Manufacturing Decline

How Racism and the Conservative Movement Crush the American Rust Belt

Jason Hackworth

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231550475
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

For decades, the distressed cities of the Rust Belt have been symbols of deindustrialization and postindustrial decay, their troubles cast as the inevitable outcome of economic change. The debate about why the fortunes of cities such as Detroit have fallen looms large over questions of social policy. In Manufacturing Decline, Jason Hackworth offers a powerful critique of the role of Rust Belt cities in American political discourse, arguing that antigovernment conservatives capitalized on—and perpetuated—these cities' misfortunes by stoking racial resentment.

Hackworth traces how the conservative movement has used the imagery and ideas of urban decline since the 1970s to advance their cause. Through a comparative study of shrinking Rust Belt cities, he argues that the rhetoric of the troubled "inner city" has served as a proxy for other social conflicts around race and class. In particular, conservatives have used images of urban decay to craft "dog-whistle" messages to racially resentful whites, garnering votes for the Republican Party and helping justify limits on local autonomy in distressed cities. The othering of predominantly black industrial cities has served as the basis for disinvestment and deprivation that exacerbated the flight of people and capital. Decline, Hackworth contends, was manufactured both literally and rhetorically in an effort to advance austerity and punitive policies. Weaving together analyses of urban policy, movement conservatism, and market fundamentalism, Manufacturing Decline highlights the central role of racial reaction in creating the problems American cities still face.

PART I

OTHERING THE DEPRIVED CITY

1

RACIAL THREAT AND URBAN DECLINE

THE 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.¹ The most common explanation is to pin urban decline on deindustrialization and the lack of economic resilience afterward.² Others, particularly conservatives, emphasize the combination of high taxes and poor services that drives people and capital out of the city.³ Still others emphasize the economic geography of housing markets, particularly central-city house age and obsolescence combined with high levels of suburban house construction.⁴ 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.⁵

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 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) state-sanctioned discrimination, and (5) tolerance of private discrimination. Together these forces have translated into what Kristin Perkins and Robert Sampson have deemed “compounded deprivation.”⁶ 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 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.⁷ 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). 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.

TABLE 1.1 NEIGHBORHOOD POPULATION CHANGE, 1970 TO 2010, CROSS-TABULATED BY PERCENT BLACK IN SELECTED RUST BELT CITIES

Population Change 1970–2010^a	Black Population, 1970				Black Population, 2010
	Median^b	Total^c	Black Maj.^d		Median	Total	Black Maj.
Extreme shrinkage (n = 1,249)	28.7%	46.7%	548		77.9%	60.8%	808
Mild shrinkage (n = 1,250)	0.3%	7.4%	68		18.8%	32.5%	353
Mild growth (n = 402)	0.2%	3.4%	12		8.8%	16.6%	36
Extreme growth (n = 401)	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.

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

Income Level^a	Income Change^b	1970 Black Population				2010 Black Population
		Median^c	Total^d	Black Maj.^e		Median	Total	Black Maj.
Low	Decline (n = 244)	20.2%	43.0%	90		55.1%	50.1%	133
	Stasis (n = 628)	31.1%	49.9%	284		57.6%	50.2%	352
	Growth (n = 44)	6.4%	33.9%	13		14.5%	15.1%	8
Medium	Decline (n = 1,394)	0.4%	14.0%	142		25.2%	36.4%	510
	Stasis (n = 582)	0.4%	20.8%	93		14.7%	31.2%	188
	Growth (n = 65)	0.7%	7.1%	2		2.7%	7.2%	4
High	Decline (n = 280)	0.3%	6.2%	11		12.3%	23.4%	53
	Stasis (n = 43)	0.4%	3.3%	1		4.1%	11.4%	4
	Growth (n = 13)	0.2%	0.9%	0		2.8%	6.0%	0

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 <75 percent of the national average (n = 916 tracts); medium income were tracts whose average income w...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Organized Deprivation in the American Rust Belt
• Part I: Othering the Deprived City
• Part II: Depriving the Othered City
• Conclusion: Urban Decline Was Planned
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index