Originally Posted by
Huggybear
Let me give you the alternative view: Corktown reached the right result.
The blog post above - in the fashion of a lot of people - is to decry urban renewal as some kind of perverse and inhuman desire solely directed at displacing humans. If you are familiar with the blogger's source material, you would understand why from the City's perspective, it made sense at the time - and in an odd way, still does.
1. By 1960, even though its population was in decline, Detroit had no concentrated vacant land on which to build anything that was major economic generator. Detroit also had double-digit unemployment [all of this is also the case now].
2. Years before the riots, Detroit planners concluded that in light of this, the only way to grow the tax base was to redevelop property to a configuration that paid more in taxes and preferably consumed less in services [still true].
3. Where suburbs were successful with commercial/industrial superblocks, where the fastest selling residential property type was on a big lot on a cul-de-sac [[they couldn't slap it up fast enough), and where the migration out validated that this was what businesses and people liked [[Southfield, Warren...), it's hard not to conclude that the "suburban" type of development was the way of the future [and given that suburbs took people from Detroit for the next 50+ years, this was an accurate observation at the time].
4. There was a perception that property occupied by poor people unaccustomed to maintaining houses would be run into the ground [this has been borne out in Detroit's cheapest housing stock, which has been treated as disposable].
5. Lafayette Park was the test case. Nobody was going to stand up for a bunch of poor African Americans, least of all their absentee landlords [[who were probably happy to sell out). When the city discovered that the tax recovery per acre went up more than ten times, with one-third the people, on a superblock with as much as one-third devoted to public space, it was time to go for the next-poorest neighborhood.
6. The federal government was paying big for urban renewal [[I guess out of guilt for redlining, freeway-building and subsidizing suburbanization in a huge way). Black Bottom was wiped out with a federal subsidy of $40 million of today's dollars.
Given the facts, the logic of urban renewal was actually very sound. The displacement of poor people was the part that wasn't really addressed by the small amount of public housing built. But it's also possible that the city couldn't afford to build more at the time.
As to whether this wrecked the neighborhood, subsequent history suggests that Corktown [[and Detroit) may have come out ahead because of it:
1. The West Side Industrial District was a rare major capital investment in an era where people weren't putting money into the city. 1967 did not mark the end of investment; it only made the lack of investment more clear.
2. Given the glut of housing in Detroit, Corktown was actually right-sized. Had it remained a large neighborhood with thousands of residential structures, there is nothing to suggest that there would have been any investment between the 1960s and now that would have kept it up - and we know this because demand and City population were rapidly declining, and housing prices were dropping. You don't have to take my word for it - look at the "good" neighborhoods as of the 1960s - they all have serious challenges [[and have since the 1960s). Given that Corktown was at the bottom end of the market, it probably would have experienced 50 years of creeping decay, abandonment, and arson [[actually, given current experience, a house can be destroyed pretty much in a week's worth of scrapping). Looking like Brush Park or the near east side seems like it would have been the outcome. Cutting Corktown down to its most historic part preserves some part of its past without subjecting it to the indignity of what we would call blight today.
3. The West Side Industrial Zone is an area that was established, acquired, cleared, and infrastructured when the money was available to do it, and eminent domain still existed. Today, it would be pretty much impossible to do - which could put a crimp in industrial redevelopment [[Detroit is awash in brownfields and abandoned factories - the Corktown area has very sound stock by comparison). The siting is actually quite good: near I-75 and I-96, not far from train tracks, and no far from the bridge. It's not as if it were dropped in the middle of Sherwood Forest.
As someone else pointed out, what was torn out may not have been considered historic at the time. Would you consider a boarding house built in 1950 to be historic? - because it's the same analysis that was probably in play then.
We look at things with 20/20 hindsight, a contemporary worldview, and unrealistic assumptions about what might have happened [[especially compared to what actually did happen).
Given economic logic behind 1950s futurism in Detroit, I would speculate that the future of Detroit will look a lot more like those projects - with major consolidations and realignments of land uses - than an attempt to preserve structures that are old but not historically significant. My grandchildren [[if I have them) might wonder what the hell happened between 1968 and 2013 and why Detroit didn't get the job done earlier.
HB