Lin, and

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4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

Elizabeth Blackburn, “Race-Ethnicity, Poverty, Urban Stressors, and Telomere Length in a Detroit Community-Based Sample,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 56, no. 2 (2015): 199–224. Joshua Akers and Eric Seymour, “Instrumental Exploitation: Predatory Property Relations at City’s End,” Geoforum 91 (2018): 127–140. Nigel Griswold, Benjamin Calnin, Michael Schramm, Luc Anselin, and Paul Boehnlein, Estimating the Effect of Demolishing Distressed Structures in Cleveland, OH, 2009–2013: Impacts on Real Estate Equity and Mortgage-Foreclosure (Cleveland: Thriving Communities Institute, 2014), http://www.thrivingcommunitiesinstitute.org/documents/Final ReportwithExecSummary_modified.pdf. Dan Immergluck, The Role of Investors in the Single-Family Market in Distressed Neighborhoods: The Case of Atlanta (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2013), Joint Center for Housing Studies Working Paper. Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (New York: Crown Publishers, 2016). Christine MacDonald, “Private Landowners Complicate Reshaping of Detroit,” Detroit News, February 3, 2011; Christine MacDonald and Mike Wilkinson, “Interactive Map: Who Owns the Most Private Property in Detroit?” Detroit News, February 3, 2011; Christine MacDonald and Mike Wilkinson, “Detroit’s Real Estate Bazaar: Reforms Urged to Deter Land Speculators,” Detroit News, February 4, 2011. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944). Harvey Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 2 (1976): 309–332; John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Justin Hollander, Karina Pallagst, Terry Schwarz, and Frank Popper, “Planning Shrinking Cities,” Progress in Planning 72, no. 4 (2009): 223–232; Alan Mallach, “Depopulation, Market Collapse, and Property Abandonment: Surplus Land and Buildings in Legacy Cities,” in Rebuilding America’s Legacy Cities: New Directions for the Industrial Heartland, ed. Alan Mallach (New York: The American Assembly/ Columbia University Press, 2012), 85–110; Laura Schatz, “DeclineOriented Urban Governance in Youngstown, Ohio,” in The City After Abandonment, ed. Margaret Dewar and June Manning Thomas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 87–103.

260 4 5. Land-Market Fundamentalism 12. Joseph Schilling and Jonathan Logan, “Greening the Rust Belt: A Green Infrastructure Model for Right Sizing America’s Shrinking Cities,” Journal of the American Planning Association 74, no. 4 (2008): 451–466; Catherine LaCroix, “Urban Agriculture and Other Green Uses: Remaking the Shrinking City,” Urban Lawyer 42 (2010): 225–285; Catherine LaCroix, “Urban Green Uses: The New Renewal,” Planning and Environmental Law 63, no. 5 (2011): 3–13; Joanna Ganning and J. Rosie Tighe, “Assessing the Feasibility of Side Yard Programs as a Solution to Land Vacancy in U.S. Shrinking Cities,” Urban Affairs Review 51, no. 5 (2015): 708–725. 13. Amy Hillier, Dennis Culhane, Tony Smith, and C. Dana Tomlin, “Predicting Housing Abandonment with the Philadelphia Neighborhood Information System,” Journal of Urban Affairs 25, no. 1 (2003): 91–105; Dan Immergluck, Yun Lee, and Patrick Terranova, Local Vacant Property Registration Ordinances in the U.S.: An Analysis of Growth, Regional Trends, and Some Key Characteristics (Atlanta: Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, August 2012). 14. Lan Deng, “Building Affordable Housing in Cities After Abandonment: The Case of Low Income Housing Tax Credits,” in The City After Abandonment, 41–63; June Manning Thomas, “Targeting Strategies of Three Detroit CDCs,” in The City After Abandonment, 197–224. 15. Detroit Future City, Detroit Future City: Detroit Strategic Framework Plan, 2012, https://detroitfuturecity.com/strategic-framework/. 16. Alan Mallach, “Demolition and Preservation in Shrinking U.S. Industrial Cities,” Building Research and Information 39, no. 4 (2011): 380–394. 17. Frank Alexander, Land Banks and Land Banking (Flint, MI: Center for Community Progress, 2011), http://www.communityprogress.net/filebin /pdf/new_resrcs/LB_Book_2011_F.pdf. 18. Detroit Future City, 139 Square Miles—Examining Population, People, Economy and Place (Detroit: Detroit Future City, 2017), https://detroit futurecity.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/DFC_139-SQ-Mile _Report.pdf. 19. This bias against municipal ownership of land is not present in state law only. In 2007, the federal government initiated the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP). NSP provided funds for cities and counties to acquire properties that were going through the mortgage foreclosure process. One prominent limit was that cities were legally disallowed

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20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

from holding those properties (whether they be a vacant lot or an occupied house) for more than ten years. The takings clause of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution outlaws the seizure of private property without adequate compensation. Some property owners have used this to successfully sue the government for actions that, while short of a literal taking, significantly diminish the value of their holding (e.g., placing a landfill next to their house). Jerome Rose, Legal Foundations of Land Use Planning (New York: Routledge, 2017). See LaCroix, “Urban Agriculture”; LaCroix, “Urban Green Uses.” MacDonald and Wilkinson, “Detroit’s Real Estate Bazaar.” This figure was derived by isolating the land area of “innovation ecological” and “innovation productive” areas of the Detroit Future City map and calculating the aggregated census tract population total for those areas in 2010. See Detroit Future City, 59. Renia Ehrenfeucht and Marla Nelson, “Planning, Population Loss and Equity in New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina,” Planning Practice and Research 26, no. 2 (2011): 129–146. MacDonald and Wilkinson, “Detroit’s Real Estate Bazaar.” Alexander, Land Banks. Akers and Seymour, “Instrumental Exploitation.” John Gallagher, “Belgium Investors Learn It’s Buyer Beware in Detroit,” Detroit Free Press, April 6, 2017, https://www.freep.com/story/money /business/john-gallagher/2017/04/06/detroit-investment-belgium /99823810/. Anna Clark,“Detroit Magnate Decides He Doesn’t Want 6,000 Blighted Properties After All,” Next City, November 5, 2014, https://nextcity.org /daily/entry/detroit-blight-bundle-bid-withdraw-herb-strather. Alexander, Land Banks. Jason Hackworth, “The Limits to Market-Based Strategies for Addressing Land Abandonment in Shrinking American Cities,” Progress in Planning 90 (2014): 1–37. Immergluck et al., Local Vacant Property Registration Ordinances. Hillier et al., “Predicting Housing Abandonment.” Local governments have the power to declare whole zones of the city unsafe or blighted (definitions vary but tend to revolve around property upkeep violations that are deemed to threaten nearby house values).

