The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

Saddled with $18 billion in debt, Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection in federal court on July 17, 2013 (Davy, Monica, and Mary Williams Walsh. “Billions in Debt, Detroit Tumbles into Insolvency.” The New York Times, 2013). This catastrophe was long in the making. In The Origins of the Urban Crisis, Sugrue argues that Detroit’s decline originated between 1940 and 1960, a period of deindustrialization and systemic racism in labor and housing. Unemployment soared as manufacturing plants relocated to more affordable parts of the country after World War II, hitting the city’s struggling Black population particularly hard. Swaths of the city were condemned as “blighted,” while growing inequality increasingly divided residential areas along class and racial lines. Sugrue ends his 1996 study on a pessimistic note:

The rehabilitation of Detroit and other major American cities will require a more vigorous attempt to grapple with the enduring effects of the postwar transformation of the city, and creative responses, piece by piece, to the interconnected forces of race, residence, discrimination, and industrial decline, the consequences of a troubled and still unresolved past (271).

Detroit’s bankruptcy is a grim postscript to The Origins of the Urban Crisis. Sugrue emphasizes the long historical processes that shaped Detroit, an approach that helps contextualize the city’s recent bankruptcy.