A Detroit Story

Urban Decline and the Rise of Property Informality

Claire W. Herbert

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780520340084
• eBook ISBN: 9780520974487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing to the fore a wealth of original research, A Detroit Story examines how the informal reclamation of abandoned property has been shaping Detroit for decades. Claire Herbert lived in the city for almost five years to get a ground-view sense of how this process molds urban areas. She participated in community meetings and tax foreclosure protests, interviewed various groups, followed scrappers through abandoned buildings, and visited squatted houses and gardens. Herbert found that new residents with more privilege often have their back-to-the-earth practices formalized by local policies, whereas longtime, more disempowered residents, usually representing communities of color, have their practices labeled as illegal and illegitimate. She teases out how these divergent treatments reproduce long-standing inequalities in race, class, and property ownership.

PART I

Social and Spatial Context

1

Urban Decline and Informality

Cities like Detroit . . . now there’s a phrase that may seem out of place to many readers. Detroit is often regarded as an exemplar of post-industrial ruination, Black poverty, and economic collapse—a place so extreme and tragic that no other city could possibly come close to mirroring the post-apocalyptic conditions of America’s Motor City. But as a declining city, Detroit is one of many scattered across predominately the Midwestern and Northeastern United States. Decline is a process of urban change involving significant decreases in population, often upward of 20 to 30 percent in the United States. Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis have lost more than half their populations, and Baltimore and Philadelphia lost nearly one third. Smaller cities like Camden, as well as many cities outside the Northeast and Midwest such as Richmond and Birmingham, have also lost significant population.¹ Recent research estimates that from 2015 to 2025, globally, 17 percent of large cities in developed regions and 8 percent of all large cities will experience population decline.²

The current state of Detroit is often reductively blamed on the collapse of the auto industry.³ But instead of having a singular stimulus, migration out of certain urban centers in the United States is the result of a complex tangling of historic (and ongoing) economic, demographic, spatial, and political shifts like deindustrialization, shrinking family size, suburbanization, white flight, and institutional racism. Thomas Sugrue’s seminal The Origins of the Urban Crisis details how these conditions played out in creating contemporary Detroit, but notes that “the differences between Detroit and other Rust Belt cities are largely a matter of degree, not a matter of kind.”⁴

In the United States, urban decline is associated with the rise of a host of problems that vary in degree and form depending on local context.⁵ Strained economic conditions and shrinking tax bases leave few resources for remaining residents and municipalities, who struggle to maintain the infrastructure and built environment constructed for significantly larger populations. Declining cities tend to suffer from high levels of vacancy; property abandonment and blight; high crime, jobless, and unemployment rates; low property values; and poor service provision. Histories of racial conflict and white flight are common among declining cities, resulting in stark racial segregation between majority Black cities and their majority white suburbs, or even within the cities themselves.

Since Sugrue’s book, Detroit has been shaped by a host of other factors which have exacerbated its decline. From 2000–2010, many households that could fled to the inner suburbs, leading to a 25 percent population loss during that time.⁶ The Great Recession decimated an already sick city, ravaging deteriorated neighborhoods with even more foreclosures and tipping many others from somewhat-stable to distressed. Bankruptcy and Emergency Management in 2013 signaled hitting rock bottom. Figure 1 shows the decline in Detroit’s population over time. Figure 2 shows the rise in the percentage of Black residents and decline in white residents in the city over time. And Figure 3 shows the concurrent dramatic rise in low-income households in Detroit as these population shifts take place.⁷

Figure 1. Change in Detroit’s population over time. Source: Detroit Future City 2017, 15.

Figure 2. Change in Detroit’s Black and white populations over time. Source: Detroit Future City 2019, 14.

Figure 3. Change in household income in Detroit over time. Source: Detroit Future City 2019, 14.

Detroit is not unique, but it is a particularly stark example of a declining city and thus a useful case through which to study what is really a broader, historical, global process of urban transformation. Since the 1970s, scholars have increasingly attended to the phenomenon of urban decline,⁸ but only since around the mid-2000s has shrinkage become “a new master framework for a broad range of empirical studies.”⁹ Research has well documented how decline comes about as a process of urban change and various planning responses to decline. But there is still a gap in scholarship about what life is like in these cities.¹⁰

The key point, however, is that despite popular presentation of Detroit as a one-off city that declined because of the loss of auto manufacturing in America, it is instead a particularly lucid example of the global process of decline or “shrinkage.” The instigators of this process are not unique to America’s Rust Belt. Rather, we can expect that regions across the globe will continue to grow and decline.

WHY DO WE NEED TO STUDY DECLINING CITIES?