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34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

“Spot blight” measures allow local governments to select individual properties for demolition on this basis. The measures are not available to local governments in all states. A recent lawsuit by land market investors in Grand Rapids illustrates this ongoing pushback. In 2013, a group of real estate investors connected to state-level Republican officials sued Kent County (Grand Rapids) for “poaching” properties from them and denying “their right” to profit from them. The suit was dismissed, but it was sufficiently influential to prompt the governor to introduce legislation to curb the power of land banks. See Matthew Gryczan, “Land Bank . . . or Land Grab? Experiment in Kent County Has Some Raising Roof,” Crain’s Detroit Business, January 12, 2014, http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article /20140112/NEWS/301129999/land-bank-or-land-grab-experiment-in -kent-county-has-some-raising. David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation of Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Geografiska Annaler B 71 (1989): 3–17. Glaeser, Triumph of the City. Alan Peters and Peter Fisher, State Enterprise Zone Programs: Have They Worked? (Kalamazoo, MI: Upjohn Institute, 2002); Timothy Weaver, Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United Kingdom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). W. Bartley Hildreth and C. Kurt Zorn, “The Evolution of the State and Local Government Municipal Debt Market over the Past Quarter Century,” Public Budgeting and Finance 25, no. 4 (2005): 127–153; Rachel Weber, “Selling City Futures: The Financialization of Urban Redevelopment Policy,” Economic Geography 86, no. 3 (2010): 251–274; Josh Pacewicz, “Tax Increment Financing, Economic Development Professionals and the Financialization of Urban Politics,” Socio-Economic Review 11 (2013): 413–440. Michelle White, “Property Taxes and Urban Housing Abandonment,” Journal of Urban Economics 20 (1986): 312–320; Larry DeBoer, James Conrad, and Kevin McNamara, “Property Tax Auction Sales,” Land Economics 68, no. 1 (1992): 72–82. Alberta Sbragia, Debt Wish: Entrepreneurial Cities, U.S. Federalism, and Economic Development (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,

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41.

42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52.

1996); Jason Hackworth, “Local Autonomy, Bond-Rating Agencies and Neoliberal Urbanism in the US,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26, no. 4 (2002): 707–725. Tracy Neumann, Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Peters and Fisher, State Enterprise Zone Programs; Weaver, Blazing the Neoliberal Trail. Programs that are used to build houses in highly distressed neighborhoods include Low Income Housing Tax Credits, Section 8, the HOME program, and state-level subsidies for home construction. Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, “Urban Decline and Durable Housing,” Journal of Political Economy 113, no. 2 (2005): 345–375; Hackworth, “The Limits to Market-Based Strategies.” Ayn Rand, “Ayn Rand Ties Her Beliefs to Today’s World,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1962, B3. Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom: And Other Essays and Addresses (South Holland, IL: Libertarian Press, 1962). Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). Witold Rybczynski and Peter Linneman, “How to Save Our Shrinking Cities,” Public Interest 135 (1999): 30–44. Michigan was an early adopter in 2003 but was subject to conservative resistance from the Mackinac and Hudson institutes. See Joshua Akers, “Making Markets: Think Tank Legislation and Private Property in Detroit,” Urban Geography 34, no. 8 (2013): 1070–1095. Hackworth, “The Limits to Market-Based Strategies.” Lavea Brachman, “Case Study: Building a Coalition to Pass a State Land Bank,” in Rebuilding America’s Legacy Cities, 291–294; Lavea Brachman, “New State and Federal Policy Agendas: Realizing the Potential of America’s Legacy Cities and their Regions,” in Rebuilding America’s Legacy Cities, 265–290. Pittsburgh Today, “Pittsburgh Seeking New Ways to Keep Up with Number of Vacant Properties,” September 18, 2011, http://www.community progress.net/news-pages-9.php?id=238; Illinois Association of Realtors. “Press Release—Illinois Realtors Oppose Land Bank Authority, 2012”; Audrey Spalding, “Legislators Should Seriously Consider

264 4 5. Land-Market Fundamentalism

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the Failings of the Saint Louis Land Bank Before Creating a Kansas City Land Bank,” Show-Me Institute, February 8, 2012, http://showme institute.org/publications/testimony/red-tape/702-land-bank-faillings .html. Bruce Stahl and Audrey Spalding, “Don’t Bank on It: When It Comes to Vacant Property, Learn from Saint Louis’ Failures,” Show-Me Institute, April 2, 2012, http://showmeinstitute.org/publications/commentary /red-tape/739-dont-bank-on-it.html; Audrey Spalding, “Land Banking: An Old Idea with a Poor Track Record,” Show-Me Institute, March 26, 2012, http://showmeinstitute.org/publications/commentary/red-tape/732 -land-banking-old-idea.html. Spalding, “Legislators Should”; Spalding, “Land Banking”; Russ Harding, “Genesee County Land Bank Threatens Private Property Rights,” Mackinac Center for Public Policy, October 19, 2010, http://www .mackinac.org/13090. Harding, “Genesee County”; Spalding, “Land Banking.” Spalding, “Land Banking.” Spalding, “Land Banking.” Spalding, “Land Banking.”

6. DEMOLITION AS URBAN POLICY 1. Quoted in Matt Helms, “Detroit Reaches Blight Milestone: 10,000 Demolitions,” Detroit Free Press, July 19, 2016, https://www.freep .com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2016/07/19/detroit-reaches -blight-milestone-10000-demolitions/87284392/. 2. Detroit Blight Removal Task Force, “Every Neighborhood Has a Future . . . And It Doesn’t Include Blight: Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan,” 2014, http://jack-seanson.github.io/taskforce/. 3. Detroit Blight Removal Task Force, “Every Neighborhood Has a Future.” 4. Rachel Weber, Marc Doussard, Saurav Bhatta, and Daniel McGrath, “Tearing the City Down: Explaining the Incidence of Privately Initiated Demolitions,” Journal of Urban Affairs 28 (2006): 19–41. 5. Richard Plunz, A History of Housing in New York City: Dwelling Type and Social Change in the American Metropolis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

6. Demolition as Urban Policy 4 265 6. Emily Talen, “Housing Demolition During Urban Renewal,” City and Community 13, (2014): 233–253. 7. Colin Gordon, “Blighting the Way: Urban Renewal, Economic Development and the Elusive Definition of Blight,” Fordham Urban Law Journal 31 (2003): 305–337. 8. Gordon, “Blighting the Way”; Edward Goetz, New Deal Ruins: Race, Economic Justice, and Public Housing Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). 9. Mindy Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It (New York: Random House, 2005). 10. Rachel Weber, “Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment,” Antipode 34 (2002): 519–540. 11. Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). 12. Andrew Highsmith, “Demolition Means Progress: Urban Renewal, Local Politics, and State-Sanctioned Ghetto Formation in Flint, Michigan,” Journal of Urban History 35 (2009): 348–368; June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013). 13. Arnold Hirsch, The Making of the Second Ghetto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Princeton Classic Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 14. Gordon, “Blighting the Way.” 15. Jeff Crump, “Public Housing, Poverty and Urban Space,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (2002): 581–596; James Hanlon, “Beyond HOPE VI: Demolition/Disposition and the Uncertain Future of Public Housing,” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 27 (2012): 373–388. 16. Timothy Williams, “Blighted Cities Prefer Razing to Rebuilding,” New York Times, November 12, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/us /blighted-cities-prefer-razing-to-rebuilding.html. 17. There is no fixed definition of blight, though courts, researchers, and city officials have debated various ways of understanding it for over 100 years. For more on this topic, see Gordon, “Blighting the Way.” Pritchett argues that blight is “a facially neutral term infused with racial and ethnic prejudice. While it purportedly assessed the state of urban

