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At the back of Alfonso Wells Memorial Playground, a small neighborhood park in northwest Detroit, sits a concrete wall covered in colorful murals. Today the wall seems somewhat randomly placed—it’s not separating much of anything except some grass from a street. But it’s there for a reason: in the late 1930s a developer tried to secure a mortgage, backed with mortgage insurance from the federal government, to build a housing development in the then largely white neighborhood. The Federal Housing Administration determined that the proposed houses would sit too close to those of an “inharmonious” racial group to qualify for mortgage insurance. In order to meet federal requirements, the developer built the wall—six feet tall, a foot thick, and a half mile long—to separate a black neighborhood from a white one. The federal government approved the project a few weeks later.

How do you solve a problem as old as the United States? Gentrification may be a relatively recent phenomenon, but as geographer Neil Smith notes, it’s really just the continuation of the “locational seesaw”—capital moves to one place seeking high profits, then, when that place becomes less profitable, it moves to another place. The real estate industry is always looking for new markets in which it can revitalize its profit rate. Fifty years ago that place was suburbs. Today it’s cities. But that’s only half the explanation for gentrification. In order to understand why cities are so attractive to invest in, it’s important to understand what made them bargains for real estate speculators in the first place. It may sound obvious, but gentrification could not happen without something to gentrify. Truly equitable geographies would be largely un-gentrifiable ones. So first, geographies have to be made unequal.

One 2014 study from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business found that poorer neighborhoods near already gentrified areas gentrified much faster than adjacent middle-class areas. As Smith’s rent gap theory suggests, this makes economic sense: gentrification is more profitable if the area being gentrified is initially cheaper. So the question is, how did those areas become cheaper?

The United States has a long history of dispossessing the poor of adequate housing through explicitly racist planning and housing policy. If gentrification requires cheap real estate, before areas can be gentrified they must be divested from, and the history of American housing is largely the history of a purposive concentration of African Americans and a subsequent disinvestment in their lives.

Few would argue that American housing is equitably distributed. It’s obvious to anyone who drives around an American city that there are areas of wealth and areas of poverty, that train tracks and highways often separate Hispanic neighborhoods from white ones, black ones from Asian ones. Most know without much thinking that “the projects” are in the “bad neighborhoods,” that big houses filled with wealthy people tend to be located not in city centers but on their outskirts. Because these features are universal to every city in the United States, we’ve internalized this geographic inequality as natural and normal. But a closer look reveals that larger, top-down forces are at play in the distribution of people and wealth in American cities.

Cities may appear chaotic, but the location, design, and makeup of their neighborhoods are the result of careful planning. In their book American Apartheid, sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton provide clear evidence that American cities maintained or expanded housing segregation even as people of color gained civil rights and wealth and moved into northern cities in greater numbers from rural areas in the South.

Massey and Denton measure the racial dissimilarity of US cities’ neighborhoods through an “index of dissimilarity,” calculating the percentage of black Americans who would have to move within a given city for every neighborhood to accurately mirror the overall demographics of the entire city. The higher the percentage, the more segregated a city is. The researchers found that before the 1900s, American cities were relatively integrated. In 1860 in the biggest cities outside the South—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and a couple of others—the average dissimilarity index was 45.7, meaning about 46 percent of African Americans would have to move into different neighborhoods in order for each city to be well integrated. The biggest southern cities were actually more integrated in 1860—their average index was 29. But by 1910, northern cities had an average dissimilarity index of nearly 60, and southern cities had one of nearly 40. Cities were becoming more segregated. By 1940, dissimilarity in southern cities had reached 81; in northern cities it had reached 89.2. In other words, by 1940, 89.2 percent of black people in northern cities would have had to move in order to achieve a truly integrated city. By 1970, the dissimilarity index in the United States as a whole had reached an all-time high at 79 percent. It’s worth pointing out the increase in segregation in the North came as black Americans were moving by the millions from the South to find industrial jobs in northern cities. In other words, the more black people who came to a city, the more segregated it became.

In the last fifty years, segregation’s gotten better, but not by much: by 2010 the index had dropped just below 60 , still nowhere near true integration. In Detroit, the index still stands at nearly 80, making Detroit the most segregated city in America. Massey and Denton conclude there’s only one possible explanation for why, even as people of color gained rights in other areas of life, the United States became more and more segregated: white America has

deliberately created segregated ghettos.

