Demolition Means Progress
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Demolition Means Progress

Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis

Andrew R. Highsmith

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eBook - ePub

Demolition Means Progress

Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis

Andrew R. Highsmith

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In 1997, after General Motors shuttered a massive complex of factories in the gritty industrial city of Flint, Michigan, signs were placed around the empty facility reading, "Demolition Means Progress, " suggesting that the struggling metropolis could not move forward to greatness until the old plants met the wrecking ball. Much more than a trite corporate slogan, the phrase encapsulates the operating ethos of the nation's metropolitan leadership from at least the 1930s to the present. Throughout, the leaders of Flint and other municipalities repeatedly tried to revitalize their communities by demolishing outdated and inefficient structures and institutions and overseeing numerous urban renewal campaigns—many of which yielded only more impoverished and more divided metropolises. After decades of these efforts, the dawn of the twenty-first century found Flint one of the most racially segregated and economically polarized metropolitan areas in the nation.In one of the most comprehensive works yet written on the history of inequality and metropolitan development in modern America, Andrew R. Highsmith uses the case of Flint to explain how the perennial quest for urban renewal—even more than white flight, corporate abandonment, and other forces—contributed to mass suburbanization, racial and economic division, deindustrialization, and political fragmentation. Challenging much of the conventional wisdom about structural inequality and the roots of the nation's "urban crisis, " Demolition Means Progress shows in vivid detail how public policies and programs designed to revitalize the Flint area ultimately led to the hardening of social divisions.

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Information

Year
2015
ISBN
9780226251080

PART ONE

Company Town

1

City Building and Boundary Making

On the eve of the Allied victory in World War II, as Michigan’s defense plants hummed and the nation’s economy boomed, Carl Crow, the official historian of the Buick division of General Motors, penned a glowing tribute to his employer and its hometown. Published in 1945, Crow’s encomium included the phrase “Buick is Flint and Flint is Buick,” a simple but revealing statement that captured the close relationship between GM and the Vehicle City. Comparing the company-town bond to that of a “self-sacrificing father and a successful son,” GM’s chronicler saluted the people of Flint for enabling GM’s rise to industrial supremacy. Because of GM’s triumphs, Crow averred, Flint’s citizens had obtained a degree of security and prosperity that made them the envy of the world.1 Like many of the city’s promoters, Crow believed that Flint’s successes symbolized the fruition of the American Dream of progress, prosperity, and opportunity. “America is a thousand Flints,” he concluded, because the city and its people exemplified the principles and aspirations that made the United States a beacon of hope for the wider world.2
Although Flint’s standing as a leading industrial city would ultimately prove fleeting, Crow’s optimism at war’s end was understandable. By the time he had finished writing The City of Flint Grows Up, the United States sat on the cusp of one of the longest periods of economic expansion and consumer prosperity in human history. As one of the world’s preeminent manufacturing centers, Flint played a major role in driving the nation’s post–World War II economic boom. Equally important, the cars and trucks made in the Vehicle City helped to fuel the transportation revolution that transformed the United States into a predominantly suburban nation. In exchange for these accomplishments, Flint’s autoworkers earned impressively high wages, particularly after they unionized in the 1930s. Hoping to claim a share of that bounty, tens of thousands of migrants flocked to the Vehicle City during the first half of the twentieth century. Their arrivals helped to make Flint the eleventh-fastest-growing city in the United States, a fact that seldom escaped the area’s boosters. Nevertheless, conditions on the ground in this densely populated working-class town were much more complicated than Crow and others were willing to acknowledge. To wit, the Flint that Crow championed was also a harshly divided city.3
During the decades preceding World War II, a potent combination of private discrimination, federal housing and development initiatives, corporate practices, and municipal public policies converged to make Flint one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States. As was the case in most other urban communities nationwide, housing proved to be a key venue for the establishment and maintenance of Flint’s color line. In the 1910s and 1920s, GM executives and local real estate developers worked to resolve the area’s deep housing shortage by building new homes and neighborhoods for migrant workers. Because the deeds to these new properties contained racially restrictive covenants, however, they were available only to white buyers. By the 1930s federal and local policy makers had begun playing a more active role in shaping the Flint area’s residential housing market. Still, though, segregation was the rule. Across the nation, in fact, New Deal housing programs hardened popular, legal, and administratively driven forms of residential segregation. During the 1930s officers from the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation helped to codify racist standards for measuring mortgage risks, neighborhood stability, and market vitality. Later adopted by officials from the Federal Housing Administration, those standards led to the systematic practice of mortgage redlining. Working alongside local realtors, builders, and municipal officials, FHA representatives in Flint and other places established rules for metropolitan real estate development that all but required discrimination against African Americans.
For a time during the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, many of these same federal policy makers also engaged in suburban redlining. This punitive practice forced officials from the area’s white working-class suburbs to provide new services and establish political independence from Flint as a prerequisite to obtaining federal mortgage insurance. Over time, the redlining of Flint’s dilapidated suburbs fostered the growth of a socially and politically divisive brand of suburban capitalism. As with whites-only schools, parks, and workplaces, the segregated and politically fragmented residential arrangements that proliferated during this period fit comfortably within Flint’s civic culture of Jim Crow.

