Michigan cities in the mid-twentieth century were prosperous places that helped to spawn the American middle class. Today, Detroit, Flint, and others have suffered more than half a century of urban crisis. Detroit is the largest city to have ever filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, while Flint gained international attention for its deadly water crisis, and small cities like Highland Park and Benton Harbor are among the most economically depressed in the country. While the ‘Rust Belt city’ narrative has been endlessly rehearsed, that Michigan cities would come to face extreme economic disinvestment was never a foregone conclusion. This dissertation project seeks to understand what actions taken by what actors shaped the economic conditions experienced by Michigan cities today. Who has governed the crisis city, what type of city did competing actors seek to create, and what has been the ultimate result?
This dissertation draws on four decades of data spanning five gubernatorial administrations (three Republican and two Democrat), including state archives, legislative recordings and transcripts, judicial hearings, print and television media, think tank reports and policy memos, surveys, and original interviews with elected officials and state bureaucrats. The project begins in the immediate aftermath of New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s that set a new urban agenda concerned with financial interests and opposed to social spending. It traces the implementation of Michigan’s system of municipal receivership which replaced elected mayors, city councilors, and school district leaders with ‘emergency financial managers’ appointed by the state’s governor. It ends with Detroit’s bankruptcy and the Flint Water Crisis, as receivership became a political liability and debates continued unresolved regarding the future of Michigan’s cities.
Researcher: Mo Torres
The Origins of Urban Austerity in Michigan, 1970s-2010s
Michigan cities in the mid-twentieth century were prosperous places that helped to spawn the American middle class. Today, Detroit, Flint, and others have suffered more than half a century of urban crisis. Detroit is the largest city to have ever filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, while Flint gained international attention for its deadly water crisis, and small cities like Highland Park and Benton Harbor are among the most economically depressed in the country. While the ‘Rust Belt city’ narrative has been endlessly rehearsed, that Michigan cities would come to face extreme economic disinvestment was never a foregone conclusion. This dissertation project seeks to understand what actions taken by what actors shaped the economic conditions experienced by Michigan cities today. Who has governed the crisis city, what type of city did competing actors seek to create, and what has been the ultimate result?
This dissertation draws on four decades of data spanning five gubernatorial administrations (three Republican and two Democrat), including state archives, legislative recordings and transcripts, judicial hearings, print and television media, think tank reports and policy memos, surveys, and original interviews with elected officials and state bureaucrats. The project begins in the immediate aftermath of New York City’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s that set a new urban agenda concerned with financial interests and opposed to social spending. It traces the implementation of Michigan’s system of municipal receivership which replaced elected mayors, city councilors, and school district leaders with ‘emergency financial managers’ appointed by the state’s governor. It ends with Detroit’s bankruptcy and the Flint Water Crisis, as receivership became a political liability and debates continued unresolved regarding the future of Michigan’s cities.
A research grant from HMUI allowed me to spend the summer of 2022 collecting archival materials across Michigan. I conducted research and met with archivists and other researchers at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the State of Michigan Archives in Lansing, and the Walter P. Reuther Library (Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs) at Wayne State University in Detroit. The collections at these libraries cover a wide range of actors, including local city officials, non-profit organizations, and labor at the Reuther Library; elected officials and bureaucrats at the state level at the Bentley Library and State of Michigan Archives; and federal policymakers at the Ford Library. Together, these documents help to explain the process by which urban economic policy is made, both within and beyond cities themselves. They also reveal just how important Detroit, Flint, and other Michigan cities were in the creation of a politics of urban austerity. As social movements across the world – in Greece, Chile, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere – come to denounce austerity policies, it is increasingly urgent to study the origins and consequences of austerity as a mode of governance.
Keywords: Urban politics, state-local governance, historical methods, economic policy, political economy, Michigan (Detroit, Flint), austerity, post-industrial cities, fiscal crisis
