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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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MAR
22
Legal Services of Eastern Michigan Inaugural Fair Housing Conference
by Legal Services of Eastern Michigan Fair Housing Center
$0 – $35
Actions and Detail Panel
Tickets
Event Information
Description
Legal Services of Eastern Michigan Fair Housing Center is excited to announce our Inaugural Fair Housing Conference at the University of Michigan-Flint Northbank Center on Friday, March 22, 2019.
Speakers include Andrew Highsmith-author of 'Demolition Means Progress: Flint, MI and the Fate of the American Metropolis', Michael Steinberg-Legal Director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, Samuel Bagenstos-former Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under President Obama, Dan Levy-Director of Law and Policy at the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, as well as representatives from the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Michigan Poverty Law Program, Equality Michigan, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Michigan Advocacy Program, the Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness, and more!
Breakfast and lunch will be provided. A book sale/signing will also take place following our Keynote Speaker, author Andrew Highsmith, in partnership with Barnes & Noble.
Registration: $25 for early-bird registration before February 22, 2019, $35 thereafter, FREE for University of Michigan students and faculty. Scholarships also available.
Contact kstanley@lsem-mi.org for more information.
Last edited by untanglingwebs on Tue Jan 01, 2019 5:01 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Sat Dec 29, 2018 12:16 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Ward on Highsmith, 'Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan and the Fate of the American Metropolis'
Author:
Andrew R. Highsmith
Reviewer:
Brandon M. Ward
Andrew R. Highsmith. Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan and the Fate of the American Metropolis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 398 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-05005-8.
Reviewed by Brandon M. Ward (Perimeter College, Georgia State University) Published on H-Midwest (March, 2018) Commissioned by Patrick A. Pospisek (Grand Valley State University)
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=46792
After General Motors (GM) announced plant closures in the late 1990s, placards hanging outside the shuttered factories read, “Demolition Means Progress.” Andrew R. Highsmith found the signs an apt metaphor for more than seven decades of tortuous efforts to revitalize Flint, Michigan, the Vehicle City. Spanning the Great Depression to the present, Highsmith delivers a wide-ranging exploration of the Herculean efforts to create a prosperous, thriving metropolis—and the inequalities produced by these efforts. At the heart of Demolition Means Progress is Highsmith’s contention that urban renewal consistently created or hardened segregation and inequality. Pushing back against the popular narrative of urban decay and despair, Highsmith writes, “the driving forces in Flint’s past … have always been renewal and reinvention more than decline and abandonment” (p. 6). Chapters explore familiar topics in post-World War II urban history, including Jim Crow on the shop floor and in the streets, residential segregation, educational inequalities, and discriminatory housing policies, but Highsmith weaves these familiar components together under the rubric of urban renewal, in the process creating an original and groundbreaking interpretation of metropolitan development and inequality.
Every renewal effort in the city and suburbs entailed a redistribution of resources—opportunities for segregation to shape the contours of the metropolis. Some of the first renewal efforts aimed at modernizing the ramshackle and unsanitary working-class suburbs, areas which had been redlined and excluded from Federal Housing Authority loans. General Motors engaged in many renewal efforts, creating new production facilities and shaping urban policy. Known by black activists as “GM Crow,” the company created racial inequalities on the shop floor and failed to intervene in patterns of residential segregation (p. 101). GM’s decision to locate new facilities in the suburbs during the 1950s marked not an abandonment of Flint, but an act of confidence that the company could leverage its political power to create metropolitan governance through incorporation of suburbs into the central city in the “Flint Plan.” It was to be put before voters in 1958, yet the Michigan Supreme Court rejected the legality of the ballot proposal, signaling an end of the “metropolitan moment” and marking a significant turning point toward metropolitan fragmentation. In this and other examples, Highsmith challenges the regional models of corporate abandonment and capital flight from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt familiar from many histories of Midwestern cities.
Highsmith explores the consequences of housing policies, school administration, the development of pro-growth “suburban capitalism,” highway development, and GM’s renewal efforts in creating a greatly unequal and fractured metropolis. Efforts to revitalize the central city had destructive outcomes for the black residents of the city. Despite initially supporting the lofty promises of regeneration for the city, African Americans shouldered the burden of the bulldozer and its unfulfilled promises of slum clearance and highway development. Such destructive strategies destroyed black wealth in the city and left them vulnerable to the whims of a discriminatory housing market and predatory loans. Suburbanites organized to stop the development of affordable housing as “part of a much broader campaign for complete secession from Flint and its problems” and effectively relegated integrated housing to small pockets of the suburbs (p. 221). GM’s financial struggles in the 1970s and beyond further fractured the metropolis, as the company sought renewal through tax breaks, which would lead the Flint’s first black mayor to declare, “We are not going to balance GM’s budget on the backs of our school children” (p. 251). Well-intentioned but misguided efforts like the AutoWorld shopping center and theme park, opened in 1984, failed to deliver tourists to the Vehicle City, yet one more example of the failed promise of urban renewal. Despite the overwhelming challenges, Highsmith shows the resilience of ordinary Flint residents who continued to work for the renewal of their homes and neighborhoods.