266 4 6. Demolition as Urban Policy

18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

infrastructure, blight was often used to describe the negative impact of certain residents on city neighborhoods.” Wendell Pritchett, “The ‘Public Menace’ of Blight: Urban Renewal and the Private Uses of Eminent Domain,” Yale Law and Policy Review 21 (2003): 6. National Vacant Properties Campaign, “Vacant Properties: The True Cost to Communities,” August 2005, http://www.smartgrowthamerica .org/documents/true-costs.pdf. Garvin et al., “More than Just an Eyesore.” Kimberley Kinder, “Guerrilla-Style Defensive Architecture in Detroit: A Self-Provisioned Security Strategy in a Neoliberal Space of Disinvestment,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (2014): 1767. National Vacant Properties Campaign, “Vacant Properties.” National Vacant Properties Campaign, “Vacant Properties”; Dynamo Metrics, Estimating Home Equity Impacts from Rapid, Targeted Residential Demolition in Detroit, MI: Application of a Spatially-Dynamic Data System for Decision Support (Detroit, MI: Dynamo Metrics, 2015), http://www.demolitionimpact.org/; Nigel Griswold, Benjamin Calnin, Michael Schramm, Luc Anselin, and Paul Boehnlein, Estimating the Effect of Demolishing Distressed Structures in Cleveland, OH, 2009–2013: Impacts on Real Estate Equity and Mortgage-Foreclosure (Cleveland: Thriving Communities Institute, 2014), http://www.thrivingcommunities institute.org/documents/FinalReportwithExecSummary_modified .pdf; Matthias Bernt, “Partnerships for Demolition: The Governance of Urban Renewal in East Germany’s Shrinking Cities,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (2009): 754–769; Jason Hackworth, “The Limits to Market-Based Strategies for Addressing Land Abandonment in Shrinking American Cities,” Progress in Planning 90 (2014): 1–37. James Rhodes and John Russo, “Shrinking ‘Smart’? Urban Redevelopment and Shrinkage in Youngstown, Ohio,” Urban Geography 34, no. 3 (2013): 305–326. SIGTARP, Treasury Should Do Much More to Increase the Effectiveness of the TARP Hardest Hit Fund Blight Elimination Program (Washington DC: Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, 2015), http://www.sigtarp.gov/Audit20Reports/SIGTARP_Blight _Elimination_Report.pdf. John Gallagher, “Detroit’s Blight-Free Vision Curtailed as Money Dries Up,” Detroit Free Press, February 2, 2015, http://www.freep.com /story/news/2015/02/26/detroit-blight-removal-money/24053179/.

6. Demolition as Urban Policy 4 267 26. Genesee County Land Bank, “Funded Demolitions,” accessed March 21, 2019, http://www.thelandbank.org/blightfree.asp. 27. Genesee County Land Bank, “Funded Demolitions”; U.S. Treasury Department, “Michigan Hardest Hit Fund Allocation,” 2012, http://www .treasury.gov/initiatives/financial-stability/TARP-Programs/housing /Documents/Michigan20fact20sheet.pdf. 28. State of Ohio Attorney General, “Foreclosure,” http://www.ohioattorney general.gov/Foreclosure, accessed 1 March 2015. 29. State of Ohio Attorney General, “Foreclosure.” 30. Flint Area Reinvestment Office, “Local, State Officials Work Together to Eliminate Blight from Flint, Genesee County,” http://www.reinvestflint .org/2q-2013-blight-elimination.html, accessed 1 March 2013. 31. Hackworth, “The Limits to Market-Based Strategies.” 32. Bill McGraw, “Dan Gilbert Is Planning to Demolish Every Last Abandoned Building in Detroit,” Deadline Detroit-Business, October 1, 2013, http://www.deadlinedetroit.com/articles/6587/dan_gilbert_is_planning _to_demolish_every_last_abandoned_building_in_detroit. 33. Williams, “Blighted Cities.” 34. Mike Benediktsson, “Territories of Concern: Vacant Housing and Perceived Disorder on Three Suburban Blocks,” City and Community 13 (2014): 191–213; see also John Hipp, “Micro-structure in micro-neighborhoods: A New Social Distance Measure, and Its Effect on Individual and Aggregated Perceptions of Crime and Disorder,” Social Networks 32 (2010): 148–159. 35. Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush, “Seeing Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of ‘Broken Windows,’ ” Social Psychology Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2004): 319–342. 36. Brent Ryan, Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 37. Lucas Owen Kirkpatrick, “Urban Triage, City Systems, and the Remnants of Community: Some ‘Sticky’ Complications in the Greening of Detroit,” Journal of Urban History 41, no. 2 (2015): 261–278. 38. John T. Metzger, “Planned Abandonment: The Neighborhood LifeCycle Theory and National Urban Policy,” Housing Policy Debate 11, no. 1 (2000): 7–40. 39. Justin Hollander and Jeremy Nemeth, “The Bounds of Smart Decline: A Foundational Theory for Planning Shrinking Cities,” Housing Policy Debate 21 (2011): 349–367.

268 4 6. Demolition as Urban Policy 40. Ryan, Design After Decline; Talen, “Housing Demolition.” 41. Griswold et al., Estimating the Effect of Demolishing Distressed Structures; Dynamo Metrics, Estimating Home Equity. 42. Griswold et al., Estimating the Effect of Demolishing Distressed Structures. 43. This is using the definition of Rust Belt set forth in the introduction. 44. This threshold (80 percent) was chosen after virtually ground truthing with Google Earth all tracts that had lost more than 50 percent of their housing. I found all cases where the housing loss appeared to be the result of a large institutional expansion, calculated what percentage would eliminate them from the sample, and then reapplied that to the entire sample. It should also be noted that some housing unit losses are the result of processes other than demolition. The U.S. Census counts all habitable housing units. In highly disinvested environments, it is possible that this includes structures that are so heavily damaged from weather, age, or arson that they are not counted (but are still physically present on the landscape). Without the census files on which units were counted and which were not, it is impossible to calculate the impact of this discrepancy completely, but there are local parcel surveys that can be of use in determining it. The Detroit Residential Parcel Survey (DRPS) of 2009 is arguably the best such resource. It found a total of 3,480 structures in need of demolition because they were uninhabitable, and thus likely not counted by the Census as a “housing unit” the following year. They also found thousands more that they recommended for demolition because of vacancy, but those units were likely counted by the census. The DRPS figures were applied to the sixty-three EHLN tracts for Detroit to gauge impact. In total, uninhabitable units accounted for 0 to 7.8 percent of the 2010 housing stock (with an average figure of 1.8 percent and a median of 0.9 percent). In no case in Detroit did these extra units bring the total demolished units between 1970 and 2010 below 50 percent. In short, the impact of this discrepancy is minimal; almost all of the housing loss was in fact housing that was demolished. The more substantive point is that these units and many others are precisely the housing structures being targeted by housing officials. If they had not been demolished by 2009, they have either likely been so since then or are now on a demolition list. For more details see Jason Hackworth, “Demolition as Urban Policy in the American Rust Belt,” Environment and Planning A 48, no. 11 (2016): 2201–2222.

