Shreya Sutariya

Kevin Ball
Honors 1000
November 29, 2014
ESSAY 3: WHERE ARE WE GOING?
Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects
In the 1930's, mobility for black people in Detroit was limited. While they were able to
get jobs in the city, they were often met with the everyday expression of white supremacy and
segregation [was] unrelenting (Martelle 86). Institutional racism manifested itself in many
forms. For example, during the Great Depression black employment was particularly hard hit
(Martelle 92). One of the main sectors that were unfair to black people was housing. On certain
houses, deed covenants existed. Sometimes deed covenants would specifically ban sales to
African-Americans and sometimes they would ban sales to people who were not Caucasian
(Stach 53, 54). The covenants led to more people having to stay in places like Black Bottom
(Martelle 156). When African-Americans did try to get access to better housing in predominantly
white neighborhoods, they were met with violence, as with Ossian Sweet (Turrini).
The racism that black people faced when trying to move away from impoverished areas
led to black tenants . . .paying premium rates for vastly substandard housing in the only
neighborhoods in which they could find someone who would rent to them (Martelle 90). This
led to overpopulation in areas such as Black Bottom. Some fifteen thousand blacks were packed

into ill-kept rental housing . . . Before it became a black ghetto, the neighborhood held about
seventy-five hundred residents (Martelle 90).
Along with the Great Depression came the New Deal. Even then, federal administrations
like the Emergency Relief Administration was inadequate in providing aid. Discrimination was
prohibited, but that was often difficult to enforce. Additionally, segregated work assignments
and in some instances wholly segregated work projects were tolerated. It was also common for
skilled minority workers to be discriminatorily categorized as unskilled (Harvey 12).
In 1935, to address the inadequate living conditions of slums like Black Bottom, Eleanor
Roosevelt started the slum-clearance project (funded by the federal government with $6.6
billion). Eleanor Roosevelt said, sixty-eight percent of the dwellings have been condemned as
unsafe for human habitation. Records show crime to be six times the average for the city,
juvenile delinquency ten times the average, tuberculosis seven and one-half times the average.
This started the Brewster homes project (later the Brewster-Douglass housing projects). The aim
was to create fifteen hundred public housing units . . . for poor blacks (Martelle 141). The
overcrowding slum would not have existed and there would not have been a need for such a
project, had institutional racism not existed at the time. Unfortunately, the land cleared after E.
Roosevelts speech stayed empty for five years. Meanwhile, the city government failed to
address the needs of the seven thousand displaced families (Martelle 158).
Even if the projects had been created as soon as possible, the Brewster-Douglass housing
projects for African Americans was an overall harmful New Deal project. The BrewsterDouglass projects dramatically decreased the likelihood of more evenly integrated communities
in and around Detroit. They created a toxic environment for minority groups and this played a
significant role in Detroits decline.

After the initial completion of the projects, most of the residents were actually quite
happy with the place. At Brewster Center we played baseball, we pitched horseshoes, we went
swimming, shot pool, we danced and we sang, said Mr. Hughes, a former resident of the
Brewster-Douglass homes, during a reunion in 1991. In the Special to The New York Times,
Brewster is described as a place of green lawns and flowers and intact families. However, over
time, those elite residents moved into the suburbs, they started moving in welfare people that
really didnt have the interest in keeping up the apartments, said Hodge, another former
resident.
Another problem with the Brewster-Douglass projects was that it mostly consisted of low
rise and high rise buildings there were no traditional houses. The apartment is good for middleclass people, but the poor are not able to hire the required people that are needed to maintain
such a building. Lobbies and corridors are vandalized; without proper maintenance, broken
elevators do not get fixed, staircases become garbage dumps, and broken windows remain
unreplaced (Rybczynski 166). Rybczynski goes on to say that without proper supervision,
teenagers sixteen stories below vandalize, a lack of gardeners leads to an unappealing exterior.
Besides those aesthetic losses, the open pedestrian areas are problematic: windblown,
unconducive to walking, and less safe than conventional streets and sidewalks overlooked by
individual homes (Rybczynski 166). All of these factors contributed to the rise of crime in
public housing.
There were national events that magnified the issue of race in the United States. In 1956,
the Federal Highway Act was enacted, it significantly sped up suburbanization and white flight.
In 1968, the last of the Civil Rights legislation was passed in the Fair Housing Act, which made

