Prelude to the Subprime Crash: Beecher, Michigan, and the Origins of the Suburban Crisis

Journal of Policy History

Volumn 24, Issue 4, 2012, Pages 572-611

  Highsmith, Andrew R ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT SAN ANTONIO   (United States)

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EID: 85011436289     PISSN: 08980306     EISSN: 15284190     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898030612000218     Document Type: Article

References (237)

1. Christopher Swope, “The Man Who Owns Flint,” Governing (January 2008): 52–57
2. Adam Geller, “Abandoning Flint, Michigan: As Homeowners Move Out, Fires Move In,” Insurance Journal, 18 June 2009, http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/midwest/2009/06/18/101510.htm
3. Laura Angus, “Rash of Fires in Flint Thought to Be for ‘Perverted Political Purpose,’” Flint Journal, 25 March 2010
4. Gordon Young, “The Incredible Shrinking American City, Slate, 16 July 2010, http://www.slate.com/id/2260473/; and
5. Teresa Gillotti and Daniel Kildee, “Land Banks as Revitalization Tools: The Example of Genesee County and the City of Flint, Michigan,” n.d. http://www.geneseeinstitute.org/downloads/Revitalization_Tools.pdf. By the beginning of 2010, an additional sixty-six-hundred area property owners were on their way into tax foreclosure.
6. See Ron Fonger, “6,600 Properties in Genesee County Have Overdue Taxes, Headed to Foreclosure,” Flint Journal, 14 January 2010.
7. Khalil AlHajal, “Foreclosure Fight Drags on in Genesee County,” Flint Journal, 12 November 2010.
8. On prices, see http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/story?section=news/local&id=7823748.
9. On previous dislocations due to urban renewal, see Andrew R. Highsmith, “Demolition Means Progress: Urban Renewal, Local Politics, and State-Sanctioned Ghetto Formation in Flint, Michigan,” Journal of Urban History 35:3 (March 2009): 348-68
10. Highsmith, “Demolition Means Progress: Race, Class, and the Deconstruction of the American Dream in Flint, Michigan” (Ph.D. diss. University of Michigan, 2009), 403–81.
11. On home foreclosure data by year, see http://www.realtytrac.com/content/press-releases.
12. George Packer, “The Ponzi State,” New Yorker, 9 February 2009.
13. See, for instance, Kimberly Blanton, “Ex-Fremont Pair Offer Inside Look at Lender,” Boston Globe, 17 January 2008
14. Diane M. Standaert and Sara K. Weed, “Secure Transactions: Restoring Our Communities with Responsible Lending,” Journal of Affordable Housing and Community Development Law 19:1 (Fall 2009): 71–87
15. Senate Judiciary Committee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts Hearing, “Mandatory Mediation Programs: Can Bankruptcy Courts Help End the Foreclosure Crisis?” 111th Cong. 2nd sess. 28 October 2010.
16. On the 1930s crisis, see Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985), 193-96
17. Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago, 1996), 86–89
18. Amy Hillier, “Who Received Home Loans? Home Owners Loan Corporation Lending and Discrimination in Philadelphia in the 1930s,” Journal of Planning History 2:1 (February 2003): 3–24
19. Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton, 2011), 45–97.
20. While leaving the connections between the Section 235 program and subprime lending largely unexplored, historian Louis Hyman has nonetheless speculated that the scandals surrounding the two are “eerily reminiscent.” See Hyman, Debtor Nation, 227.
21. On the 1970s and Section 235, see Brian D. Boyer, Cities Destroyed for Cash: The FHA Scandal at HUD (Chicago, 1973)
22. R. Allen Hays, The Federal Government and Urban Housing: Ideology and Change in Public Policy (Albany, 1985), 107-36
23. Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York, 1994), 100–115
24. Kevin Fox Gotham, “Separate and Unequal: The Housing Act of 1968 and the Section 235 Program,” Sociological Forum 15:1 (2000): 13–37
25. Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience, 1900–2000 (Albany, 2002), 127-42.
26. On the HUD Act more broadly, see Gilbert A. Bartlett, “The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968: Private Enterprise and Low-Income Housing,” William and Mary Law Review 10:4 (1969): 936-55.
27. HUD and Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Analysis of the Flint, Michigan Housing Market as of December 1, 1970, Olive Beasley Papers, box 10, folder 40, Genesee Historical Collections Center (GHCC), University of Michigan–Flint.
28. James Bennet, “A Familiar Formula for a Second Nomination Address,” New York Times, 2 September 2004; Vikas Bajaj and Ron Nixon, “For Minorities, Signs of Trouble in Foreclosures,” New York Times, 22 February 2006; Naomi Klein, “Disowned by the Ownership Society,” Nation, 18 February 2008; Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, “Sub-Prime as a Black Catastrophe,” The American Prospect (October 2008), A9–A11; Packer, “The Ponzi State”; and Alyssa Katz, Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us (New York, 2009), 75.
29. On subprime lending and the “credit revolution” in urban America, see Paul S. Grogan and Tony Proscio, Comeback Cities: A Blueprint for Urban Neighborhood Revival (Boulder, 2000), 107-26.
30. For examples of this rough consensus on chronology, see Richard Williams, Reynold Nesiba, and Eileen Diaz McConnell, “The Changing Face of Inequality in Home Mortgage Lending,” Social Problems 52:2 (May 2005): 181–208
31. Benjamin Howell, “Exploiting Race and Space: Concentrated Subprime Lending as Housing Discrimination,” California Law Review 94:1 (January 2006): 101-47
32. Edward M. Gramlich, Subprime Mortgages: America's Latest Boom and Bust (Washington, D.C. 2007)
33. Carolyn Bond and Richard Williams, “Residential Segregation and the Transformation of Home Mortgage Lending,” Social Forces 86:2 (December 2007): 671-96
34. Dan Immergluck, Foreclosed: High-Risk Lending, Deregulation, and the Undermining of America's Mortgage Market (Ithaca, 2009)
35. “A Symposium on the Subprime Crisis,” City and Community 8:3 (September 2009): 341–56
36. Jacob S. Rugh and Douglas S. Massey, “Racial Segregation and the American Foreclosure Crisis,” American Sociological Review 75:5 (2010): 629-51
37. Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York, 2010).
38. David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago, 2007).
39. See, for example, Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge, 1983), 1–39
40. Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York, 2009), passim; and Hyman, Debtor Nation, 137–45, 174–90.
41. “HUD Program to Aid Low-Income Families in Purchase of Homes,” Wall Street Journal, 20 January 1970
42. Glenn Fowler, “Assurance Given to Homebuilders,” New York Times, 21 January 1970
43. “New Mortgage Securities to Be Offered by Government Unit within Two Weeks,” Wall Street Journal, 16 February 1970; and
44. Hyman, Debtor Nation, 220–34.
45. On the effects of the Section 235 and 236 programs on other communities, see, for example, “Audit Review of Section 235 Single Family Housing,” 10 December 1971, Record Group (RG) 207, Office of Undersecretary, Van Dusen, box 32, National Archives (NA), College Park, Maryland; John Herbers, “Federal Aid to Housing Has Produced Widespread Criticism and Condemnation,” New York Times, 3 January 1972; Herbers, “Subsidized Housing Rise in Suburbs Alarms Cities,” New York Times, 24 January 1972; Herbers, “Outlying Housing for Blacks in Columbia, S.C. Assailed,” New York Times, 26 March 1972; Quadagno, The Color of Welfare, 100–115; Gotham, “Separate and Unequal,” 13–37; Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development, 127–42; and Chris Bonastia, “Hedging His Bets: Why Nixon Killed HUD's Desegregation Efforts,” Social Science History 28:1 (Spring 2004): 19–52.
46. On the significance of local actors, see Bernard J. Frieden, “What Have We Learned from the Housing Allowance Experiment?” Habitat International 5:1–2 (1980): 227-54.
47. On federal “subsidies” and the housing industry, see Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (New York, 2004), chap. 7; Hyman, Debtor Nation, 45–72; and Freund, Colored Property, 118–28. In Colored Property, Freund makes a compelling argument that the federally insured mortgages of the New Deal and postwar eras were subsidies to both the supply and demand sides of the housing market. However, he does not recognize the decisive 1960s shift toward supply-side subsidies and predatory lending that I trace in this article.
48. For examples of this tendency, see Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; and
49. Freund, Colored Property.
50. On credit and discrimination, see Hyman, Debtor Nation, 6–7, 174–90.
51. On suburban diversity, see Myron Orfield, American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality (Washington, D.C. 2002)
52. Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2004)
53. Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds. The New Suburban History (Chicago, 2006).
54. Richard J. Meister, “Beecher: Coldwater Settlement to Community in Crisis,” chaps. I–III, Suburbs-Beecher File, Perry Archives of the Sloan Museum (PA), Flint.
55. Clarence H. Young and William A. Quinn, Foundation for Living: The Story of Charles Stewart Mott and Flint (New York, 1963)
56. Alfred P. Sloan Jr. My Years with General Motors (Garden City, N.Y. 1964)
57. Timothy Jacobs, A History of General Motors (Greenwich, Conn. 1992)
58. Axel Madsen, The Deal Maker: How William C. Durant Made General Motors (New York, 1999)
59. David Farber, Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors (Chicago, 2002).
60. Meister, “Beecher,” chap. IV.
61. Beecher V–4.
62. Tom Dinell, The Influences of Federal, State, and Local Legislation on Residential Building in the Flint Metropolitan Area (Ann Arbor: Institute for Human Adjustment, University of Michigan, 1951), 22–24.
63. Peirce Lewis, “Geography in the Politics of Flint” (Ph.D. diss. University of Michigan, 1958), 20. On self-built housing and working-class suburbanization, see Richard Harris, Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto's American Tragedy, 1900–1950 (Baltimore, 1996)
64. Becky M. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago, 2002), 9–119
65. Wiese, Places of Their Own, 11–93.
66. On federal housing policies, redlining, and racial restrictions, see Freund, Colored Property
67. Highsmith, “Demolition Means Progress: Race, Class, and the Deconstruction of the American Dream in Flint, Michigan,” 68–89, 133–45, 227–61.
68. “Report on the Impact of Section 235/236 Housing on the Beecher School District, Genesee County (Flint), Michigan,” n.d. 1–5, Albert Applegate Papers, box 2, Beecher School District, Bentley Historical Library (BHL), Ann Arbor.
69. On racial violence in Beecher and the remainder of suburban Flint, see Highsmith, “Demolition Means Progress: Race, Class, and the Deconstruction of the American Dream in Flint, Michigan,” 386–410.
70. “Report on the Impact of Section 235/236 Housing,” 6.
71. Gene Merzejewski, “Beecher Woes Now Minor Compared with Strife of ‘70s,” Flint Journal, 5 October 1984.
72. On the selective credit mortgage insurance programs of the FHA and VA, see Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 190–218; and
73. Freund, Colored Property.
74. Mark L. Ladenson, “Race and Sex Discrimination in Housing: The Evidence from Probabilities of Homeownership,” Southern Economic Journal 45:2 (October 1978): 559-75
75. Bonastia, “Hedging His Bets,” 19–52. Specifically, Section 235 of the HUD Act required participants to pay all real estate costs (including the principal, interest, taxes, and insurance) up to 20 percent of their income or all mortgage-related expenses at a special 1 percent interest rate, whichever amount was lower. The federal government paid for all of the borrowers’ mortgage-related expenses beyond these limits. Because participants in the program paid these costs on a sliding scale that varied depending on income and the value of the mortgage, there was no fixed amount that borrowers owed.
76. John W. Finney, “$5-Billion Plan on Housing Voted by Senate, 67 to 4,” New York Times, 29 May 1968
77. P. N. Brownstein, “New Aids Outlined for Home Owning,” Washington Post, 14 September 1968
78. Saul Klaman, “Federal Support Threatens Private Role in Housing,” New York Times, 20 September 1970
79. John C. Welcher, “The Paradox of Housing Costs,” Wall Street Journal, 26 October 1977
80. Gotham, “Separate and Unequal,” 13–37
81. Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development, 121–42
82. Marshall H. Medoff, “Race and Sex Discrimination in Housing: Comment,” Southern Economic Journal 46:3 (January 1980): 946-49
83. Edward G. Goetz, “Housing Dispersal Programs,” Journal of Planning Literature 18:1 (August 2003): 3–16.
84. See also U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Home Ownership for Lower Income Families (Washington, D.C. 1971), 174.
