ACADEMY RETROIT
UNLOCKING POTENTIAL
Detroit, founded in 1701 by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, is the oldest city west of the eastern seaboard colonies. The largest city in Michigan, it was home to French settlers, who named it for the “strait”, meaning the 27-mile long Detroit River. (Different reference) Detroit’s strategic location and connection to cities near the Great lakes caused it to not only be fought over by the several countries but also allowed it to be a strong exporting centre. One of the largest manufacturing cities in the US, Detroit is not only the epicentre for the auto industry, but also has strong connections in the health care and real-estate trades (Detroit, mich., 2011). Detroit was home to 300 families and 80 houses after the Pontiac war in 1764. During this time the city had founded its first mill, which allowed for lumber homes to be built. The landscape of the time was said to be beautiful and full of orchards, game, fish and fur-bearing animals (Base & Fellow, 1970).
In the early twentieth-century Detroit was, in the words of historian Oliver Zunz, a “total industrial landscape”. Factories, shops, and neighbourhoods blurred together indistinguishably, enmeshed in a relentless grid of streets and a complex web of train lines (Sugrue, 2005, P18). Of the 125 auto companies that sprang up in Detroit in the early twentieth century, Ford quickly rose to the top. A restless innovator, Ford devised the modern assembly line. In 1908, the fledgling company introduced the Model T, a car whose standardized production would revolutionize the industry. Six years later, with hopes of building a stable, loyal workforce, Ford announced the five-dollar day, leading to a dramatic increase in pay for industrial workers (Surgue, 2013).
The automobile industry, beginning between 1890 and 1900 signified a major change in the manufacturing business in Detroit (Base & Fellow, 1970). Located in the heart of the Great Lakes region, Detroit had all of the ingredients for industrial growth: it was close to the nation’s major centers of coal, iron, and copper mining; it was easily accessible by water and by land; and it was near the nation’s leading, well-established production centers (Surgue, 2013). The availability of materials paved the way for Henry Ford and other automakers to build vehicles with off-the-shelf parts. Next to foundry and machine goods, Detroit was producing $49.5 million dollars by 1910 and 40% of all American cars (Base & Fellow, 1970).
In the early twentieth-century Detroit was, in the words of historian Oliver Zunz, a “total industrial landscape”. Factories, shops, and neighbourhoods blurred together indistinguishably, enmeshed in a relentless grid of streets and a complex web of train lines (Sugrue, 2005, P18). Of the 125 auto companies that sprang up in Detroit in the early twentieth century, Ford quickly rose to the top. A restless innovator, Ford devised the modern assembly line. In 1908, the fledgling company introduced the Model T, a car whose standardized production would revolutionize the industry. Six years later, with hopes of building a stable, loyal workforce, Ford announced the five-dollar day, leading to a dramatic increase in pay for industrial workers (Surgue, 2013).
The auto magnate recruited skilled artisans from the shipyards of Scotland and England and blue-collar workers from the rural Midwest, as well as workers from Mexico and Lebanon, and African Americans from the city’s rapidly growing population of southern migrants. By 1940, Ford was one of the largest private employers of African Americans in the United States (Surgue, 2013). By 1950, Detroit had become the fifth largest city in the United States, home to nearly two million people. But in the midst of that prosperity, the auto industry restructured its operations. Between 1948 and 1967—when the auto industry was at its economic peak—Detroit lost more than 130,000 manufacturing jobs.
The auto industry began to decentralize its production, building new plants in suburban “greenfields” and in the small towns of the upper Midwest and, increasingly, the Sunbelt. Many smaller auto-related manufacturers also left the city in search of low-wage workforces and open land for new factories. At the same time, the auto industry experimented with new laborsaving technology—called “automation”—that replaced many assembly-line jobs with new machinery. The results were devastating. Many of the large, early twentieth-century factory buildings in the city emptied out. The massive Dodge Main plant, which employed more than 30,000 workers at its peak, winnowed its workforce to a few thousand before closing in 1980. Ford’s River Rouge plant hemorrhaged jobs beginning in the 1950s—and although it continues operations today, it has but a few thousand workers, a shadow of its World War II–era might (Surgue, 2013).
Like other northeastern and midwestern cities, Detroit’s deindustrialization came at a moment when the city’s white population was suburbanizing. Between World War II and the 1960s, the city’s African American population rose exponentially, as hundreds of thousands of blacks were lured to the city by the promise of high-paying industrial jobs. Just as they arrived, those jobs—especially the entry-level positions that had served as the first rung on the economic ladder—were disappearing. By 1967, when Detroit erupted with one of the worst race riots in American history, the city had already lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, had experienced massive white flight, and had seen many of its neighborhoods (especially those that had been built in the shadow of the major automobile plants) gutted by depopulation and disinvestment (Surgue, 2013).
By the 1970s, Detroit’s image had been completely transformed from the mighty engine of American capitalism to the embodiment of America’s urban woes. The auto industry, buffeted by the oil crisis during the Nixon and Carter administrations, continued to contract. The rise of international competition, especially from Japan and Germany, further weakened Detroit’s auto industry. Chrysler, the smallest of the “Big Three,” filed for bankruptcy in 1979, while Ford and General Motors struggled with reputations for producing gas-guzzling behemoths and faced serious deficits. Although the fortunes of the auto industry eventually rose again, especially during the economic boom of the 1990s and the growth in popularity of sport-utility vehicles, the Big Three would continue to struggle for market share in an economy increasingly dominated by overseas manufacturers.
Detroit, already weakened by decades of disinvestment and depopulation, fared badly. The Motor City was nearly completely abandoned by whites (who today comprise just a little over 10 percent of the city’s population). Metropolitan Detroit is still home to the Big Three headquarters, but the city’s population has plummeted to 886,000; its job base continues to shrink; and its skyline is now dominated by the rotting hulks of old factory buildings. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, boomtown Detroit is a distant memory, visible only in the old factory buildings and rubble-strewn lots that were once magnets of opportunity. A fitting symbol of Detroit’s transitory industrial might is Ford’s Highland Park plant—home to the first assembly line—now empty and deserted, a stark monument to the city’s history as the cradle of the modern American consumer culture (Surgue, 2013).
While the nation’s population saw an increase of almost 10%, the state of Michigan, once the fourth most densely inhabited state had a total decline in population of 0.6%. In 2006 the state saw its highest population numbers in the 21st century; however, after 2006 its been steadily waning. Michigan is just one of five states around the Midwest to have a decline in population, Detroit having the most considerable amount of loss. Between 2000 and 2010, Detroit’s population declined from 951,270 to 713,777 – a loss of 25%. Within Detroit, five neighbourhoods suffered the most, each losing 40% or more of their residents. These neighbourhoods, airport, Connor Kettering, Foch and Jefferson/Mack, which are comprised of mostly African American residents, lie east of Woodward Avenue, in Southeast portion of the city (Semcog, Quick Facts, 2011).
Detroit was once the engine of America’s automotive industry. Today it is a symbol of urban decay (Harris, 2014). The city is regarded as America’s largest city in decline, a metropolis that has failed to recover from an insidious cycle of deindustrialisation, racism, suburban flight and laggard politics (Berry, P3). Detroit used to be the greatest working class city in the most prosperous country in the world. With the explosion of the auto industry, it had become the Silicon Valley of the Jazz age, a capitalist dream town of unrivalled innovation and bountiful reward (Binelli, 2010, P3). The cars rolling off the assembly lines existed as tangible manifesto of the American Dream, the factories themselves a glimpse of the birth of modernity, in which mass production would beget mass employment and in turn mass consumption (Binelli, 2010, P3).
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