Detroit is not an outlier—every city in the United States has been impacted by segregation—but the effects of racist housing policy were well documented here, and so the city provides a good example of how deleterious segregation has been in the United States.

The economic boom created by World War II drew tens of thousands of African Americans to Detroit, where they sought employment in the factories making military ships and vehicles. They were met with violence every step of their journey. Threats of violence when blacks moved into majority-white neighborhoods were so common that in 1942 Life magazine ran a story with the headline “Detroit Is Dynamite.” “It can either blow up Hitler,” the magazine wrote, “or blow up the U.S.”

The next year, racial tensions over housing, policing, and job discrimination boiled over into one of the worst riots in Detroit’s history. Black and white Detroiters were killed, but whites had the advantage of the police on their side. By the end of the riots, 1,893 people had been arrested, 700 injured, and 34 killed. Twenty-five of those killed were black, and seventeen of those people were shot dead by police. No whites were killed by police.

The riot grabbed headlines, but it was far from the only example of racial tension in the city. Nearly every facet of life in Detroit for African Americans was plagued by racist violence and discrimination during and following World War II. Detroit’s economy was booming, but unions still tried to bar black workers from joining their ranks and auto factories only hired African Americans for dangerous, low-paying work.

While unions and corporations did their best to keep Detroit’s black residents economically disadvantaged, politicians and white residents did their best to ensure they stayed trapped in the most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. In the 1940s, it wasn’t uncommon for white neighborhoods to post large billboards on their streets warning black Detroiters to leave. Most of the signs simply read “Whites Only ,” though one on the West Side read, “Negroes moving here will be burned, signed Neighbors.”

Housing-based violence continued and even increased through the 1960s . When black Detroiters moved into new neighborhoods, often their lawns would be torched; sometimes their houses would be burned down. New black residents in white neighborhoods frequently would have stones thrown at them. In 1963, the city documented sixty-five incidents of housing-based violence, but because many cases were never reported, that’s likely an undercount.

There were subtler but still effective ways of keeping black Detroiters out of white neighborhoods. In the 1940s, neighborhood associations often included restrictive covenants in their bylaws that essentially barred black people. These covenants would sometimes be explicit; other times they’d list requirements that were nearly impossible for nonwhites to meet—for example, to move into some Detroit neighborhoods, a person’s boss would have to sign off on housing applications; in some neighborhoods only relatives of current residents could move in. One neighborhood on the city’s northwest side mandated that property “shall not be used or occupied by any person or persons except those of the Caucasian race.” More than 80 percent of the city outside its downtown core had these kinds of restrictions in

6 How the Slate Got Blank

Detroit real estate agents helped segregate the city too. As in other places, they followed the code of ethics specified by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and until 1950 that code stated that realtors should “never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any industry whose presence will be clearly detrimental to real estate values.” The surrounding suburbs were also active in keeping Detroit’s poor black population stuck in place. Dearborn, a city just a few minutes’ drive west of Detroit, elected Orville Hubbard mayor in 1941 (and fourteen times after that) after he promised to keep the city “lily white.” “Housing Negroes is Detroit’s problem,” he said. Grosse Pointe, just to Detroit’s east, assigned a point system to people looking to purchase homes. Potential residents had points deducted based on their “degree of swarthiness,” and Jews were able to move in only if they were personally vouched for by people already living in the neighborhood; African Americans weren’t able to move in at all.

Mayor Albert Cobo , the man the Cobo Center is named after, lent the city’s approval to the countless acts of racism perpetrated throughout its neighborhoods. Elected in 1949 largely on a promise to keep low-income housing out of white neighborhoods, Cobo quickly got to work promoting segregation. He gave the same neighborhood association heads who established restrictive race-based covenants in their neighborhoods prominent roles in his government, including on the city planning commission. The Mayor’s Interracial Committee, a quasi-governmental body that was established before Cobo took office and was meant to help quell racial tension in the city, denounced Cobo’s policies, especially his refusal to integrate low-income public housing, as having “the sole purpose of rebuilding and perpetuating the Negro ghetto.” So Cobo disbanded the committee.

As racist as Cobo and some of his predecessors were, local governments were limited in just how much segregation they could perpetuate. Only the federal government had the power to promote and enforce true apartheid conditions across the country. The federal government, unlike Cobo, rarely explicitly stated racism as its end goal. Instead, it cloaked its racism in the language of economic prosperity and individual consumer choice.