85. “‘Credit Crunch’ Is Linked to Housing Shortage,” Flint Journal, 23 November 1969; and
86. Medoff, “Race and Sex Discrimination in Housing,” 946–49.
87. On the advertising of the 235 program, see, for instance, “New Bill Stimulates Housing Construction,” Chicago Tribune, 13 August 1968
88. Dave Felton, “First in U.S. under Low-Income Plan: Watts ‘Home of Hope’ Built in Only 96 Hours,” Los Angeles Times, 13 November 1968
89. H. Erich Heinemann, “Savings Bank Group Seeking Sponsors for Housing Projects,” New York Times, 1 May 1969
90. “Sivart to Hold 7th Mortgage Seminar Nov. 12,” Chicago Daily Defender, 8 November 1969
91. “Realty Seminar Tonight,” Chicago Daily Defender, 29 January 1970
92. “Low-Cost Seminar Set-Up,” Washington Post, 14 March 1970.
93. Federal officials also marketed the new program. See, for example, Fowler, “Assurance Given to Homebuilders.”
94. “Report on the Impact of Section 235/236 Housing,” 11.
95. HUD and FHA, Analysis of the Flint, Michigan, Housing Market as of December 1, 1970.
96. Welcher, “The Paradox of Housing Costs”
97. Jack Rosenthal, “Romney, in Shift, Freezes Disputed Home Aid to Poor,” New York Times, 15 January 1971; and
98. Herbers, “U.S. Now Big Landlord in Decaying Inner City,” New York Times, 2 January 1972.
99. Herbers, “Lag in Housing Spurs a Drive to Alter Law,” New York Times, 22 March 1971.
100. Flint Housing Commission, Annual Report, 1971(Flint: Flint Housing Commission, 1972), 8; and Leon V. Whitfield, A Study to Determine the Characteristics of Homeowners and Multifamily Developments in Default on Federally Subsidized Mortgages (Flint: Genesee County Metropolitan Planning Commission, 1974).
101. Yost, “Federal Guidelines Promote Integrated Housing,” Flint Journal, 17 October 1971
102. Robert E. Mitchell and Richard A. Smith, “Race and Housing: A Review and Comments on the Content and Effects of Federal Policy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 441 (January 1979): 177
103. Quadagno, The Color of Welfare, 106–9; Bonastia, “Hedging His Bets,” 27; and Bonastia, “Why Did Affirmative Action Fail During the Nixon Era? Exploring the ‘Institutional Homes’ of Social Policies,” Social Problems 47:4 (November 2000): 524.
104. On the poor oversight, see “Civil Rights Unit Says Housing Bias Study Shows HUD Has Failed to Change Pattern,” Wall Street Journal, 11 June 1971; and
105. Fowler, “Assurance Given to Homebuilders.”
106. Whitfield, A Study to Determine
107. Peter Braestrup, “HUD's Biggest Housing Effort Runs into Trouble in Michigan,” Washington Post, 16 February 1971.
108. “Report on the Impact of Section 235/236 Housing,” 7–9.
109. Harold Ford, “Beecher: Ten Years after Paul Cabell's Suicide,” Flint Voice, 3–16 June 1982.
110. Braestrup, “HUD's Biggest Housing Effort.”
111. “Report to Joint Economic Committee on Beecher School District,” 25 May 1971, 1–9, Beasley Papers, box 10, folder 12, GHCC.
112. “Report on the Impact of Section 235/236 Housing,” 11.
113. Braestrup, “HUD's Biggest Housing Effort.”
114. “Report to Joint Economic Committee,” 7.
