This episode treats Detroit’s Black Bottom and Paradise Valley as a study in how policy builds and destroys neighborhoods. The name came from riverbottom soil, not residents, and in the 1920s the area was a mixed enclave of Jewish, Italian, Syrian and German families. By the 1930s it was almost entirely Black, the result of deed covenants that barred sales to nonwhite buyers and Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps that graded Black areas hazardous. Shut out of banks, residents built their own economy along Hastings and St. Antoine Streets, where policy offices running the numbers game acted as informal lenders and venture capital for grocers and restaurants.
The neighborhood produced or hosted Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Diana Ross, Mary Wells and Reverend C.L. Franklin, yet single-family houses held three or four families, and residents were denied New Deal housing aid and VA loans needed for repairs. Labeled a slum, the area was taken by eminent domain under the 1949 Housing Act and 1956 Highway Act, routed through because redlining had made the land cheap. Displaced families went to the Brewster-Douglass and Jeffries projects, both later demolished. More recently a 190,000 square foot University of Michigan and Bedrock Detroit innovation center at Gratiot and I-375 drew protest and moved in 2021.
- By 1950 the city had condemned 423 residences, 109 businesses, 22 manufacturing plants and 93 vacant lots.
- The Edsel Ford Freeway cut through the northern edge of Paradise Valley.
- Lafayette Park, built on the cleared land, was priced and marketed for a different demographic.
- U-M professor Stephen Ward challenged the innovation center, and students rallied behind a hashtag against gentrification.
- The hosts close by asking which communities data centers and logistics warehouses may displace today.
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