6. Demolition as Urban Policy 4 269 45. HOPE VI demolitions were also compared, but their aggregate coverage is even smaller than urban renewal. Nationally, 260,000 units of public housing were demolished between 1994 and 2015 (U.S. HUD, 2015, “IMS/PIC Inventory Removals,” http://www.hud.gov/offices /pih/systems/pic/sac). As of 2010, 117,000 public housing units had been demolished nationally as part of the HOPE VI program (and 56,800 were rebuilt) (Source: J. Hanlon, “Beyond HOPE VI: Demolition/Disposition and the Uncertain Future of Public Housing,” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 27 (2012): 373–388.). Within the study area, approximately 43,000 units were demolished and 14,600 units were rebuilt, of which only 5,500 are public housing, for a net loss of approximately 28,400 units total and 37,500 public housing units. These numbers include revitalization grants from fiscal years 1997–2006 plus demo grants from 1996–2003. Only 5,500 (approximately) rebuilds are public housing units. The net loss in the study area is approximately 37,500 public housing units. 46. Talen, “Housing Demolition,” 214. 47. The point here is not to suggest that the extent of urban renewal was its main problem—its particular destruction of neighborhoods in general and those occupied by people of color in particular are the main conceptual and moral problem with urban renewal. Urban renewal is often framed as a transformational moment in urban-policy history, while ad hoc demolition is simply framed as a small-scale unorganized local practice. This comparison is only used to illustrate that the extent of ad hoc demolition is greater than the literature would imply given these framings. 48. This number was derived by indexing Talen’s estimate (910,000 housing units) to the total number of 1950 housing units in the United States (45,983,398), then applying that percentage (1.98 percent) to the total number of housing units in the study area in 1950 (14,945,252). 49. Estimates of urban renewal site clearance from Michael White, Urban Renewal and the Changing Residential Structure of the City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 73. 50. This figure is a rough estimate of housing parcel sizes in affected areas. Unlike the urban renewal period (which focused on dense neighborhoods directly adjacent to the CBD), ad hoc demolition has largely focused on the first ring of single-family houses in cities.

270 4 6. Demolition as Urban Policy 51. I am cautious about causality here. I do not want to suggest that demolition caused a drop in income or a rise in vacancy in one neighborhood category or another. Rather, the logic here is conservative and oriented around falsification. That is, the claims of demolition proponents suggest that if only the “cancer” is removed, more-functional markets and by extension less-marginalized communities will occur in its wake. This study is a simple evaluation of those claims in places where demolition has been the most dominant policy intervention since 1970. 52. The definitions of terms used (e.g., convergence, divergence) are contained in table 6.4. To summarize them here: the figures are classified as higher or lower (EHLN vis-à-vis the growing city), then further classified by the degree of difference (in this case Substantially = +/−25 points; Moderately = 10–25 points; Similar = within 10 points). Trajectory refers to the change in relative difference between 1970 and 2010. The figures are classified as converging or diverging (from the growingcity figures, then further classified if they are significant = >10 points change). 53. Bernt, “Partnerships for Demolition.” 54. Metzger, “Planned Abandonment”; Peter Eisinger, “Is Detroit Dead?” Journal of Urban Affairs 36 (2014): 1–12.

7. SAVING THE CITY TO KILL IT 1. Detroit Future City, Detroit Future City: Detroit Strategic Framework Plan, 2012, https://detroitfuturecity.com/strategic-framework/, 11. 2. Joseph Schilling and Jonathan Logan, “Greening the Rust Belt: A Green Infrastructure Model for Right Sizing America’s Shrinking Cities,” Journal of the American Planning Association 74, no. 4 (2008): 451–466; Catherine LaCroix, “Urban Green Uses: The New Renewal,” Planning and Environmental Law 63, no. 5 (2011): 3–13. 3. Thomas Pedroni, “Urban Shrinkage as a Performance of Whiteness: Neoliberal Urban Restructuring, Education, and Racial Containment in the Post-industrial, Global Niche City,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 32 (2011): 203–215. 4. Roberta Gratz, “Shrinking Cities: Urban Renewal Revisited?” Planetizen Blog, April 19, 2010, http://www.planetizen.com/node/43826; Justin Hollander and Jeremy Nemeth, “The Bounds of Smart Decline:

7. Saving the City to Kill It 4 271

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

A Foundational Theory for Planning Shrinking Cities,” Housing Policy Debate 21 (2011): 349–367. Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1942–1962 (Boston: MIT Press, 1964); Marshall Berman, All that Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). Jamie Peck, “Austerity Urbanism: American Economies Under Extreme Economy,” City 16 (2012): 626–655; Jamie Peck, “Austere Reason, and the Eschatology of Neoliberalism’s End Times,” Comparative European Politics 11 (2013): 713–721; Betsy Donald, Amy Glasmeier, Mia Gray, and Linda Lobao, “Austerity in the City: Economic Crisis and Urban Service Decline?” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 7 (2013): 3–15; Mark Davidson and Kevin Ward, “ ‘Picking Up the Pieces’: Austerity Urbanism, California, and Fiscal Crisis,” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 7 (2014): 81–97; Jamie Peck, “Pushing Austerity: State Failure, Municipal Bankruptcy and the Crises of Fiscal Federalism in the USA,” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 7 (2014): 17–44; William Tabb, “The Wider Context of Austerity Urbanism,” City 18 (2014): 87–100; Timothy Weaver, Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United Kingdom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Jason Hackworth, “Local Autonomy, Bond-Rating Agencies and Neoliberal Urbanism in the US,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26, no. 4 (2002): 707–725; Rachel Weber, “Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment,” Antipode 34 (2002): 519–540; Davidson and Ward, “Picking Up the Pieces.” Peck, “Pushing Austerity.” Peter Marcuse, Peter Medoff, and Andrea Pereira, “Triage as Urban Policy,” Social Policy (Winter 1982): 33–37; Nancy Kleniewski, “Triage and Urban Planning: A Case Study of Philadelphia,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 10 (1986): 563–579; Deborah Wallace and Rodrick Wallace, “Consequences of Massive Housing Destruction: The New York City Fire Epidemic,” Building Research and Information 39 (2011): 395–411; Patrick Cooper-McCann, “The Trap of Triage: Lessons from the ‘Team Four Plan,’ ” Journal of Planning History 15, no. 2 (2016): 149–169. It should be noted that much of the literature focuses on future use rather than future ownership per se of vacated land. I focus on ownership

