What do you think?
Rate this book
Detroit Divided
Unskilled workers once flocked to Detroit, attracted by manufacturing jobs paying union wages, but the passing of Detroit's manufacturing heyday has left many of those workers stranded. Manufacturing continues to employ high-skilled workers, and new work can be found in suburban service jobs, but the urban plants that used to employ legions of unskilled men are a thing of the past. The authors explain why white auto workers adjusted to these new conditions more easily than blacks. Taking advantage of better access to education and suburban home loans, white men migrated into skilled jobs on the city's outskirts, while blacks faced the twin barriers of higher skill demands and hostile suburban neighborhoods. Some blacks have prospered despite this racial divide: a black elite has emerged, and the shift in the city toward municipal and service jobs has allowed black women to approach parity of earnings with white women. But Detroit remains polarized racially, economically, and geographically to a degree seen in few other American cities. A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality
321 pages, Paperback
First published January 8, 2000
2 people are currently reading
44 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 20, 2022
Very helpful data dive on Detroit, if a bit out of date.
August 30, 2018
This was very much a scholarly work, and I did not read it in detail. Lots of research, surveys, charts and graphs. Very dry. Published in 2000. Its 2018, and Detroit is on the rebound, or so I'm told. I wonder how much, if any, statistical improvement there has been in neighborhood integration in the last 18 years -- somehow, I'm guessing not a lot. Book didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know -- Detroit is very very segregated. But it certainly gave me all the facts and figures I could possible want to prove that point.
December 3, 2022
Great read, a bit outdated, but still worth the time
October 15, 2009
When the University of Michigan trims its collections, bids farewell to faculty, or needs a little extra storage space, a lot of interesting things are left for scavengers. Somewhere in Ann Arbor, I came upon a forelorn collection of annual reports published by a U-M research center on Detroit. I picked a few up, thinking they'd be nice artifacts to add to my small collection of Michigan salvage. While I chuckled at the statistics from the 1950s (# of TVs per household, % of households with income under $2000 per year, etc.) I didn't realize that this very same project provided the foundations for one of the best and most extensive volumes of social research on Detroit.
Several years later, my friend Tasha sent me this book. It was published during Detroit's most recent "boom" era, the late 1990s. While this is discussed in some detail, the decades of statistical data and then-recent qualitative research reveal the key long-term trends underlying what was then, and is now, an extremely vexing state of affairs in the metropolitan area. Many Detroiters will find few surprises in the data, although this is to be expected from a study which strives to represent the social and economic fundamentals of the region. Most insightful, though, is the way in which defining features of geography, culture, economics, and politics are linked; the nature of these links, and how they relate to one another, does more to explain Detroit than any of the reductionist reasons cited around dinner tables and in the steady stream of magazine and newspaper commentary.
Also interesting is their discussion of public policy debates on urban issues circa the mid 1990s. Without having much historical perspective on these debates, I can only say that current experience with the social service / economic development sector seems to show that many of these debates have yielded policy initiatives which define current approaches to economic development and social programs.
The authors close with a discussion of various ways to revitalize Detroit, many of which, such as job training programs, free cars for low-income individuals, re-location vouchers so inner-city residents could move closer to jobs, are predicated on favorable macroeconomic conditions. There was little indication at the time that the auto industry was only a decade away from a major collapse. For all of the misfortune that this has caused, we can at least say that a sequel to Detroit Divided is sure to be interesting. Until it arrives, I'll recommend this book highly to all.
Several years later, my friend Tasha sent me this book. It was published during Detroit's most recent "boom" era, the late 1990s. While this is discussed in some detail, the decades of statistical data and then-recent qualitative research reveal the key long-term trends underlying what was then, and is now, an extremely vexing state of affairs in the metropolitan area. Many Detroiters will find few surprises in the data, although this is to be expected from a study which strives to represent the social and economic fundamentals of the region. Most insightful, though, is the way in which defining features of geography, culture, economics, and politics are linked; the nature of these links, and how they relate to one another, does more to explain Detroit than any of the reductionist reasons cited around dinner tables and in the steady stream of magazine and newspaper commentary.
Also interesting is their discussion of public policy debates on urban issues circa the mid 1990s. Without having much historical perspective on these debates, I can only say that current experience with the social service / economic development sector seems to show that many of these debates have yielded policy initiatives which define current approaches to economic development and social programs.
The authors close with a discussion of various ways to revitalize Detroit, many of which, such as job training programs, free cars for low-income individuals, re-location vouchers so inner-city residents could move closer to jobs, are predicated on favorable macroeconomic conditions. There was little indication at the time that the auto industry was only a decade away from a major collapse. For all of the misfortune that this has caused, we can at least say that a sequel to Detroit Divided is sure to be interesting. Until it arrives, I'll recommend this book highly to all.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews