Race and the Production of Extreme Land Abandonment in the American Rust Belt

Abstract

Extreme land abandonment is one of the most visible expressions of urban decline. Conventional theory emphasizes housing lifecycle processes, municipal fiscal challenges and deindustrialization to explain its prevalence. Empirically however, these factors are not strongly associated with the most extreme instances of land abandonment in the American Rust Belt. Race, by contrast, is strongly associated with these patterns, yet there is little mention of it in conventional theory. This article draws on group threat theory to explain how the construction of Blackness as a threat to white property, power and political influence, has propelled the production of extreme land abandonment. The constructed threat has translated into a sustained suppression of demand and capital for overwhelmingly black neighborhoods. These forces operate both independently and as an accelerant for other abandonment drivers. IntroductionHeidelberg Street in Detroit is fairly typical of the city's near east side. Virtually every home on the street has been abandoned and demolished since the early 1970s (see Figure 1). Today, its open spaces make it look more like a semi-rural town in central Michigan than the center of what was once the fourth largest city in the United States. Though extreme, Heidelberg Street is not unique--62 other census tracts in Detroit alone have also lost half or more of their housing since 1970. In total, there are 269 such extreme housing loss neighborhoods (EHLNs) spread across 49 cities in the region. 1 Though they account for only a small percentage of overall neighborhoods in the region, these spaces are highly visible, and a frequent focus for scholars, practitioners, artists and the general public.2 'Ruin porn' photographers and documentarians flock to such neighborhoods to record ostensibly representative images of Detroit and other cities (Kinney, 2016). Planners and city officials struggle to manage the costs associated with such places (Hackworth, 2015). Urban scholars seek to explain how they became so concentrated in some cities as opposed to others (Dewar and Weber, 2012). Conventional explanations of land abandonment emphasize some combination of housing lifecycle processes, deindustrialization, or municipal fiscal collapse. But, when operationalized across the region, these drivers exhibit much weaker relationships with extreme abandonment than an additional factor that has only been partially developed in this context: race. I argue that race has an under-appreciated causal influence on the production of such extreme land abandonment, past and present. In particular, the construction of Blackness as a threat to white property, political power and safety 1Extreme housing loss neighborhoods (EHLNs) are census tracts that lost more than half of their housing between 1970 and 2010. The more detailed definition and justification for this threshold is contained in the study design section. 2In the 49 cities with extreme housing loss, 6.8% of tracts were EHLNs, 47.3% of tracts had lost 0-49.9% o...

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