272 4 7. Saving the City to Kill It

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

because it predetermines the potential land use, arguably more than any other factor. Susan Fainstein and Scott Campbell, eds., Readings in Planning Theory, 3rd ed. (West Sussex, UK: John Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). Detroit Future City, Detroit Future City; Detroit Blight Removal Task Force, “Every Neighborhood Has a Future . . . And It Doesn’t Include Blight: Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan,” 2014, http://jackseanson.github.io/taskforce/. Detroit Future City, Detroit Future City, 3. Detroit Future City, Detroit Future City, 11. Detroit Future City, Detroit Future City, 13. Kirkpatrick, “Urban Triage.” Detroit Future City, Detroit Future City, 13. Marla Nelson analyzed the performance of a similar house swap program, Project Home Again, which was implemented in post–Katrina New Orleans. The program sought to reconcentrate the population away from disinvested, low-lying areas of the city. But despite a $22 million private donation and considerable public buy-in, the program was successful at relocating fewer than 100 households. A good-faith attempt to reconcentrate distressed neighborhood residents in Detroit would likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars. See Marla Nelson, “Using Land Swaps to Concentrate Redevelopment and Expand Resettlement Options in post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans,” Journal of the American Planning Association 80, no. 4 (2014): 426–437. U-SNAP-BAC is a consortium of community organizations in the city’s east side. The acronym stands for “United Streets Networking and Planning; Building A Community.” DBRTF, Every Neighborhood Has a Future. “Triage” language is found on page 101. Demolition targets are found on page 94. DBRTF, Every Neighborhood Has a Future, 235. Andrew Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). City of Flint, Michigan, Imagine Flint: Master Plan for a Sustainable Flint, 2013, http://www.imagineflint.com/, accessed 10 June 2018, 3. Imagine Flint, 5. Imagine Flint, 35.

7. Saving the City to Kill It 4 273 26. Imagine Flint, 73. 27. The census tract encompassing most of Area Six is over 97 percent African American. 28. Imagine Flint, 45. 29. Imagine Flint, 45. 30. Imagine Flint, 68. 31. Imagine Flint, 83. 32. Imagine Flint, 103. 33. Imagine Flint, 167. 34. Imagine Flint, 92. 35. City of Rochester, Project Green: From Blight to Bright (Rochester, NY: City of Rochester, 2009), http://www.cityofrochester.gov/article .aspx?id=8589941695, accessed 1 March 2011, 8. 36. City of Rochester, Project Green, 14. 37. Project Green, 8. 38. Project Green, 20. 39. Project Green, 13. 40. Project Green, 20. 41. Project Green, 20. 42. Project Green, 26. 43. Project Green, 12–13. 44. City of Saginaw, Michigan, City of Saginaw Master Plan, 2011, http:// www.saginaw-mi.com/pdfs/city-of-saginaw-master-plan-2011.pdf. 45. City of Saginaw, Michigan, City of Saginaw Annual Action Plan 2014– 2015, http://www.saginaw-mi.com/pdfs/2014-2015-Draft-Annual-Action -Plan.pdf. 46. Saginaw Master Plan, 12. 47. Saginaw Master Plan, 43. 48. Saginaw Master Plan, 74. 49. City of Saginaw, City of Saginaw Annual Action Plan, 3. 50. Saginaw Master Plan, 78. 51. Saginaw Master Plan, 74. 52. Saginaw Master Plan, 75. 53. Saginaw Master Plan, 85. 54. Justin Hollander, Karina Pallagst, Terry Schwarz, and Frank Popper, “Planning Shrinking Cities,” Progress in Planning 72, no. 4 (2009): 223–232; Laura Schatz, “Decline-Oriented Urban Governance in

274 4 7. Saving the City to Kill It

55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

Youngstown, Ohio,” in The City After Abandonment, ed. Margaret Dewar and June Manning Thomas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 87–103. City of Youngstown, Youngstown 2010 Citywide Plan (Youngstown, OH: City of Youngstown, 2005), http://www.cityofyoungstownoh .com/about_youngstown/youngstown_2010/plan/plan.aspx, accessed 1 March 2011, 7. Youngstown 2010 Citywide Plan, 7. Youngstown 2010 Citywide Plan, 18. Youngstown 2010 Citywide Plan, 18. Youngstown 2010 Citywide Plan, 50. Youngstown 2010 Citywide Plan, 79. Youngstown 2010 Citywide Plan, 79. Youngstown 2010 Citywide Plan, 148.

CONCLUSION: URBAN DECLINE WAS PLANNED 1. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944). 2. Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007 [1960]), 57. Emphasis in original. 3. Polanyi, The Great Transformation. 4. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 147. 5. Jason Hackworth, “Urban Decline Is Not Natural,” Metropolitics, April 11, 2017, https://www.metropolitiques.eu/Urban-Decline-Is-Not-Natural .html. 6. Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell, “Neoliberalizing Space” Antipode 34 (2002): 380–404. 7. Jordan Buie, “Senate Passes Bill that Would Punish Cities for Removing Historical Monuments,” The Tennessean, April 25, 2018, https://www .tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2018/04/25/tennessee-confederate -monuments-memphis-statues/549760002/; John Russell and Adam Klasfeld, “Six States, NYC Sue DOJ over Sanctuary City Funding Threat,” Courthouse News Service, July 18, 2018, https://www .courthousenews.com/six-states-nyc-sue-doj-over-sanctuary-city -funding-threat/. 8. Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative, 55; Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).

Conclusion 4 275 9. Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York: Viking, 2017). 10. Goldwater, Conscience of a Conservative. 11. Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 12. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, 16. 13. Ayn Rand, “Racism,” The Objectivist Newsletter 2, no. 9 (1963): 33–36, at 36. 14. Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 15. Blyth, Great Transformations. 16. Harry Girvetz, The Evolution of Liberalism (New York: Collier, 1963). 17. Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Random House, 2007); Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 18. Jason Stahl, Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Political Culture Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). 19. David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (New York: Verso, 2012). 20. Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 4. 21. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); Susan Fainstein, The Just City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 22. Fainstein, The Just City. 23. Harvey, Spaces of Hope.

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INDEX

abandonment, land. See demolitions; land abandonment abortion, 22 affirmative action, 216 African American rights, x American Enterprise Institute, 10, 95, 224 American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC), 122–23, 132 Anderson, Elijah, 55 anticolonial movements, 220 anticommunism, 23 apartheid, urban, 17 arson, 14–15, 134, 136, 147, 189; and demolitions, 162, 165–66 Atwater, Lee, 72 audit studies on discrimination, 58–59 austerity, government, 9, 12–13, 21–22, 24, 52, 61, 64–65, 112, 114; as response to urban problems (austerity urbanism), 123–24, 130, 188–90, 211 Baldwin, James, 164 Baltimore, Maryland, 29

bankruptcy laws, 214 banks and banking, 53, 155 Baum, Dan, 79 Becker, Gary, 44 Belle Isle, Detroit, 104, 154; race riot (1943), 109 Benediktsson, Mike, 169 Berlin, Isaiah, 220–22 Bertrand, Marianne, 60 Bing, Dave, 186, 196 Black Lives Matter, 83 black municipal politicians, 44, 50–55, 61, 227 Black Reconstruction, x–xi blight, urban, 6, 160–61, 166–67, 211, 261–62; definition, 232, 265–66; “spot blight measures,” 148, 262; in Detroit, 197 Blight Elimination Program, 167–68 Block, Fred, 7 block grants, 164 Bloomington, Indiana, 171 Blumer, Herbert, 16 Blyth, Mark, 10, 96, 224–25 Bobo, Lawrence, 17–18, 21 bonding capital, 246