In 1931, in the midst of the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover assembled more than 400 housing experts for the President’s National Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership. The idea was to restart the American economy through housing. “ I am confident that the sentiment for home ownership is so embedded in the American heart that millions of people who dwell in tenements, apartments and rented rooms… have the aspiration for wider opportunity in ownership of their own homes,” Hoover said.

His assembled horde of housing experts agreed that the encouragement of home ownership was the best thing a government could do to grow America’s economy. To that end, the experts advised Hoover to create what we’ve come to take for granted as run-of-the-mill mortgages. Before Hoover’s housing assembly, mortgages with payback periods

of more than ten or fifteen years and low down payments were virtually unheard of. Banks feared the risk of lending to someone who could not afford to pay back the loan within a relatively short time frame. By extending the payback period and lowering down payment requirements, the new type of mortgage would allow families previously too poor to buy housing to purchase a home.

Two years later, with the economy even further into the throes of the Great Depression, Hoover’s successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, pounced on Hoover’s mortgage idea and created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) to refinance the mortgages of families at risk of losing their homes with the kind of low-interest, low-down-payment mortgages pushed by Hoover. This made economic sense: without the ability to refinance, many Americans could have gone into foreclosure, worsening the country’s economic depression. So between July 1933 and June 1935, HOLC made more than a million mortgage deals for a total of over $3 billion. But because of the massive risk inherent in the federal government getting involved in normal people’s mortgages, HOLC could not lend to just anyone. So the agency devised a comprehensive system for predicting the ability of people to pay back their mortgages. That system was blatantly racist.

Each neighborhood of every major American city was coded A, B, C, or D and assigned a corresponding color of green, blue, yellow, or red. “Homogenous” areas—identified by HOLC as areas with lots of new construction and filled with “American business and professional men”—were given A labels and colored green on maps. An “infiltration of Jews” or any other minority in a neighborhood would bar it from being given an A and the color green. So would old, semi-dilapidated housing. Blue neighborhoods were slightly less good investments in the eyes of the feds—perhaps they had a few Jews, or housing units that were too densely packed and crumbling. Yellow C neighborhoods were ones that were considered “definitely declining”—these were most often racially mixed areas in city centers. And neighborhoods labeled “D” and colored red were defined by the feds as neighborhoods “in which the things taking place in C have already happened”—in other words, where there was a combination of racial integration and poverty. Almost every majority-black neighborhood in the country was given a D and “redlined” on the federal government’s maps, barred from receiving federal funding for mortgages. The effect of these redlining maps was compounded as nearly every major bank adopted the federal government’s system. Within a few years of the HOLC system’s start, it was almost impossible to get a mortgage in much of the United States if you were black.

In 1934, FDR created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which ten years later would be joined by another homeowner program created through the newly established Veterans Administration (VA). Both programs were established with the intent of not only moving more Americans into homes but also funneling billions of dollars into the construction industry in order to boost the lackluster American economy.

“The building trades in America represent by all odds the largest single unit of our unemployment,” one housing official told Congress in 1934. “A fundamental purpose of this bill is an effort to get the people back to work.”

Unlike HOLC, the FHA and VA programs did not give out mortgages. Instead, for the first time in US history,

they created a government mechanism to insure bank mortgages. Any home that met FHA construction standards would be backed by government funding if the private mortgage went under, which enabled banks to start making riskier bets and making loans in numbers never seen before. The modern mortgage industry was essentially created by the two bills.

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation had already started to make mortgages with lower down payments the norm, but the FHA helped solidify the idea that Americans could buy a home with very little cash up front. After the creation of the FHA, mortgages with 20 percent or sometimes even 10 percent down were common—spurring not only the construction of new housing but also the development of a new class of Americans who could all of a sudden move into private, detached housing and grow their nest egg as that house appreciated in value. In 1933, construction began on 93,000 new homes . By 1937, just three years after the FHA was created, housing starts had risen to 332,000. In 1941, 641,000 homes began construction. After World War II, construction really boomed: the United States added 13 million homes between 1945 and 1954. And VA mortgages accounted for 40 percent of these homes in 1946 and 1947.

