If you’re a fan of seminal work “Origins of the Urban Crisis,” you’d be a pig in mud here at the Our Detroit Story event this a.m…. Detroit historian Thomas Sugrue is here, and talking about the neighborhood where he grew up, in a west side neighborhood over by Livernois.
Right now, he’s talking about the contrast between the neighborhood where he grew up – Chalfonte and Santa Rosa – and the neighborhood as it is today – unrecognizable to his ancestors, he says.
The neighborhood is 99 percent African-American, and in the 2000 U.S. Census, about 12 percent of its residents were unemployed, a statistic that was likely underreported 10 years ago and is sure to rise after the 2010 Census. Poverty was high in 2000 – in the middle of the tech boom, Sugrue notes, and a disproportionate number of residents are disabled. And this isn’t the poorest or most blighted neighborhood in Detroit.
But this neighborhood, he says, “tells us in microcosm” the history of working-class Detroit, and of urban America over the last half-century.
The question to ask is deceptively simple, he says – why?
That question encompasses poverty, racial segregation, disinvestment, unemployment… the answer is far more complicated. Stay tuned…
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