Throughout the analysis, Highsmith demonstrates the manifestation of segregationist policies, laws, and attitudes in virtually every facet of urban renewal. Matthew Lassiter and other urban historians have urged scholars to abandon the misleading terms de facto and de jure segregation for their mischaracterization of the way segregation operates.[1] Highsmith replaces the old lexicon by proposing new categories for understanding and interpreting the phenomena: legal segregation, administrative segregation, and popular segregation. Legal refers to segregation resulting from laws and judicial mandates; administrative refers to segregation related to the state’s programs, policies, and application of bureaucratic powers; and popular refers to the segregation deriving from “nonstatist forces and actors” (p. 9). Of course, overlap and mutual reinforcement of the different types were the norm, and Highsmith unravels their development in Flint.
A central achievement of Demolition Means Progress is Highsmith’s deft analysis of the educational system in Flint as a primary driver of residential segregation. Where most urban historians have blamed residential segregation primarily on federal housing policies, the racist block-busting practices of real estate agents, and the hostile treatment of African Americans by (often highly organized) white neighborhood residents, Highsmith includes these factors while simultaneously shifting the focus to the role of school officials and philanthropic institutions like the local Mott Foundation. Educational gerrymandering ensured both class and racial homogeneity in the schools, a pattern repeated in the neighborhoods of the Flint region. Segregated schools were not merely a consequence of residential segregation, but rather were an important contributor.
Highsmith has little to say about policing and its relationship to urban renewal, missing an opportunity to examine the extent to which law and order policies figured into efforts to “clean up” and revitalize neighborhoods. In many cities, like New York and Detroit, a criminal justice approach was never far removed from renewal efforts, but any analysis of this dimension is absent from the book. I mention this not to criticize Demolition Means Progress but to indicate an opportunity for further scholarship that Highsmith’s work has opened.
Historians of Midwestern cities will find much of value in Demolition Means Progress. Cities large and small surely demonstrate many of the same processes at work as those in Flint, particularly faith in urban renewal and overlapping modes of segregation. The recent Flint water crisis is yet one more manifestation of a renewal effort gone disastrously awry. Demolition Means Progress suggests that it likely will not be the last, and Highsmith provides an essential framework for better understanding the roots of metropolitan crises.
Note
[1]. See especially Matthew D. Lassiter, “De Jure/De Facto Segregation: The Long Shadow of a National Myth,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Mathew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 25-48.
Citation: Brandon M. Ward. Review of Highsmith, Andrew R., Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan and the Fate of the American Metropolis. H-Midwest, H-Net Reviews. March, 2018. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46792
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |
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Sat Dec 29, 2018 12:18 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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December 4, 2018 at 9:39 AM ·
Mark your calendar: Let's talk about it with the author Andrew R. Highsmith; "Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis." Saturday, January 12, 11am-1pm, Flint Public Library. Presented by Community Read, Flint and Genesee Literacy Network and the University of Michigan Flint with support from Flint ReCAST. |
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Tue Jan 01, 2019 5:00 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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East Village Magazine
Highsmith: Flint “starkly segregated, racially unequal” even in its “drive toward renewal”
Home»Analysis»Highsmith: Flint “starkly segregated, racially unequal” even in its “drive toward renewal”
Posted on Jan 12, 2019
By Jan Worth-Nelson
At first blush, historian and author Andrew Highsmith told a rapt and appreciative audience of 70 at the Flint Public Library Saturday, the Flint of 1954, when General Motors sponsored an extravaganza called the Golden Carnival, the city was “perched on top of the industrial world.”
On that November day when 150,000 people lined Saginaw Street for a parade featuring a gold-plated Chevy BelAir and GM president Harlow Curtis announced a $3 million gift to fund the city’s cultural center, it seemed Flint was the nexus of “a golden age of sorts for American capitalism and prosperity.” The city was, after all, the home of close to a quarter million people, with 80,ooo employed by GM, with impressive wages, low unemployment and nationally-recognized public education.
However, Highsmith asserted, “Although the splendor of the day made it difficult to detect,” that event concealed just as much as it revealed.”
“Beneath the shine of the Golden Carnival, Flint was a profoundly segregated and unequal city,” he said, “and the municipal and corporate officials who presided over the days amusements were largely to blame.”
Community Read moderator Todd Womack introduces Andrew Highsmith Saturday at the Flint Public Library (Photo by Jan Worth-Nelson)
That story–“Flint being one of the most starkly segregated and racially unequal metropolitan areas in the entire nation,” — continues to this day. Three successive maps on a screen for the audience to see–from 1950, 1980 and 2010–made continuing “hyper-segregation” of African-Americans visually unmistakable.
Highsmith is the author of Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan and the Fate of the American Metropolis. Now a professor at the University of California at Irvine, Highsmith began his book as a Ph.D. dissertation in 2003 when his wife, a physician, was working in Flint and the couple bought a house on Paducah Street in Mott Park. His talk and visit to Flint were part of the Community Read, a project focusing each year on one book which Flint residents read and discuss at monthly gatherings.
In buying their house, built by GM in 1927, the Highsmiths were given a box of legal papers — among them an old deed restriction set by GM indicating originally the house could only be sold to whites. That discovery propelled him into his research. He noted his wife, who is Indian, was the first person of color to live in the house.
His most significant finding, he said, was the history, persistence and contributing factors to the “color line,” Highsmith said. Flint’s racial divisions go back a long, long way.
Community Read facilitator and UM – Flint professor Erica Britt helps capture discussion points (Photo by Jan Worth-Nelson)
“Achieving this level of segregation wasn’t easy,” he said. “It required in fact a great deal of effort from a variety of people and institutions. It didn’t just happen naturally, it required hard work. It took widespread use of restrictive housing covenants, it took numerous acts of violence. It took realtors, lenders and builders who did their part by steering AAs away from white neighborhoods.
“But racism in the private marketplace wasn’t enough to maintain Flint’s rigid color lines. In fact, government at all levels played a role too. In the first half of the 20th century in fact, courts routinely enforced racially restrictive deed restrictions, officials from the Federal Housing Association (FHA) also did their part by preventing African-Americans from obtaining home mortgages.
City officials, he contended, maintained the color line through discriminatory education practices, urban renewal, and public housing programs. “In Flint,” he concluded,”racial segregation was public policy for much of the 20th Century.”
Raised in Cincinnati, Highsmith said he grew up with the concept that “in cities of the north, segregation was de facto — prejudice from people’s hearts and minds.
“And yet I found in Flint, there was public policy driving much of that inequity. This led me to believe that we need to jettison the concept of de facto segregation once and for all.”
Following Highsmith’s talk, Community Read committee members divided the audience into eight tables, where small groups were offered two questions and discussed aspects of Highsmith’s book.
While Flint’s story appears to be a very familiar tale of urban decline,” Highsmith said, “the reality is much more complicated–” ironically, sometimes the result of a drive toward renewal.
“Flint’s story is best understood as one of renewal — a history driven by the near-constant and yet unfulfilled struggle to grow the local economy and revitalize the city”–a philosophy, often with dire consequences, that lies behind the slogan “Demolition Means Progress.”
The statement comes from signs GM used to put in front of its shuttered factories, he explained.
“It doesn’t represent my feelings,” he said. “I thought it was a ridiculous corporate slogan, but over time I came to learn that ‘Demolition Means Progress’ was a powerful metaphor for thinking about the city’s history– the operating ethos of the area’s economic and political leaders for most of the 20th and early 21st centuries.
Danielle Brown, program director for the Flint Genesee Literacy Network, leads a small group discussion at the Community Read event, with Tony Palladeno, Nayyirah Shariff and Doug Jones (Photo by Jan Worth-Nelson)
This philosophy not unique to Flint, he said. Many civic and economic leaders “have looked to demolish what they perceived to be old and inefficient structures and institutions and to rebuild them to be more profitable: they demolished poor and African American neighborhoods and replaced them with freeways and public housing,
They tore down old factories, rebuilt them in the suburbs, with “really grave consequences.”
“Civic and political elites ultimately hardened social inequality, making Flint one of the most racially segregated, economically polarized and politically divided metropolitan regions in the United States.
All of it was rooted, he said, in Flint’s “virtually ceaseless quest for revitalization.”
At a Q&A session completing the event, the Flint audience expressed thanks and admiration for Highsmith’s work.
“Your book is the only thing that has grabbed my attention since Mad Magazine,” Eastside activist Tony Palladeno said. “You’ve nailed it so much. We are tired. The people that should be helping us aren’t, and some of us are fighting each other now.”
Community activist and UM – Flint lecturer Laura MacIntyre told him, “People finally feel validated” by the findings of his work.
Anna Clark of Detroit, author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy, came to Flint to meet Highsmith and join in the discussion–here with Highsmith and Flint resident Ray Heddy (Photo by Jan Worth-Nelson)
If he could add anything to his book, Highsmith said, it would be to add a chapter on the Flint water crisis. His manuscript went to the publisher in the spring of 2014, just as Flint switched to river water, and the book came out in the late spring of 2015–just as Flint was starting to make headlines. None of that story appeared in his book.
If he could write that epilogue, he said, the essence of it would be “The Flint water crisis didn’t begin in 2014, and it’s not over yet.”
“We already know a lot about government malfeasance– the contamination of the water supply has been well documented, but there are larger and deeper issues.
“Beyond the misdeeds of officials who triggered this calamity,” he said, “Flint’s crisis is also the product of variety of larger historical forces.” The city’s water and infrastructure troubles also stem from generations of government-sponsored deindustrialization, white flight and disinvestment, forces that have eroded the tax base making it all but impossible to update or even maintain the city’s infrastructure.”
The Community Read project is sponsored by UM – Flint, in collaboration with the Flint Public Library and the Flint Literacy Network. Other books featured have been Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Ta-nehisi Coates Between the World and Me.
The next discussion on Demolition Means Progress is scheduled for 11 a.m to 1 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 9 at the Genesee Valley Center Library. More information available at facebook.com/CommunityReadFlint or 810-232-2526.
EVM Editor Jan Worth-Nelson can be reached at janworth1118@gmail.com. |
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Sun Jan 13, 2019 8:12 am |
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