The FHA, VA, and HOLC all explicitly used race in determining where they would approve mortgages. FHA established a set of rules for identifying neighborhoods where fewer mortgages might fail. Its 1939 underwriting manual stated, “Crowded neighborhoods lessen desirability” and “Older properties in a neighborhood have a tendency to accelerate the transition to lower class occupancy.” The manual also set standards for setbacks from curbs and minimum widths for houses. And it discouraged mixed-use planning—buildings with storefronts, it said, were less than ideal. Instead, blocks should be purely residential, commercial, or industrial, following the urban planning orthodoxies of the time, which held that space and calm were always good, while crowdedness and chaos were undesirable. It’s hard to parse out whether the FHA’s aesthetic requirements were just about aesthetics or whether they were another, subtle way of encouraging racial division. In St. Louis, Missouri, for example, zoning laws from the 1910s and 1920s were proposed with the explicit intent of keeping white residents in high-value, residential-only neighborhoods and pushing poor black people into the mixed-use central city. Regardless of the FHA’s intent, its zoning preferences meant that multiuse, multiracial sections of cities such as St. Louis were ineligible for most home loans.

The manual also contained the same blatant racism as HOLC’s rules. “If a neighborhood is to retain stability,” the FHA manual stated, “it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” The manual recommended that neighborhoods that wanted to be eligible for mortgages enact restrictive covenants like those used in Detroit to bar blacks and others from new neighborhoods.

The FHA manual was perhaps the single most detrimental document in the history of urbanism in the United States. With a few lines of anti-density, racist planning policy, the federal government essentially forced the creation of the suburbs and the near-complete disinvestment of the inner city. Not only were builders discouraged from

building in cities; if they wanted insured mortgage funding, they couldn’t build in cities at all. Cities were dense, mixed-use, and diverse, all qualities the FHA thought undesirable for new-home construction.

It would be easy to dismiss the guidelines as clumsy or a product of less enlightened times, but the FHA knew exactly what consequences its practices would have. In a 1939 memo about Washington, DC , FHA officials admitted the guidelines would end up concentrating poor African Americans in city centers and moving richer whites out to the suburbs: “The ‘filtering up’ process [white people moving to the suburbs], and the tendency of Negroes to congregate in the District, taken together, logically point to a situation where eventually the District will be populated by Negroes and the surrounding areas in Maryland and Virginia by white families.”

Yet the FHA did not change its policies for years , and banks followed the agency’s lead. Historical data on FHA loans nationwide are slim, but surveys from individual cities show how vast the influence of the FHA was. In the city of St. Louis, for example, only 12,116 mortgages were backed by FHA insurance between 1934 and 1960, while St. Louis County (the suburbs of St. Louis) received nearly 63,000 FHA-backed mortgages. Nassau County, which encompasses many New York City suburbs on Long Island, received 87,000 mortgages; the Bronx received 1,641.

The FHA’s racist policies continued for decades. As late as 1966, for example, there had not been one mortgage backed by the FHA issued in the urban centers of Camden or Paterson, New Jersey, yet nearly half of all suburban housing in the 1950s and 1960s was backed by the FHA or the VA.

The FHA’s preference for suburban-style construction and its redlining of nearly every black neighborhood in America had the effect of trapping poverty in urban centers and trapping African Americans in poverty. In postwar boomtowns such as Detroit, black people were already at a disadvantage in finding jobs and getting paid fairly for those jobs—leaving them with lower incomes and nest eggs than whites. That disadvantage was further compounded when the FHA’s loans enabled white flight to the suburbs and forced black people into cities. And that plight was then further compounded when suburbs subsequently banned blacks from living in them, and when factory work (specifically car manufacturing in Detroit) followed white people to the suburbs. Between 1946 and 1956, GM, Chrysler, and Ford spent nearly $8 billion on new factories, nearly all in the suburbs of Detroit. The decentralization was so quick that by the time orders came in for military gear during the Korean War in the 1950s, only 7.5 percent of military purchases came from within the Motor City’s city limits. African Americans were essentially prevented from reaching these jobs by design: they were barred from living in suburbs and often too poor to afford transportation via car out to the factories.

Black people in Detroit and all across the country not only were pushed into city centers and held there by racist suburban policy but were repeatedly internally displaced by the forces of “urban renewal.” Federally funded highways began cutting through Detroit after World War II. The highways weren’t just ways to subsidize white flight to the suburbs; local politicians considered them a “ handy device for razing the slums .” Detroit displaced nearly 2,000 black families from one area along Gratiot Avenue in 1947 for the sole purpose of getting rid of a section of the city that

used more tax dollars than it gave back. Mayor Albert Cobo called urban renewal the “price of progress .”