308 4 Index Bretton Woods, 9 bridging capital, 246 Brookings Institution, 8–9 Brown v. Board of Education, xii Buckley, William F., 65 Buick, David, 105 building codes, 148 Bush, President George H. W., 78, 80, 84 Bush, President George W., 66, 84 Camden, New Jersey, 124–25 capital, bonding and bridging, 246 capital flight, 15, 25–26, 36, 53–54, 61, 117. See also white flight carding, 41 Carter, President James ( Jimmy), 74–75, 82–83, 247 casinos, 103, 130 Cato Institute, 10, 96, 104, 188, 218, 226, 252 Center for Community Progress (CCP), 154, 158 Charles, J. Brian, 81 Charlotte Street, New York City, visit by Ronald Reagan, 74–77, 150 Charlottesville, Virginia, 84 Chicago, Illinois: black urban settlements, 50; demolitions, 171; gentrification, 48; ghettos, 45; Trump rhetoric about crime in, ix, 80, 84; urban renewal, 174 Cincinnati, Ohio, 2, 19, 50, 91–92 City Limits, 118 City of Saginaw Master Plan, 204–5 Civil Rights Act (1964), 69, 71, 246; and conservative ideology, 220–21 civil rights legislation, 25, 49

civil rights movement (CRM), xii, 24, 56, 74, 85, 220, 226; and housing law, 81–82; and Jim Crow racism, 17; and the Democratic Party, 23, 89; and the Republican Party, 76–77, 83; U.S. voting patterns before and after, 32, 92–94 Civil War, xii Clarke, David, 84 Cleveland, Ohio, 26, 123, 136, 224; black mayors, 54; black urban settlements, 50; casinos, 130; deindustrialization, 35, 215; demographics, 47, 52, 89; drugs, 131; ghettos, 45; housing loss and land abandonment, 41, 145, 155, 157; infrastructure, 137; municipal spending, 4; unemployment, 19; urban renewal, 174 Clinton, Hillary, 82 Clinton, President Bill, 81–83 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 46–47 cocaine, 56–57 colonialism, 220 Columbus, Ohio, 91–92, 129, 159, 236 community gardens, 139, 141, 158 Community Reinvestment Act (1977), 46, 240 Confederate monuments, removal of, 22, 119, 121, 217, 255 Conscience of a Conservative, 213 Conservative movement, 10, 20–27, 63, 213, 217–19; attitudes towards government, 219–20; controls on cities, 120–33; growth of, 63–66; organizations and think-tanks, 22, 96–97; relationship to racial threat, 25–26; relationship to urban decline, 26

Index 4 309 covenants, restrictive, 41, 45–46, 164, 238 Curley, James, 109–10 Curley effect, 107–11 Cuyahoga County, Ohio, 19 Cuyahoga River fire, 99 Data Driven Detroit, 194, 196 Dayton, Ohio, 2, 19, 25, 89–92, 96 death penalty, 83 defensive localism, 51 deindustrialization, xiii, 35, 61, 122, 138 Democratic Party and Democrats, 2, 8–9, 85; and the American South, 23, 68–70, 73; and civil rights, 23, 70, 89; conservatives in, 66, 126; Democratic presidents, 81–83; hostility to social assistance, 81; policies on crime, 56, 63, 83; voting patterns, 71, 89, 92 demographic patterns, in the Rust Belt, Midwest, and South, 85–87 demolitions, 14–15, 160–85, 191, 211; effects of, 270; and market change, 175–79, 183; as organized deprivation, 182–84; reasons for pursuing, 184–85; and social marginality, 180–83. See also land abandonment; rightsizing Department of Housing and Urban Development, 58 deprivationist policies, 12–13, 20–21, 85, 112, 223 deregulation, 6, 21, 70; land market, 114, 138, 159, 228; mortgage, 26 desegregation, 47, 68, 71; of the army, xii, 69; schools, 216 Desmond, Matthew, 48–49, 224

Detroit, xiii, 2, 4, 25, 29, 47, 77, 86, 89; in the 1970s, 5; bankruptcy, 103, 186; black leadership in, 51, 54; black urban settlements, 50; bus system, 52; conservative ideas and, 26, 96–114; deindustrialization, 35; demographics, 47; demolitions, land abandonment, and rightsizing in, 5, 14–15, 27, 130, 160, 193–97, 268–69; drugs in, 131; ghettos, 45; media coverage of, 97–99; population loss, 103; and presidential campaigns, 77–78; racial violence in, 109–10; voting patterns, 92 Detroit Blight Removal Task Force, 161, 196–97 Detroit Future City (organization), 141, 145, 187 Detroit Future City (publication), 186–88, 194–97 Detroit Residential Parcel Survey, 268 Detroit Water Service (DWS), 124 deurbanization, 187 Devos, Betsy, 125 Diamond and Silk, 84–85 discrimination: in employment, 58–61; in housing, 47, 58–59; informal, 45; legal, 61 disinvestment. See capital flight displacement, and rightsizing, 195, 205, 210–11 Dixiecrats, 73 Dog-whistle politics, 23, 52, 72, 84–86; applied to racial issues, 66–67; by conservatives, 26; by Republicans, 92; and social assistance, 81

310 4 Index Dole, Bob, 78 Downs, Anthony, 187 downsizing, 195. See also rightsizing drug trade, 166, 244. See also cocaine; heroin Du Bois, W. E. B., x–xii Duggan, Mike, 106–7, 160, 196 Dukakis, Michael, 80 Duke, David, 78 East Chicago, Illinois, 171 East St. Louis, Illinois, 28, 35, 47, 171 Economic Policy Institute, 226 education, 124–26, 129; rates, 181–82. See also schools egalitarianism, 213 Eisenhower, President Dwight, 71 eminent domain, 126–29, 157, 165, 216; and land abandonment, 144–45, 149–52 Engels, Friedrich, 99 Environmental Protection Agency, 99 environmental regulation, 213 Ehrlichman, John, 79 Every Neighborhood Has a Future, 194, 196–97 Evicted, 224 expressways, 47, 163–64 extreme housing loss neighborhoods (EHLNs), 162, 268; definition, 238, 270; in the Rust Belt, 170–82, 189 Fainstein, Susan, 228 Fair Housing Act (1968), 69, 81–82, 240 Faith-Based Initiative, 22, 66 Federal Housing Administration, 108 federal relationship with cities, 120–21

Ferguson, Missouri, 48, 55 financial control boards, 123 fines, municipal, 55 Flint, Michigan, 91, 124, 126, 130, 167; rightsizing in, 197–200; water crisis, 256–57 Ford, Henry, 105–6 foreclosures, 6 foreign buyers of distressed property, 147 Fox News, 10, 95, 224 free trade, 21–22 freedoms, positive and negative, 220–22 Friedman, Milton, 21, 225 Friesema, Paul, 51–52 futility thesis, 102 Garvin, Eugenia, 166 Gary, Indiana, 28; black leadership in, 54; black urban settlements, 50; deindustrialization, 215; demographics, 47; housing loss, 171; voting patterns, 2, 25; and white flight, 43 gay marriage, 22 General Motors (GM), 54, 127, 165 Genesee County, Michigan, 146 Genesee County Land Bank, 167 Geolytics Neighborhood Change Database, 237 George Mason University, 95 gerrymandering, 56, 86–87 ghettos, 45–46, 55–56 Gilbert, Dan, 168, 196 Gingrich, Newt, 104, 154 Glaeser, Edward, 44, 105–7, 109–11, 252 globalization, 215 Goldwater, Barry, 64, 71, 213, 219, 221