115. Gerald A. Ziegler, “Some 235 Housing Criticism Based on Bigotry, Jean Says,” Flint Journal, n.d. [ca. 1971].
116. Genesee Community Development Conference, 1970 Activities Report (Flint: Genesee Community Development Conference, 1971), 9.
117. “Report to Joint Economic Committee,” 6
118. “M. M. Township & City Could Get Fed. Monies,” Genesee County Herald, 25 October 1972.
119. Herbers, “Lag in Housing.”
120. Herbers, “Outlying Housing for Blacks.”
121. See Richard Karp, “Painting over the Cracks: Section 235, ‘The National Housing Scandal,’ Is Back in Business,” Barron's National Business and Financial Weekly, 15 December 1975.
122. Proceedings of the Flint City Commission, 16 March 1970, 130.
123. Braestrup, “HUD's Biggest Housing Effort.”
124. Herbers, “Lag in Housing.”
125. Proceedings of the Flint City Commission, 4 May 1970, 274.
126. Proceedings of the Flint City Commission 13 July 1970, 443.
127. Proceedings of the Flint City Commission 23 July 1970, 469.
128. An Analysis of the Section 235 and 236 Programs: Prepared for the Subcommittee on Housing and Urban Affairs of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, U.S. Senate (Washington, D.C. 1973)
129. Herbers, “U.S. Report Finds Fraud in Housing,” New York Times, 6 January 1971; and
130. “Federal Compensation for the Victims of the ‘Homeownership for the Poor’ Program,” Yale Law Journal 84:2 (December 1974): 298.
131. Meister, “Beecher,” VIII–6.
132. “Report on the Impact of Section 235/236 Housing,” 23.
133. “Audit Review of Section 235 Single Family Housing.”
134. “Riegle Claims Housing Will Take a Community Effort,” Genesee County Herald, 27 September 1972.
135. “Delinquency Rate Up on Mortgages,” New York Times, 2 September 1971; Herbers, “U.S. Now Big Landlord”; Herbers, “Housing Reform Bill Lags as Nation's Crisis Grows,” New York Times, 24 July 1972; “Delinquency Rising on Mortgage Loans,” New York Times, 25 November 1972; and Michael H. Schill and Susan M. Wachter, “The Spatial Bias of Federal Housing Law and Policy: Concentrated Poverty in Urban America,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 143:5 (May 1995): 1313.
136. “Report to Joint Economic Committee,” 8.
137. Meister, “Beecher,” VIII-6.
138. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Report on the Racial and Ethnic Impact of the Section 235 Program (Washington, D.C. 1971)
139. Herbers, “Rights Panel Says U.S. Housing Plan Aids Segregation,” New York Times, 11 June 1971.
140. “Audit Review of Section 235 Single Family Housing.”
141. Audit Review of Section 235 Single Family Housing 6.
142. “Report on Audit of Section 236 Multifamily Housing Program,” 29 January 1972, 68–72, Applegate Papers, box 2, 235–36 Audit Reports—January–February 1972, BHL.
143. See also “Draft Report on Section 236 Nationwide Audit,” 29 December 1971, Applegate Papers, box 2, 235–36 Audit Reports—January–February 1972, BHL.
144. The automobile industry slumps of the 1970s only exacerbated the region's gathering foreclosure crisis. Between 1969 and 1975, the number of GM employees working in Genesee County declined from 76,700 to 59,600. See Thomas R. Hammer, Evaluation of Development Potentials for Metropolitan Flint, Michigan (Evanston, Ill. 1986), 2.
145. Whitfield, A Study to Determine, 1-12.
146. Fowler, “Assurance Given to Homebuilders.”
147. Gotham, “Separate and Unequal,” 22.
148. Ronald Kessler, “Patman: FHA Aids Profiteers,” Washington Post, 31 July 1970
149. “Audit Review of Section 235 Single Family Housing,” 12–21
150. Herbers, “Subsidized Housing Rise in Suburbs”
151. Fred Ferretti, “U.S. Looks into Profits on Homes,” New York Times, 20 February 1972
152. Heinemann, “F.H.A.—from Suburb to Ghetto,” New York Times, 7 May 1972; and
153. Quadagno, The Color of Welfare, 105–6.
154. “Audit Review of Section 235 Single Family Housing,” 18–21; and
155. Hays, The Federal Government and Urban Housing, 114.
156. “Report to Joint Economic Committee,” 6.
