DCC researcher David Helps, a coordinator of the Detroit as a Carceral Space research initiative, has published “The Police: Gentrification’s Shock Troops” in the online magazine Public Books (Nov. 3, 2020).
If you want to understand how US cities became what they are today, look to Detroit. In 1980, Detroit handed General Motors more than $100 million to build a new factory where the working-class Poletown neighborhood stood. After months of protest, it took deploying a SWAT team to clear out the last residents (including women in their seventies), who were sheltering in a church. These types of corporate inducements have emptied Detroit’s coffers, and the poorest residents have shouldered the burden. Since the city’s bankruptcy in 2013, thousands of families with unpaid water bills or property taxes have been evicted: victims of predatory mortgages, illegal and discriminatory tax assessments, and water bills that have increased 120 percent.
If you want to understand what US cities will become in the future, look—again—to Detroit. . . .
Read the full article here.
