Saving The Neighborhood Case Study

In cities across America race has been a crucial line of demarcation. The Origins of the Urban Crisis and Saving the Neighborhood show how race transformed American cities, towns, and neighborhoods. “From Rural South to Metropolitan Sunbelt” demonstrates how racial prejudices lingered in Montgomery County, Texas, evan after racial residential segregation and racially restrictive covenants were proscribed. The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas J. Sugrue examines the deindustrialization of Detroit, Michigan as a result of commercial decline, disinvestment, property devaluation, job loss, and depopulation. As a perfect and detailed case study, Sugrue uses Detroit to explain the transformation of American cities as a result of three factors:

However, racial conflicts were downplayed and discussions of class structure were censored. City government solutions were never able to correct the underlying causes of Detroit’s economic woes. Racially restrictive covenants led to a shifting of Detroit’s racial borderlands. For elite and steadily-employed blacks, housing options were opened up, if the housing was located in still-segregated neighborhoods. Detroit’s white citizens banded together to form grassroots groups to keep their neighborhoods racially segregated. Sugrue argues that violence practiced by whites was organized, widespread, and the largest grassroots movement in Detroit’s history. The effects of racial violence in Detroit were far-reaching and included: hardened definitions of white and black identities; limited housing opportunities for blacks, persistent housing segregation that stigmatized blacks; racial divisions; and a reinforcement of unequal race relations. While Sugrue focused on an entire city and its economy, Brooks and Rose take a look at racially restrictive covenants in neighborhoods in the second book, Saving the Neighborhood. The authors also aim to examine the ways legal and social norms reinforce one

The people Brooks and Rose credit with spread of racially restrictive covenants are norm entrepreneurs. Developers, brokers, and the FHA, instituted covenants as standard practice. Paradoxically, these norm entrepreneurs were faced against norm breakers who attempted to ameliorate the practice and effects of racial covenants. Norm breakers, including blacks thinking of integrating into white neighborhoods, civil rights lawyers, and political groups such as the NAACP, began to challenge racially restrictive covenants. While illegal in today’s world, racially restrictive covenants do still exist in many deeds, covenants, conditions and restrictions. Homeowners are still left with few options in handling their restrictive covenants. “The amendment process nonetheless can be arduous, often requiring some kind of supermajority along with legally acknowledged signatures of the participating members.” Seemingly the only way to deal with these lingering housing restrictions is to ignore