157. See also “Report on the Impact of Section 235/236 Housing.”
158. “Report to Joint Economic Committee,” 4.
159. “Report on the Impact of Section 235/236 Housing,” 13.
160. Report on the Impact of Section 235/236 Housing 17; and
161. Braestrup, “HUD's Biggest Housing Effort.”
162. Randall Coates to George Romney, 22 January 1971, Applegate Papers, box 2, Beecher School District, BHL.
163. “Report on the Impact of Section 235/236 Housing,” 16.
164. See Report on the Impact of Section 235/236 Housing
165. Braestrup, “HUD's Biggest Housing Effort.”
166. Merzejewski, “Beecher Woes Now Minor.”
167. Thomas C. Henthorn, “A Catholic Dilemma: White Flight in Northwest Flint,” Michigan Historical Review 31:2 (Fall 2005): 27.
168. “Field Representative's Notes,” Beasley Papers, box 10, folder 12, GHCC.
169. “Curb on Building in Beecher Raises Legal Eyebrows,” Flint Journal, 7 April 1970; and
170. “Ban on Building in Beecher Hot Potato,” Flint Journal, 12 April 1970.
171. Ronald L. Froehlich, “Crowd Supports Board on Beecher Building Ban,” Flint Journal, 14 April 1970; and
172. Froehlich, “Beecher Board Still in Favor of Building Ban,” Flint Journal, 23 April 1970.
173. “Court Rules Beecher Building Moratorium Illegal,” Flint Journal, 14 July 1970; and
174. “Township Declines Appeal of Beecher Case,” Flint Journal, 30 July 1970.
175. A&E Building Company et al. v. Mt. Morris Township, Judge Elliott No. 16046 Opinion, State of Michigan, Circuit Court for the County of Genesee (1970); “Court Rules Beecher Building Moratorium Illegal”; and “Township Declines Appeal of Beecher Case.”
176. “Building Moratorium Ends, Beecher Plans for Enrollment Jump,” Flint Journal, n.d. [ca. 18 July 1970].
177. Robert Lewis, “New ‘235’ Housing Starts Delayed for Area Probe,” Flint Journal, 9 February 1971
178. Ziegler, “Beecher ‘235’ Probe May Trigger Investigations in Other Areas,” Flint Journal, 18 February 1971; and
179. Ziegler, “Krapohl Wants FHA Housing Stalled,” Flint Journal, 31 March 1971.
180. Gulledge to Deming, 18 February 1971.
181. Ziegler, “HUD Beecher Report Called Surprisingly Candid,” Flint Journal, 31 May 1971.
182. Fowler, “Assurance Given to Homebuilders.”
183. Romney to Coates, 1. Something similar happened in 1970, when HUD officers halted the construction of Section 235 units in Chicago's south suburbs due to concerns about resegregation. See “HUD Halts Suburban Housing; Blames Segregation,” New York Times, 4 July 1970.
184. Ford, “Paul Cabell: A Man in the Middle,” Flint Voice, 3 June 1982.
185. “Beecher: Ten Years after Paul Cabell's Suicide,” Flint Voice, 3 June 1982; and
186. “Death of the Middleman,” Time, 20 March 1972.
187. Loudon Wainwright, “The Man in the Middle,” Life, 21 July 1972, 55–66
188. Tom Perry, “Tragedy of Paul Cavell [sic] Death Is Indictment of Community. if it Forgets,” Flint Spokesman, 11 March 1972
189. Penn, “Beecher Remembers the Goals of Paul Cabell,” Flint Journal, 5 May 1972; and
190. “Frankness on the Race Issue,” Christian Science Monitor, 10 March 1972.
191. “Black Majority Elected in Beecher,” Free to Be, 18 August 1977.
192. Whitfield, Housing Market Analysis and Feasibility Study (Flint: Genesee County Model Cities Development Corporation, 1972), IV-4
193. Ford, “Beecher: Ten Years after Paul Cabell's Suicide.”
194. Braestrup, “HUD's Biggest Housing Effort.”
195. Meister, “Beecher,” VII–2; and
196. “Report on the Impact of Section 235/236 Housing,” 30.
