The Destruction of Detroit's Black BottomHow the zeal for government project housing killed a prosperous black community in Detroit.
By Howard Husock
The March 2022 Issue
The clearance of the thriving, legendary African-American neighborhood in Detroit known as Black Bottom, circa 1950, was not caused by natural disaster, gentrifying developers, or a destructive riot by its residents. The slowly gathering public policy that led to its demolition included an element of racial animus in the city's politics, but more than anything, the death of a neighborhood replete with black-owned businesses and owner-occupied property stemmed from the ideas of progressive housing reformers.
They began to build in the 1890s, when Jacob Riis, a New York police reporter deeply versed in sensationalist journalism, portrayed New York's Lower East Side in How the Other Half Lives as nothing but squalid, showing no interest in the vibrant upward mobility of its immigrants.
Riis inspired the now-obscure Johnny Appleseed of American zoning, Lawrence Veiller, who convinced communities across the country that the density that makes housing affordable (without government subsidies) must be limited. The formula that brought housing within the reach of the poor—what Boston settlement house pioneers Robert Woods and Albert Kennedy rightly celebrated as a "zone of emergence"—would be cast aside.
Its replacement—literally in the cases of Detroit's Black Bottom, Chicago's Bronzeville, St. Louis' DeSoto-Carr, and so many other healthy neighborhoods—would be public housing. The "projects" were and still are the rotten fruit that grew from seeds planted by progressive public intellectuals. The premier modernist architect Le Corbusier envisioned high-rise urban campuses without streets or stores. Less well-known but still essential figures in American housing policy history were University of Chicago sociologist Edith Elmer Wood and self-styled reformer Catherine Bauer Wurster.
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Black Bottom ThrivesDetroit's Black Bottom neighborhood provides the perfect prism through which to see the unfortunate ways in which public housing and its close cousin, urban renewal, destroyed African-American institutions and robbed residents of the chance to accumulate wealth. It's a story well told in a lively phone conversation in July 2020 with historian Jamon Jordan, the president of the Detroit chapter of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
Increased appreciation for what was lost when Black Bottom was cleared has led the onetime middle school social studies teacher to a new career. He now works as a tour guide for university and high school groups interested in the handful of buildings (including public schools) that remain of what was once a dynamic community of 130,000, replete with more than 300 black-owned businesses.
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Source:
https://reason.com/2022/02/05/the-destruction-of-black-bottom/