Much urban research has focused on conditions of urban growth. Theoretical approaches to understanding what cities are and how they change have focused on the way increasing populations create competition over urban space. Urban ecologists view the form and dynamics of cities as the product of natural competition over urban space, where the “fittest” economic actors seize control over prime locations, relegating less powerful actors (like the poor) to less attractive or desirable spaces (such as neighborhoods near environmental hazards). Political economists have explained cities as created through struggles between entrepreneurs and institutional actors, who want to make money by investing in and developing urban space, and those who are concerned with their quality of life within urban space (residents). From this perspective, cities are imagined as sites of contestation and power struggles over scarce urban space (property), as both populations and capital grow.

Essentially, predominant theoretical frameworks for conceptualizing what the city is and how social relations within urban areas play out suppose that cities are places wherein competition over urban space results from increasing populations and rising demand for property. The resulting dynamics between classes, social groups, entrepreneurs and investors, city authorities, and the proliferation of different uses of property are explained by various power struggles over high-demand urban space. In this context, property is urban space carved up by law, assigned to public or private owners, and regulated by zoning codes and lot lines. And in cities with growing populations, there is increasing demand for access to urban space (property). Those with more political and economic resources tend to “win out” in struggles over this resource.

But in declining cities—or even distressed neighborhoods within otherwise stable or growing cities, like the South Side of Chicago—there is decreasing demand for urban space. Developers have little interest in property that does not guarantee a return on investment. Residents who wish to leave the city are often unable to sell and may resort to abandoning their properties. Municipalities struggle to fulfill the responsibilities for maintenance and care of property that private owners have left behind. In this context, property becomes a liability more than a high-demand resource. What explains, then, the form of the city—which residents and what functions are able to exist in different areas of the city? And how does this sociospatial form influence residents’ experiences of daily life therein? In a declining city it is not, as urban ecology or political economy frameworks presume, competition or contestation over urban space.

In Detroit, it does not take the “fittest” or most powerful economic actors to gain formal, legal access to property. Architectural theorist Andrew Herscher argues that in Detroit, property has become more significant for what residents can do with it than for how much investors or property speculators can profit from it.¹¹ Nor does accessing urban property require legal right—informal (de jure illegal) uses of property are able to flourish, giving even Detroit’s poorest residents access to urban space. Property laws diminish in salience for regulating sociospatial dynamics, and informal metrics for assessing legitimate uses of urban space gain traction.

One important reason for studying informal uses of property in a declining urban area is to understand how property relations change. Property relations—understood in a Marxist sense as how we relate to land once it is property, and how that relationship mediates our interactions with others around us—are typically regulated by law, delineating who has legal right to access, control, and benefit from property (urban space). While sociologists haven’t often explicitly studied property, some legal scholars consider property law to be a dynamic institution that is social in nature and reflects community values. As such, violating property laws can have both acquisitive and communicative impacts—helping residents gain access to property (a valuable resource) and conveying problems with existing formal, legal arrangements of property rights, access, and control.¹²

POLICY AND PLANNING FOR DECLINE

Despite shifts in how property is valued and used by residents in Detroit, local planners and policymakers still largely adhere to a market-based approach to remedying urban decline, trying to encourage investors and legal private ownership, and stimulate various forms of development.¹³ While growth and decline are linguistic antonyms, they are not inverse processes in the urban context,¹⁴ which complicates attempts to remedy urban decline by trying to shift the process in reverse and stimulate growth. Growth builds upon a geographic area, densifying and expanding the infrastructure, footprint, and built environment, all of which are not easily “unbuilt.” The durability of housing, infrastructure, and other real estate means that there is an asymmetry in the trajectories of growth and decline: they don’t look the same coming down as they do going up. Like growth, decline is spotty and uneven, happening at different paces and scales within a geographic area, and is inextricably linked to processes of growth and decline at other scales and in other regions.¹⁵ At the city-scale, we often speak of growth or decline, but the rate and trajectory of population change varies across neighborhoods (Philadelphia, for example, has some neighborhoods with similar sociospatial conditions as Detroit).

Since the post-WWII era, urban planners have been dealing with the hollowing out or “donut effect” that the rise of the suburbs has had for many urban centers. And planning agendas have relied on models of growth to inform revitalization strategies for distressed urban centers.¹⁶ That is, urban policies and plans have sought to tackle decline by strengthening economic competitiveness and promoting economic and population growth.¹⁷ Local governments adhere to this market-based approach as well, but the lack of reliable property law enforcement in places like Detroit undermines confidence in the potential economic value of property.¹⁸

Early approaches to solving the crises of urban decline without relying on growth models involved grand schematics for “right-sizing” the city.¹⁹ The idea is that if the city could be shrunk back down to a scale appropriate for the remaining population, then the burdens of infrastructure costs, blight, and vacancy would cease, and the city would once again be able to take care of itself. Right-sizing requires areas of the city with high vacancy rates to be cut off from...

Table of contents

• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Social and Spatial Context
• Part II: Informality in Everyday Life
• Part III: Informal Plans and Formal Policies
• Conclusion: Lessons for Informality in the Global North
• Appendix: Research Methods and Data
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index