197. Flint Journal, 7 and 12 April 1970.
198. “Report on the Impact of Section 235/236 Housing,” 35.
199. “Report to Joint Economic Committee,” 6.
200. “M. M. Township & City Could Get Fed. Monies.”
201. Braestrup, “HUD's Biggest Housing Effort”; and
202. Merzejewski, “School Chief Says Beecher's Woes Today Financial, Not Racial,” Flint Journal, 5 October 1984.
203. This was not unique to Flint. See Herbers, “Federal Aid to Housing”
204. Herbers, “Subsidized Housing Rise in Suburbs”
205. Herbers, “Outlying Housing for Blacks”
206. Bonastia, “Hedging His Bets,” 19–52.
207. Satter, “Riots, Real Estate, and Selective Memory,” The Defenders Online, 9 October 2009, http://www.thedefendersonline.com/2009/10/09/riots-real-estate-and-selective-memory/. My estimate of “hundreds of millions of dollars” almost certainly understates the profits accrued by investors. According to Satter, just in Detroit alone, HUD payments to speculators totaled between $375 million and $500 million during the late 1960s and early 1970s. There are no such figures available for Flint and Beecher.
208. On the national foreclosure data, see Karp, “Painting over the Cracks.”
209. Howard Karger, “The Home Ownership Myth,” Dollars and Sense (Spring 2007): 13–19
210. “Federal Compensation for Victims,” 298–99.
211. “HUD Halts Building at Mich. Site,” Washington Post, 8 February 1971.
212. On the wave of financial services deregulation in the 1980s and the growth of the subprime crisis, see Immergluck, Foreclosed.
213. U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Report on the Racial and Ethnic Impact of the Section 235 Program.
214. See, for instance, Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto
215. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996)
216. Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven
217. Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003)
218. David R. Diaz, Barrio Urbanism: Chicanos, Planning, and American Cities (New York, 2005)
219. Freund, Colored Property. The “ghetto studies” published in the 1960s would be clear exceptions to this more recent historiographical trend. See, for instance, Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto, Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York, 1966)
220. Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago, 1967).
221. On the persistence of racial segregation, see Susan Welch et al. Race and Place: Race Relations in an American City (New York, 2001)
222. Xavier de Souza Briggs, ed. The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America (Washington, D.C. 2005)
223. Freund, Colored Property; and Charles M. Lamb and Eric M. Wilk, “Presidents, Bureaucracy, and Housing Discrimination Policy: The Fair Housing Acts of 1968 and 1988,” Politics and Policy 37:1 (February 2009): 127-49.
224. On the significance of HUD and the HUD Act, see Bonastia, Knocking on the Door: The Federal Government's Attempt to Desegregate the Suburbs (Princeton, 2006), passim.
225. On the Fair Housing Act and its enforcement limitations, see William A. Henderson and Todd A. Singer, “The Fair Housing Act of 1968: Deficiencies and Proposals for Change,” Journal of Planning Literature 1:1 (January 1985): 129-41
226. Goetz, “Housing Dispersal Programs,” 3–16
227. Lamb, Housing Segregation in Suburban America Since 1960: Presidential and Judicial Politics (New York, 2005)
228. Bonastia, Knocking on the Door
229. Lamb and Wilk, “Presidents, Bureaucracy, and Housing Discrimination Policy,” 127–49
230. Immergluck, Foreclosed, 51.
231. For examples, see Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, esp. 190–218
232. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, passim
233. Grogan and Proscio, Comeback Cities, 107–26
234. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003), 122-23
235. Self, American Babylon, 3, 97, 130; and
236. Freund, Colored Property, passim. For a more recent iteration of this position
237. see Sugrue, “A Dream Still Deferred,” New York Times, 27 March 2011. Although Freund and other scholars have pointed out that New Deal and postwar federal housing policies also benefited the supply side of the market, they have not acknowledged the marked shift toward corporate subsidies and predatory lending that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s.