The effect of decades of segregation is that black Americans are poorer and less likely to achieve success than whites. In Stuck in Place, a study of the apartheid-like conditions of black America, New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey found that over the last half century there has been virtually no improvement in the income of African Americans. While white children today who come from middle-class families can expect to earn on average $74,000 , $20,000 more than their parents, black children can expect to earn $45,000 a year—not only significantly less than white kids, but $9,000 less than the average earned by black people in the middle class a generation ago. Half of middle-income black kids fall down the economic ladder compared with the previous generation, while only 14 percent of white kids do.

Sharkey argues that there’s only one possible reason: “ When white families advance in economic status , they are able to translate this economic advantage into spatial advantage by buying into communities that provide quality schools and healthy environments for children.” This simply is not possible for most black families.

The United States’ racist housing legacy may seem only tangentially related to gentrification today, but the two processes are part and parcel of the same historical trajectory. If black Americans had been able to achieve the same kind of success through housing that whites had, gentrification would not be such a race-based phenomenon. Instead, the intentional destruction of black urban life has become the canvas on which gentrifiers now paint.

Over and over again, media organizations, hipsters, and artists refer to Detroit as a “blank slate.” That ignores not only the 700,000 other people who still live there but also the historical reality that the “blank slate” was created through decades of brutal racism. The fact that gentrifiers are often taking advantage of the cheap rent caused by racially restrictive housing policy also complicates the narrative gentrifiers and the mainstream media like to perpetuate about being saviors to decimated urban areas. When Jamie Dimon, the head of JPMorgan Chase, announced the bank would invest $100 million in the city’s downtown in 2014, the press hailed him as a risk taker. And, as we have seen, Dan Gilbert has been called a superhero . This of course belies the fact that the same kinds of institutions—and often the very same institutions, as is the case with old banks such as JPMorgan Chase—were instrumental in destroying Detroit and keeping its poor black residents poor. Gentrifiers may see racial inequality in Detroit, but few acknowledge where that inequality comes from. These gentrifiers are often the kids of the same white families that were able to leave Detroit thanks to subsidies from the federal government in the form of highways and low-interest loans on houses—loans that were denied to black families because of redlining.

Now, just like generations before, though with the geography reversed, the same dynamic is playing out: white people are being subsidized by the local, state, and federal governments to reinhabit cities, while black Detroiters are

ignored or even forcibly pushed out. Fifty years ago subsidies came in the form of billions spent on highways and suburban housing. This time they come in the form of billions used on tax breaks for stadiums and condos, for renovations of storefronts and homes, for streetcars and bike lanes.

Gentrification is often presented as a sort of corrective to the suburbs: instead of white flight and unsustainable cookie-cutter planning, we get dense, urban, and diverse cityscapes. But gentrification is simply a new form of the same process that created the suburbs; it’s the same age-old, racist process of subsidizing and privileging the lives and preferred locales of the wealthy and white over those of poor people of color. The seesaw has just tipped in the other direction. Gentrification does not mean that the suburbs are over, or that cities are becoming more diverse. All it means is that our geography of inequality is being redrawn. Gentrification is not integration but a new form of segregation. The borders around the ghettos have simply been rebuilt.

Lauren Hood grew up in Detroit . She’s black and navigates the two worlds of the old and new Detroit. Until recently, Hood was the community engagement manager at Loveland Technologies, one of the hottest tech companies in the city. Loveland has developed software that allows the city of Detroit, along with anyone else with an Internet connection, to view detailed information about any piece of land in the city—its owner, its blight status (is it in need of being demolished? Is it occupied?), and often a photo. Loveland’s technology is used by the city and funded by some of its major players, including Dan Gilbert.

Hood told me her work there left her feeling unfulfilled, and recently she quit. Still, she occupies a space few others do: she’s black, she’s part of the professional class in the city, and she lives in the 7.2. But she’s also part of that other Detroit, the people being pushed out of the city both by the government’s current focus on the 7.2 and by a legacy of racism. Hood is a fourth-generation native Detroiter. Her parents were part of the black middle class that built Detroit. Her mom was an administrator for the state government; her father worked for GM. And Hood has seen their Detroit nearly disappear as the new Detroit she’s part of now takes shape seemingly overnight.

“I made up this character named Ms. Jenkins,” Hood told me on a recent drive up Detroit’s main street—Woodward Avenue, which goes from downtown through Midtown and out toward the deteriorating residential sections of the city and eventually to the suburbs. “When people are like, ‘Oh, all this development, it’s good for Detroiters,’ I’m like, ‘It’s good for Detroiters like you, but is it good for Ms. Jenkins? The woman who has been here for decade after decade, who owns a home on the East Side? All these things that are good for Detroit, which Detroit are they good for?’”

On the way down Woodward out of Midtown, Hood pointed to her loft-style apartment, located a block away from where the new taxpayer-funded hockey arena and entertainment complex will be built. She pointed to the tracks

being laid for the M-1, to buildings that are being converted from abandoned shells to luxury condos. Then, as we got farther and farther away from the city’s center, she pointed to different kinds of things—closed stores, homes burned to the ground, improbable signs of life such as a well-kept lawn on an otherwise desolate block or a clothing shop still in business on a street with little else.

“When I was growing up, all these places were occupied,” she said. “All of the people here had good, solid jobs. What happened?”

We continued driving north, and Woodward turned more and more desolate until it was dark. There was virtually nothing open on either side of the road. The drivers around us seemed concerned only with speeding further north to Detroit’s suburbs.

Eventually Hood turned left off Woodward into a neighborhood near Seven Mile (which is, as the name implies, seven miles from Detroit’s downtown) into an area filled with grand but dilapidated houses. She then made another turn down a small tree-lined residential street where plywood, chains, and padlocks had replaced front doors—an attempt to prevent scavengers from stealing copper wiring. The houses without the plywood were already scavenged, turned into unusable shells one piece of cheap metal at a time. They had no windowpanes, no lights. Hood stopped in front of a house on the corner. It was two stories, simple but nice. It wouldn’t be out of place in the tonier neighborhoods of most industrial American cities. The house showed signs of decay at its fringes—paint chipping, a cracked window. At least, she said, it was occupied. And then she told me, “This is where I grew up.”

Lauren comes to check on the house every couple of weeks as a kind of ritual to remind herself whom she’s fighting for. She feels as if it’s her responsibility to make sure her childhood home doesn’t fall apart like most of the houses surrounding it did.

“I think about how fast this all happened,” Hood said. “What were we paying attention to that we didn’t notice that people were leaving, that properties were deteriorating? It seems like it happened overnight.”

If Hood is looking for a Ms. Jenkins, it could be her own mother. Detroit was never very friendly to Ida Hood or her husband, Lawrence, but they stuck it out year after year, through multiple break-ins and car thefts, as their favorite stores and restaurants closed during the period of white flight, and as many of their friends left for the safer suburbs. But on a cold January day in 2013, a group of teenagers ran up to Ida and Lawrence as they carried groceries from their car to their house. One teen pointed a gun at Lawrence’s head. They robbed the Hoods of everything. The cops took half an hour to show up. And that was what finally convinced them to get out.

“I think I have PTSD,” Ida told me, speaking from her new home in Farmington Hills, a suburb twenty miles northwest of Detroit. “The level of anxiety just increased day by day. We couldn’t sleep, we couldn’t eat. We had to get out of there.… The first good night’s sleep I had was once we moved here.”

Lauren isn’t a conspiracy theorist, but she struggles to figure out the underlying logic in the redevelopment of a city in which people like Ida and Lawrence Hood are forgotten while money and praise are lavished on the new,

largely white Detroit.

“Maybe that was the idea all along,” Lauren told me. “To get rid of them.”

After pausing for a minute at her former home, Lauren began the journey back toward her loft in the city center with me in the passenger seat. If the drive out made it feel like the city was slowly disintegrating into nothing, the drive back made it feel as if we were seeing a city being constructed in real time—burned husks of buildings turning into fully formed ones, sidewalks becoming bright with the yellow of streetlights and the white-blue hue of shopping centers and gas stations. There was a brief lull as we drove through Highland Park, the municipality within Detroit’s borders that’s so poor its fire department’s alarm system involves a fax machine pushing an empty soda can onto the floor. But rather quickly after that, things looked more lush again. You could see the locational seesaw of capital in real time. When we crossed back into the 7.2, it was as if we had entered a dome of luxury tightly sealed at its borders. This is where capital has decided investment is important, and so this is where the people who can afford it live the good life.

“The 7.2 is turning into the Hunger Games,” Lauren said as she pulled up to her house. “They might as well put a barbed-wire fence around it, and everyone else can fight for scraps.”