Index 4 311 Grand Rapids, Michigan, 262 Great Depression, 10 Great Migration, 17, 25, 45, 47, 50, 68, 108 Great Recession, 182, 186 Great Transformation, The, 214 green city rhetoric, 191, 209 green infrastructure, 223 greenways, 188–89 group position theory, 17 “growth machine,” 43, 139, 151, 190 Hardest Hit Fund, 167 Hartsfield Airport, 54 Harvey, David, 8, 149, 233 Hatch, Megan, 132 Hayek, Friedrich, 21, 64, 153, 225 Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, 84 Heidelberg Street, Detroit, 134–36, 138, 143–45, 151–52 Heritage Foundation, 10, 226–27 heroin, 57, 79 Highland Park, Michigan, 171 Hinton, Elizabeth, 20, 82 Hirschman, Albert, 100, 251–52 Hollander, Justin, 169 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (1975), 46, 53, 59, 240 HOME program, 263 Hoover, President Herbert, 64, 67 HOPE VI, 165, 269 Horton, Willie, 80 house swapping, 195–96, 272 housing: law, 81; markets, 35, policy, 216; rights, 213. Housing Act: of 1949, 108, 163, 174; of 1954, 163, 174; of 1968, 46, 58 Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Department of (HUD), 81–82

housing loss. See demolitions; extreme housing loss neighborhoods; land abandonment; moderate housing loss neighborhoods human-capital theory, 102–3 Hwang, Jackelyn, 48 ideational school of policy production, 10 Imagine Flint, 198 incarceration rates and policies, 18, 20, 56–57, 82 Indianapolis, Indiana, 91 Industrial Green zoning category, 207 infrastructure, urban, 124, 209–10, 214 inner cities, 13, 15, 29, 48, 53–54, 87, 124, 157, 184, 217; “pathological inner city” rhetoric, 56–57, 67, 76, 79–80, 82, 86, 92, 95, 96, 218, 228 Institute for Justice, 127–28 institutionalism, 8–9 investors, predatory, 6, 46, 132–33, 144–46, 148, 159 Jackson, Maynard, 54 Jacobs, Jane, 164 jeopardy thesis, 102 Jim Crow laws, xi–xii, 17–18, 76, 78 John Birch Society, 66 John Olin Center for Law Economics and Public Policy, 251 Johnson, President Lyndon B., 1–2, 69, 71, 246 Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 226 Kalamazoo, Michigan, 91 Kelo, Susette, 128, 151 Kerner Commission (1968), 1–5, 223

312 4 Index Keynesian managerialism, 8–10, 68, 226; city-level, 54; rejection of, 8, 64, 96–97, 112, 190, 216, 224. See also New Deal Kinder, Kim, 166 King, Martin Luther Jr., 2 Kirkpatrick, Lucas Owen, 195 Koch, Charles, 127 Kohl, Herb, 257 Kornberg, Dana, 124 Korver-Glenn, Elizabeth, 59 Kraus, Neil, 43 Kresge Foundation, 194 Ku Klux Klan, 78, 84–85 Kye, Samuel, 48 labor, 226; laws, 122, 213; unions, 106, 190 laissez-faire economics, 10, 214 laissez-faire racism (LFR), 18–21, 24, 26, 158 land: banking, 147–48, 154–57; expropriation, 126–29; investment, 4. See also eminent domain; land abandonment land abandonment, 14, 39, 134–40, 189; entrepreneurial and tax-based approaches, 149–53; managerial approaches, 146–49; market-only approaches, 153–57; nonmarket approaches, 140–45; policies intended to counter, 139–40. See also demolitions landlord regulation, 216 landlord-tenant imbalances, 131–32 LaCroix, Catherine, 143–44 liberty. See freedoms Linneman, Peter, 154 “local control,” myth of, 7 localism, defensive, 51

Lockwood, Rodney, 104, 154 Lott, Trent, 78 low income housing tax credits (LIHTC), 141, 263 Lucas County, Ohio, 142 Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 97, 155, 188, 245 Macomb County, Michigan, 52, 91 Manafort, Paul, 247 Manhattan Institute, 3, 10, 96, 252 manufactured decline, purpose of, 112–14 market-only approaches to land abandonment, 153–57 Marxism, xi, 11 master plans, municipal, 191–93 mayors, black. See municipal politicians, black Medicaid, 19, 22 Meigs County, Ohio, 19 Memphis, Tennessee, 217, 255 Midwest, unionized workers in, 86; demographic patterns in, 87 migration of black people to northern cities. See Great Migration military interventions, 22 Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 48–49, 130, 224, 257 minimum wage, 26, 122, 216 Mises, Ludwig von, 153 Model Cities Program, 2, 218 Moderate Housing Loss Neighborhoods (MHLNs), 171–73, 175 Morial, Marc, 54 mortgages, 53; contract, 46; discrimination, 59; insurance, 47; markets, deregulation of, 6; rules, 108

Index 4 313 Moses, Robert, 164 Moving Ohio Forward Program, 167 Mugabe, Robert, 44 Mullainathan, Sendhil, 60 municipal bonds, 151–53 municipal politicians, black, 44, 50–55, 61, 227 myth-busting, 227

Olasky, Marvin, 66 Olin, John, 251 Ontario, comparison with Rust Belt, 39, 41–42 OPEC oil embargo, 9 organized deprivation, 96, 99; defined, 5, 11; factors in, 10–12 Overton, Joseph, 245 Overton window, 63, 245

NAACP, 78 Nader, Ralph, 257 National Guard, 109 National League of Cities, 121 National Review, 65 National Urban League, 74, 247 Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP), 167, 260–61 Nelson, Marla, 272 Nemeth, Jeremy, 169 neoliberalism, 7–11, 21–24, 216; tenets of, 64–65 Neshoba County, Mississippi, 77 New Deal, 9, 23, 31, 63, 65–68, 70, 92; and demolitions, 163; opposition to, 85. See also Keynesian managerialism New London, Connecticut, 165 New Orleans, Louisiana, 124–26, 272 New York City, 5–6, 74, 123, 187 Newark, New Jersey, 124 Nixon, President Richard, 2–3, 71–72, 79, 82, 120; “Southern Strategy,” 72

Pager, Devah, 58–60 “pathological inner city” rhetoric, 56–57, 67, 76, 79–80, 82, 86, 92, 95–96, 218, 228 Peck, Jamie, 215–16 penal system, 214 Perkins, Kristin, 36 perversity thesis, 100, 102 Peterson, Paul, 118–19, 254 Philadelphia, Mississippi, 73–74 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 27–28, 125, 130 Philadelphia Negro, The, x Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 84 planning, municipal, 191–93 Polanyi, Karl, 8, 137, 214, 226 Poletown, Detroit, Michigan, 54, 127, 165, 257 policing, 45, 56, 129; targeted, 61; zero-tolerance, 17, 217 Porter, Michael, 53–54 Powell, Colin, 84 Powell, Lewis, 9–10 Powell Memorandum (1971), 9–10, 225–26 predatory investors. See investors, predatory preemption laws, 121–22 prisons, 129, 131. See also incarceration

Obama, President Barack, ix, 83, 122, 128 Occupy Wall Street, 227 official plans, municipal, 191–93

314 4 Index private sector, role in urban decline, 75 Project Green, 200–203 property rights, 128 property standards enforcement, 148 property taxes, 122, 149–50 public choice theory, 102–4, 117–19, 132, 218 racial proxy theory, 42–43, 48, 61 racial realignment, 67–71, 85–95 racially mixed housing, policies to prevent, 46 racism, 10, 66, 226; in the 1960s, 1; de jure, 36, 45–47; denial of, 42; in Detroit, 107; laissez-faire racism (LFR), 18–21, 24, 26, 158; racial animus, 16, 18, 20–21, 43–44, 50, 61, 67; racial threat theory, 16–17; relationship to conservative movement, 25–26; and rightsizing, 190–91; and urban decline, 25, 35–36, 43, 45, 89 Rand, Ayn, 21–22, 44, 104, 153, 221 Raspberry, William, 73 Reagan, President Ronald, 10, 64, 72–77, 80, 120, 150 “Reagan Democrats,” 92 real estate industry and realtors, 59, 108, 149, 155–56, 222 reconstruction, xi, 11; Second, 69 redlining, 53, 112, 158, 164 renters, penalization of, 130–32 Republican Party and Republicans: black support for, 69; changes to Medicaid in Ohio, 19; Civil Rights Movement, 32, 71, 92, 94; conservative movement, 63–64; efforts to reject racism, 78–79;

gerrymandering, 57; opposition to New Deal, 9, 23, 70; President Trump, 83–85: racism, xiii, 24, 69, 76–77, 80–81, 89, 92; “Southern Strategy,” 86, 91; states’ rights rhetoric, 73; urban policy, 113, 121–23, 126, 138, 185 restrictive covenants, 41, 45–46, 164, 238 Reuther, Walter, 106 Rice, Condoleezza, 84 Rice, Glenda, 196 rightsizing, 4–5, 13, 20, 130, 188–212; as austerity urbanism, 189–90; definition of, 188; purposes of 189; selected examples of, 191–208; as spatial austerity, 208–12 Riis, Jacob, 99 Riley, Jason, 3–4 Rivers, Francis, 70 Robin, Corey, 23 Rochester, New York, 200–203 Romney, George, 81–82 Roosevelt, President Franklin D., 31, 64, 67–68, 70 “ruin porn,” 15 Rust Belt: characteristics, 28–31; definition, 27–28, 250; demographic features, 86, 95; house value change, 40; income change, 38; land abandonment, 39–42; population change, 37, 39; voting patterns, 87–95, 177 Rybczynski, Witold, 154 Saginaw, Michigan, 130, 203–6 Saginaw County Land Bank, 205

Index 4 315 Sampson, Robert, 36, 48 Sances, Michael, 55 sanctuary-city statutes, 217 schools, 2, 51, 144, 150, 227; charter, 125; closures, 75; desegregation, 216; funding, 100, 113; takeovers, 126. See also education section 8, 141, 263 segregation, ethnoracial, 79, 180, 189; housing, 47, 49, 59. See also Jim Crow laws sentencing, judicial, 56–57, 243 Service Employees International Union, 226 Shepherd, Hana, 59 Shleifer, Andrei, 44, 109 Show-Me Institute, 97, 155 Smith, Linda, 196 Smith, Neil, 231 Snyder, Rick, 256–57 Social Security, 22, 68, 246. See also social welfare social welfare, 64–65, 102, 129; dismantling of, 65–66; election campaign platforms, 80–81 Somers, Margaret, 7 Souls of Black Folk, The, x South Bend, Indiana, 132 “Southern Strategy,” 86, 91 Spalding, Audrey, 155 Springfield, Illinois, 171 St. Louis, Missouri, 28, 41, 45, 48, 145, 155 stadium construction, 129–30 stagflation, 9 Stahl, Bruce, 155 Stahl, Jason, 9 Stansel, Dean, 104 Starr, Roger, 187, 232

state relationship with cities, 52, 120–21, 129–30 states’ rights, 69, 71–73 Stone, Roger, 74, 247 Strather, Herb, 147 structuralism, 8–9 suburbanites, 25, 51–52, 94, 124, 222. See also white flight Sugrue, Thomas, 108 Swanstrom, Todd, 43 takings clause (of U.S. Constitution), 144, 159, 261 Talen, Emily, 174 Tanner, Michael, 104 tax: anticipation notes, 150; assessments, 150; ceilings, 216, 218; districts, 150, 152; foreclosures, 6, 142–43, 146–48, 156, 165, 167; policies 21–22; reversion, 143 tax increment financing, 150, 218 Tea Party, 122, 128, 154 Thatcher, Margaret, 10, 64 Thomas, Clarence, 84 Thurmond, Strom, 69, 78 Tickell, Adam, 215–16 Tiebout, Charles, 103, 117–19 Toledo, Ohio, xiv, 142 transit, urban, 51–52 triage, as urban policy, 5, 169, 187, 190, 197 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, 99 Truman, President Harry, 69 Trump, President Donald, 83, 95, 122; attack on housing rights, 82; campaign rhetoric, 22, 77–80; election of, ix–x; racism, xii, 83–85

316 4 Index U.S. Census, 268 unemployment rates, 9, 18–19, 180–81 unionization rates, 32, 106 United Auto Workers, 106 urban decline, 14, 20; association with racism, 16, 25; defined and described, 13–15. See also capital flight; demolitions; land abandonment; white flight urban policy, formation of, 6–7 urban renewal (1960s and 1970s), 2, 4–6, 64, 171, 190, 269; creation of, 99; eminent domain, 126–28; emphasis on demolition, 109, 160, 162–63, 165, 189; impact of, 174–75, 183, 189; legacy, 195, 201, 205, 210–11; opposition to, 164, 169–70 vacancy rates, 178 vacant housing, relationship to disorder, 169–70. See also blight, urban; urban decline vacant land, public ownership of, 142–43 Vietnam War, 2, 9 voter suppression, 20, 32 voting patterns, in the Rust Belt, 31–32 Voting Rights Act (1965), 69, 83

Walker, Scott, 257 Wallace, George, 2, 71–72, 76, 250; support from the Rust Belt, 89, 91–92 War on Drugs, 82 War on Poverty, 2, 218 Wayne County, Michigan, 142, 127. See also Detroit Wayne State University, 107 welfare. See Social Security; social welfare Wells Fargo, 53 West, Kanye, 84–85 white flight, 36, 42–53, 61, 75, 117, 227; in the 1970s, 122; in Detroit, 112, 124, 138. See also capital flight white supremacy, xii, 228 White, Michael, 174 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 70 You, Hye, 55 Young, Coleman, 44, 54, 107, 109–11, 124, 127 Youngstown, Ohio, 206–8 Youngstown 2010 Citywide Plan, 206 zero-tolerance policing, 17, 217 zoning codes, 143–44, 149–50