Mapping Detroit

Notice the dense street grid and the absence of highways slicing through neighborhoods.

Now compare the city as it was in 1940 to the way it is today. Notice the amount of vacant land and the number of highways that now slice through the city form.

How has the urban form changed since 1940? How did infrastructure projects change the city's population and wealth? This map will respond to these questions by looking at the impact on the urban form of a government policy called redlining.

Here are the city limits of Detroit. The street map of urban growth does not extend far beyond the city limits because most areas outside Detroit were undeveloped. Zoom in on these areas to see the undeveloped crabgrass frontier of farmlands and forest at city edge.

In 1940, Detroit city had a population of 1,623,000. Detroit suburbs had only 757,000 people. Today, more people live in Detroit suburbs than in Detroit city. How did this come to be? This map will explore one force that drove this shift from city to suburb.

Starting in the 1930s, the American government drew maps of every major city. These maps were colored red, yellow, blue, and green to help banks determine if a neighborhood was a safe and stable place to invest.

This is the redlining map of Detroit in 1939. Click annotations to explore neighborhoods.

Banks were encouraged to examine these maps and refuse to give loans to people living in or buying homes in neighborhoods colored red. This practice is called redlining. This policy locked a generation of Black people out of home ownership.

Starting in the 1920s, about six million Blacks living in farms and plantations in the American South fled poverty, segregation, and often death threats from White racists. This mass movement is known as the Great Migration. About 200,000 of these migrants arrived in Detroit in hopes of finding good jobs and safe homes.

Unfortunately, Black migrant hopes did not become reality. The streets of Detroit were not paved in gold. The jobs available to Blacks paid less and required longer hours than the jobs available to White people and European immigrants.

This is a population dot map of where all the Blacks lived in 1940.

Each dot represents 100 people.

There were different types of Black neighborhoods.

Some like Black Bottom were dense, poor, and urban. Most were renters.

Others like West Side and Conant Gardens were middle class and relatively wealthy.

Others like Eight Mile-Wyoming and Royal Oak Township were the poorest and most rural of all. But they owned their own homes.

Black neighborhoods started small but quickly grew from a few hundred people to many thousands during the Great Migration.

Various tools were used to keep Blacks in place.

At least 30,000 people lived in Black Bottom in 1940. Shown below is Hastings Street, which was the commercial and cultural center of the Black community. The photo was taken standing at the red star on the map.

Here is the same view c.1960 when Hastings Street and all the buildings on it were demolished for the highway. No traces survive of this street.

Another strategy called restrictive covenants also locked Black people in place. Here is the upper middle-class Black neighborhood of West Side.

Notice how the green dots representing Black people are in a neighborhood marked red as a "hazardous" place to invest. The red dots representing White people are in an area marked yellow.

The government explained why the area north of West Side was unsafe:

"Negro area just to the south. There are higher priced 2-flats and 4-flats on Seebaldt. There are about 15 singles on Spokane and on Ivanhoe priced $6200-9000. This is too high. They are not selling. Danger of negro infiltration which gives the area a 'C' rating."

In 1944, the Orsel McGhee and wife Minnie S. McGhee (pictured) dared to move to a home north of West Side at 4626 Seebaldt Street (red star). Their all-White neighbors tried to stop the McGhee family from living there with a restriction or "restrictive covenant" written into the deed:

"This property shall not be used or occupied by any person or persons except those of the Caucasian race."

The Supreme Court ruled in 1948, that the state could not enforce restrictive covenants in a landmarks civil rights case. However, Detroit housing remains segregated today.

Any Black neighborhood of any size was redlined and denied investment. But the majority of redlined neighborhoods were lived in by White people and White renters.

Also notice that only 15% of the Detroit region was marked green as the safest place for investment. Most green areas fell near or outside of Detroit city limits, meaning that new home construction was easier to finance in the White suburban edge than in the Black city center. This was one reason among many why Detroit was left behind.

Notice that Black homeowners lived in the same neighborhoods as Black renters. A change in social class for Blacks did not mean a change in location.

By contrast, White homeowners were spread over a wider and larger area than White renters. While White renters were closer to the city center, White homeowners were farther from the city center. A change in social class meant a change in location from central city to suburban edge. Click this button:

In America today, where you were born determines where you will go in life. Can you still climb the social ladder if you are locked into the same neighborhood?

Now compare all the maps together: the maps of redlining, street network development, land use, race, and homeownership. What story do they tell?