Tax Increment Financing Contrasting Effects Essay Research — страница 2

of center of economic activity into counties to the north like Oakland, Macomb, and Livingston. Suburbanization is a complex process with many components, however I have identified four physical things and one Limmer (3) psychological factor that changed American cities. The wave of technological innovation such as the automobile, changes in government policy which brought about the interstate highway system, the segregation into racial and social classes, and the overall shift of economic activity. The one psychological factor that I have identified is that overall, suburbanization represents a change in the attitudes of the American people. These five Apillars@ that I have identified I believe at least triggered the suburbanization process in Detroit. In 1880, the city of

Detroit had just over 116,000 residents and was ranked eighteenth in total poplulation (Zunz 3). At that time the city of Detroit was primarily a commercial center in the Great Lake system. In the next forty years, the city would change to a heavy industrial city, thanks to Henry Ford=s utilization of the assembly line. In Zunz book on the Changing Face of Inequality, he introduces seven propositions for the transformation of the city, with each proposition leading to the next one. The first proposition is how in 1880 Detroit was primarily a multiethnic society, with groups clustered together spatially due to a common ethnic background and the social status was on the back-burner. During the turn of the century the city experienced a Asilent social revolution@ and slowly by 1920,

groups began to cluster together by social class as well and individual residents in each group would influence the others based solely on social status. The second proposition is that the evaporation of ethnically bounded neighborhoods were caused by upward mobility in the economic system of Detroit. Zunz argues that ethnic divisions were reinforced through upward mobility within a particular ethnic group during the turn of the century and wouldn=t disappear until the evolution of automobile in the city after it was created in 1908 (Detroit Chamber of Commerce). With the automobile and the huge corporations with Limmer (4) it, the locally owned shops and factories would be overrun by the invading whites and their huge factories. Thus, the white middle class virtually took over

the city, causing the city=s presence of ethnic diversity to virtually disappear and the economic power to rise in the hands of one group, and for the most part is not any different today. The third proposition is that during the transformation that ethnic divisions were highly apparent and that almost every component in each group differed in some way. This represented the growing difference in the ethnic groups of the city. Those groups that contributed to the growth of the city during the beginning of the 1900’s, often maintained a multiethnic society. The fourth proposition is that ethnic bonds remained so strong during the industrialization process that social status didn=t interfere with unequal working conditions. Labor unions did not have an impact in the city until the

evolution of class. The fifth proposition is that many historians believe that early cities around the turn of the century were not segregated. However, even in Detroit certain segregated groups were identified such as Hamtramck, just north of where Wayne State University is today, and that area consisted of Polish immigrants. AWhat really changed from the nineteenth to the twentieth century was the nature of concentration patterns in the city, not their degree.@ The sixth proposition was that the overall size of the city change during the forty years surrounding the turn of the century from 1880-1920. This change in the overall size of the city can be represented by the disappearance of social classes crossing in neighborhoods as was apparent during the nineteenth century, and

into more cohesive units of socially grouped residences and factories. The final proposition is that blacks were the last group to arrive in the city of Detroit and Limmer (5) thus experienced a different settlement process than the white immigrants and Alived history in reverse.@ Blacks were forced to try and live outside the dominating white world, and were not included while the factories of the city were expanding. At the beginning of the century, this was only the first of the migrations of the southern blacks to the northern industrial cities. Another migration would come after WWII and would be even more disasterous for the city. These seven propositions explain the condition of the city of Detroit and the transformation that the city went through from 1880-1920. Toward