Company and Town

Flint’s phoenixlike emergence on the national scene was a testament to copious amounts of hard work, government support, and imperial ambition. The city’s identity as a commercial and industrial center first began to take shape in 1819, when an enterprising settler named Jacob Smith established a fur trading post on the Flint River. Prior to then, several groups of Ojibwe Indians had shared the sparsely developed lands of the Saginaw Valley with an assortment of trappers, subsistence farmers, and territorial officials. By 1820 the US government had acquired all of the Ojibwe lands in southeastern Michigan through a mix of treaties, purchases, and raw violence.4 Flint’s ascent as an urban and commercial hub coincided with this era of Native American dispossession and displacement. Located between Detroit and Saginaw, Smith’s settlement on the banks of the Flint River was an excellent stopping point for both traders and travelers. An influx of settlers during the antebellum period helped to turn Flint into a bustling hamlet of nearly twenty thousand permanent residents. Encouraged by this growth, community leaders launched a successful campaign for municipal incorporation in 1855. Soon after that, the city’s burgeoning lumber and carriage manufacturing industries began attracting thousands of workers to Genesee County. Nevertheless, Flint remained a tiny, relatively unknown city until the turn of the twentieth century, when the arrival of the “horseless carriage” inaugurated a new epoch in the community’s history.
The birth of the automobile industry helped to transform Flint from a small town into a metropolitan center. The shift began shortly after engineers unveiled the first generation of gasoline-powered cars in the 1880s, at which point area investors launched a campaign to recruit automobile companies to the Flint region. Civic boosters achieved a major victory in 1904 when one of the area’s leading industrialists, James H. Whiting, acquired the Buick Motor Company and relocated its manufacturing operations to Flint’s north side. Soon afterward, Whiting hired a Flint-based carriage maker and speculator named Billy Durant to run his new venture. Durant promptly moved Buick’s industrial operations ninety miles southeast to the city of Jackson, Michigan, however, claiming that Buick’s Flint facilities were too small and outdated. In response, civic leaders, in what would become a recurring theme in the city’s history, launched a major fundraising campaign to bring Buick back to Flint. Within weeks, local bankers and industrialists had pledged over five hundred thousand dollars in stock subscriptions, which provided Durant with the capital necessary to build a suitable assembly plant on Flint’s north side. By 1906 Durant and Buick had returned to Flint to establish long-term operations.5
Two years later, Durant founded the General Motors Corporation. Eager to build an industrial empire, Durant promptly acquired the Olds, Cadillac, and Oakland automobile companies. On the strength of those investments, GM quickly became one of the world’s leading automobile producers, bringing windfall profits to Durant, Whiting, Charles Stewart Mott, and other local industrialists. By 1929 Durant’s company had produced ten million cars, and GM was well on its way to becoming the world’s largest industrial firm. As GM’s birthplace and manufacturing headquarters, Flint grew rapidly during this freewheeling era of corporate expansion.6 Between 1900 and 1930, Flint’s population soared from just 13,103 to 156,492.7
As GM grew and opened new manufacturing and assembly facilities, the city began to resemble Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and other industrial metropolises. On the near north side—to the west of the gritty St. John Street neighborhood, the Flint River, and the Chesapeake and Ohio rail lines—sat GM’s massive complex of Buick plants. With an employee roll that routinely exceeded twenty-five thousand, “The Buick” was Flint’s largest employer and virtually a city unto itself. Nearby there were two major industrial facilities operated by GM’s AC Spark Plug division. At its peak, AC employed nearly twenty thousand workers who manufactured spark plugs, oil filters, and other auto parts. On Flint’s west side, in a valley surrounding the Flint River, visitors could find GM’s Fisher Body 2 plant and a large complex of Chevrolet plants known as “Chevy in the Hole.” There nearly twenty thousand workers produced GM’s top-selling line of cars and trucks. Just to the northwest of Chevy in the Hole, on the corner of Third and Chevrolet Avenues, stood the General Motors Institute of Technology, an elite division of the company dedicated to training automobile engineers and corporate managers. Another of Flint’s major industrial facilities was the Fisher Body 1 plant, located on the city’s far south side. By 1955 eight thousand workers at Fisher Body 1 manufactured automobile bodies for the north side Buick plants.8 An industrial marvel, Flint was home to more GM workers than any other city in the world and second only to Detroit in annual vehicle production. “It is to the automobile,” claimed the New York Times Magazine in 1937, “what Pittsburgh is to steel, what Akron is to rubber.”9
Although the Vehicle City’s booming economy attracted migrants from virtually every part of the world, Flint was much less diverse than most urban centers. As late as 1930, over 80 percent of Flint’s residents were native-born whites, most of them Protestants. Approximately three-quarters of Flint’s people hailed from either Michigan or the nearby states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Nearly 15 percent of Flint’s residents in 1930 were born in the South, many from the states of Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee. In a striking departure from many other urban areas, foreign-born residents accounted for just 14 percent of the city’s overall population on the eve of the Depression. Among these immigrants, the largest numbers were from England, Scotland, and Anglophone sections of Canada. Whereas Catholics hailing from Poland, Italy, and elsewhere constituted up to a third of the population in Detroit, Chicago, and other midwestern cities, southern and eastern Europeans accounted for only 19 percent of Flint’s already small immigrant total. Similarly, only a tiny fraction of the city’s total population—approximately 1 percent—were of either Hispanic or Asian descent. For their part, African Americans represented just 3.6 percent of the Vehicle City’s relatively homogeneous Depression-era population.10
Figure 1.1. Aerial view of “The Buick,” n.d., circa 1925. The Buick manufacturing and assembly complex on Flint’s north side was one of GM’s largest and most important industrial facilities in the United States. During the postwar era, approximately twenty-five thousand men and women worked within this sprawling compound. With numerous GM facilities scattered throughout Genesee County, metropolitan Flint was the company’s international manufacturing headquarters for most of the twentieth century. Courtesy of the Richard P. Scharchburg Archives, Kettering University, Flint, MI.
Upon arriving in the Flint area, most migrants knew that they wanted to make a living at General Motors. They knew much less, however, about where, with whom, and under what conditions they would live. For many newcomers, then, the quest to locate...

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