it illegal to discriminate when selling houses. This implies that before 1968, racism still limited
social mobility for African-Americans. However, a year before, in 1967, Detroit saw one of the
most violent riots in American history. Public housing presumably played a role in influencing
these riots. George Romney, Michigan governor during the riot, said, What triggered the riot in
my opinion, to a considerable extent, that between urban renewal and expressways, poor black
people were bulldozed out of their homes. They had no place to go in the suburbs because of
suburban restriction. They settled along 12th Street. The concentration of people on 12th Street
was too great. So when that incident occurred, it was a spark that ignited the whole area.
The 1967 riot on 12th Street significantly sped up white flight, further driving down
property value in Detroit as well as reducing the citys tax revenue. Furthermore, an assessment
of racial attitudes after the riot showed that race was still a divisive issue. 75% of whites thought
that race relations would be damaged, while 38% of blacks thought the same. 70% of the white
population in metro Detroit thought that the black rioters were demanding too much and that
they only had themselves to blame for the fact they had worse jobs, education, and housing
than white people (Darden and Thomas 3).
Of course Detroit was not unique in its approach to addressing inadequate housing for the
poor. The Cabrini-Green projects were all high-rise buildings in Chicago. From an urban renewal
way of seeing, modern urbanism meant isolating creating single-use zones. Along with the
high-rise buildings being poor choices for low-income households, the Cabrini-Green buildings
were inadequate in that there were no private balconies, which left the access galleries and
elevators open to the cold. Standardized high-rise apartment blocks that contribute to social
isolation are a problem, not only because they are inhuman in scale but also because they
stigmatize their occupants, claims Rybczynski (168). There was a competition in Chicago,

asking for hypothetical solutions to the housing problem. The winners were Nelson and Faulker.
They opted for integration via letting two-thirds of the 8,000 dwellings be privately owned. The
public and private housing would be indistinguishable . . . hope that public housing might be
finally be . . . integrated into the city (Rybczynski 168, 169). In addition, their urban design
involved a mix of commercial buildings, small parks, police and fire stations, and daycare
centers. In San Francisco, a successful public housing solution was provided via the Richardson
Apartments. The apartments are conducive to pedestrians allowing for bike transit as well. The
buildings themselves have several commercial locations in them. The Richardson Apartments
also meet GreenPoint requirements for sustainable features, such as reclaimed woods, a
purifying bioswale in the court, and sunshades. The roof includes a living roof, allotment garden
plots, solar arrays, seating and views of city hall (David Baker Architects).
The Brewster-Douglass homes were created to help the people effected by racism in
Detroit. However, the crime ridden place held people back. It is clear to see that single-zone
areas do not work. Institutional racism and police brutality (which led to the riots) didnt work
and only led to more violence. Rybczynski offers an alternative to just institutional racism being
the reason for the failure of the projects created to help blacks: Black workers had migrated
thousands of miles in search of productive employment only a decade or two earlier [Great
Migration], so what stopped them [from going to the suburbs] this time? The new ingredient, as
many social critics have pointed out, was the Great Society, with its social agencies, welfare
programs, and cash benefits. Since many of these benefits were not portable, people stayed put.
It was the beginning of the urban underclass (Rybczynski 171). However, even modern studies
offer compelling evidence of covert racism affecting the way people are forced to live. Black
workers, observes Mieklejohn, may not seek higher paying jobs in suburban Detroit because of

discrimination in terms of unfair hiring practices and harassment by police (Bates and
Fasenfest 961). A study in Eastpointe from the early 2000s found that black motorists were more
likely to be stopped by police when outside of the Eight Mile Road boundary (Bates and
Fasenfest 960). Racial profiling discouraged blacks from seeking employment in the suburbs
even though employment opportunities in Detroit were bleak.
It seems that integration earlier on would have solved a considerable amount of these
problems (finding jobs, crime, race riots). The Brewster-Douglass projects were for the black
population of Detroit at the time. If those projects had not been in single-use zones and had had
some kind of commercial participation, it is highly likely that the homes would not have
deteriorated so quickly nor attracted criminal activity.