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Photo: David Brooks
s it possible that Detroit, with the country’s highest percentage of home ownership, coupled with a freeway system linking the sprawling suburbs with the city for a quick daily commute between home and work will become a candidate for a “back- © to-the-city’’ movement? The phenomenon, far more pronounced in eastern “commercial center” cities with different housing patterns, fewer housing choices and larger white-collar populations, isn’t about to reverse 30 years of corporate disinvestment and related white flight from the central cities, according to a two-year-old federal Housing and Urban Develop_ ment (HUD) report. Urban renewal—or urban removal—of the poor and working class isn’t new. Freeways. and the destructive renewal programs in the 1950s and 1960s that often tore down the old but didn’t build anything new, displaced © far more than “urban pioneers” trooping back to the cities have. Yet, two ecehbochoods close to downtown have and will undergo great changes. Here’s a glimpse of what’s happening to beth.
GM’s “New Neighborhood”
WOODBRIDGE:A Slow Transition
by Tom Lonergan
by Laurie Townsend
“GM is not profiting from this venture. Our sole interest is a selfish one—to improve the area in which we live.” —Former GM Chairman,
Thomas Murphy “They say they don’t want the lower middle class. | can’t help it because I’m constantly out of a job.” —Donna Redden, a former New Center tenant he slick, multi-color promotion. T packet from the New Center Development Partnership bills the area north of General Motors world headquarters as “Your new neighborhood.” The
area
between
Grand
W.
Blvd.,
Virginia Park, Woodward and the Lodge
freeway was Tom Williams’ neighborhood ;
for 15 years.
Until last July. Williams,
59,
— a retired GM
worker,
moved from his rented Bethune flat to a “new neighborhood” about six miles from New Center through no choice of his own. Williams and 300 other former New Center tenants: didn’t fit in GM’s $36 million plan to restore the aging neighborhood “as nearly as possible to its turn-ofthe-century elegance.” The displaced black families, elderly whites and single persons of both races have been called Detroit’s first victims of
classic gentrification—the planned _replacement of inner city poor by young upper middle-class professionals attracted by the convenience of living near their downtown and New Center jobs in restored architectural gems of a by-gone era. In Detroit, GM’s New Center plan fits in a larger downtown design to transform the area to a commercial-convention center—
a “mini” Chicago or Toronto. The plan, which includes the subway, apartments and the Kern Block shopping mall, is stalled.by the worst economic conditions since the Depression and an axe-wielding
Reagan administration. One ¢old, hard economic fact of GM’s
plan, whichis one-third funded by federal grants obtained by the city, is that it offers _ another pocket of middle-class homeowning taxpayers to a city starved for money. The city is using the federal funds to build new sewers, place utility lines underground, close streets and build alleys. GM has been careful to cultivate the support of the Detroit political establishment, starting at the top with Mayor Coleman Young. A consistent adversary and leader on the city council of the displaced tenants’ successful fight for relocation assistance was Kenneth Cockrel. GM and the Young administration initially opposed the relocation aid, since public funds were not to be directly used to rehab the houses. Continued on page 9
causing many to flee to what they con-The hoods. neighbor “better” sidered the od, borho |: one Detroit neigh political actions of the ’60s battered the slow process of change is occurring initiating thus sides, all from rhood neighbo modawhich allows for the accom which ty control communi for struggle -the withs” pioneer “urban tion of the so-called s continue today. rm long-te of cement displa the out In the late ’60s, the city skola ona residents. The Woodbridge community, massive urban land renewal clearance projust west of Wayne State University, engram in the University City “B” area tocompasses some 800 dwellings in the area provide large parcels of land for expansion bounded by Grand River, Trumbull and by Wayne State University and the Detroit the Ford Expressway. Board of Education. Hundreds of homes Developed from 1860 to 1920, the were lost, and those families displaced buildings reflect the eclectism of the period, received pitiful relocation sums ($2,000ranging from worker's cottages to near $4,000). This, compounded by the disasmansions. There is a mix of single and trous effects. of the HUD lending program multiple-family dwellings, with scattered had a catastrophic impact. apartment buildings and some foster care Angry and concerned, residents formed homes. the Woodbridge Neighborhood Citizens In its heyday—the 1920s—WoodDistrict Council, an elected and appointed bridge was the home of the upper and body of 24 neighborhood representatives. middle class, economically beyond the “We won't move’ was our motto,” says range of most in the city. As with any major city in the U.S., social forces were - Victoria Buckley, an outspoken community leader who sits on the Council’s executhe strongest contributor to the decline of tive board. She and her husband Francis the neighborhood. The rise of private have lived in a restored home since 1967. transportation, building of urban freeways, She described what they had to do to get _the move to the suburbs coupled with corthe city to prepare a house-by-house porate flight to lower-taxing areas took its survey to prove the necessary percentage | toll on Woodbridge. of blight existed to declare Woodbridge an During the Depression and war years, urban clearance area. Unable to do so, the the pressure for low-cost housing caused city was forced to redesignate the area for many of the area’s large homes to be urban conservation. divided into apartments and_ sleeping rooms, thus radically changing who lived in the community. Racism played into this, Continued on page 9