Unaffordable Housing Not at the Root of Midwest Homelessness

I was critical of sociologist Matthew Desmond in my last two columns, but I do appreciate that he based his research in Milwaukee. The Midwest is often overlooked in discussions about homelessness. Journalists more often write about California, home to about half of all unsheltered homeless people in the U.S., and New York, flush with immigrants. “Housing First” became a familiar slogan partly because of journalistic near-sightedness: High housing prices in some coastal cities make it easy for coast-based reporters to argue that finances are central to the homelessness problem — but the middle of the country looks very different.

Fact: 60 U.S. cities with more than 100,000 residents — many in the north central sector stretching from Buffalo to St. Louis — have suffered huge population losses in recent decades. Gary, Indiana, once known as Steel City, had 178,000 residents in 1960 and is now down 61 percent. Since 1950, St. Louis has lost almost 60 percent of its population, and Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh about 50 percent.

These cities typically have lots of vacant housing, sometimes decrepit — but better than cement. The beleaguered city of Flint is a good example. When I bicycled through it in 1971 on a cross-country trip, Flint’s population was 200,000. Many of them, or their parents, had migrated from the south to work on cars. Boastful nicknames such as “Fabulous Flint” and “Happiest Town in Michigan” sat alongside Flint’s traditional moniker, “Vehicle City,” the mainstay of the Buick and Chevrolet divisions of General Motors.

A Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago report back when Flint was booming included good news and bad news: “The Flint economy, probably to a greater extent than that of any other city of comparable size, can be described in a single word. That word is automobiles.” Then, decades of decay, deindustrialization, depopulation, and disinvestment dropped the population to 81,000 in 2020. Governmental hubris was part of the problem. In the 1960s, when GM was expanding, planners pushed through a $130 million Interstate 475/industrial park project that destroyed the Saint John neighborhood. Few of the 500 homeowners it displaced could afford to buy elsewhere.

Flint residents still moan over the way officials wasted $62 million in their 1980s creation of AutoWorld, “the largest enclosed theme park in the world.” It included a mock assembly line operated by robots: Not a smart move in a city where automation had led to job losses. At the grand opening on July 4, 1984, then-Governor James J. Blanchard said AutoWorld would trigger “the rebirth of the great city of Flint.” Attendance was so poor that AutoWorld closed six months later. Officials demolished it in 1997.

Many of the problems were beyond local control. The 1973 oil crisis that escalated gas prices came as Detroit was thinking big and Japan was manufacturing small cars. U.S. companies lost market share. Automation, job movement to states without compulsory unionization, and neoliberal offshoring beginning in the 1990s also pushed along Flint’s downfall. In ancient Rome “decimated” meant losing one in ten soldiers. If the number of auto worker jobs had only been decimated, that would not have been as awful. Flint’s plague was nine times worse: GM went from a high of 80,000 Flint employees in 1978 to fewer than 8,000 in 2010. Most found other jobs or retired. Some became homeless.

When it seemed Flint life couldn’t get much worse, it did. Governmental attempts to save money by changing the city’s water supply led to a public health emergency via lead contamination. Children were particularly at risk of lifetime damage to bodies and minds, so governments spent tens of millions to change the water supply and replace more than ten thousand lead pipes.

Now, some of Flint’s public messaging seems like a disconnect: A billboard says, “Eat fruits and veggies every day,” but how much difference does that make when it hovers over a building with the sign, “Come in to donate plasma”? It’s a tough environment when anything that can be stolen is: copper plumbing, manhole covers, even sod and freshly planted saplings. (One arrest was on two counts of “tree larceny” for stealing black walnut trees worth $3,000 each from a city parkway.)

But here’s the silver lining: In a city operating at 40 percent capacity, housing is plentiful. One Flint ad announced, “Cheap Apartments for Rent from $300 with Parking.” Even at the Michigan minimum wage of $10.10 per hour a working person could afford an apartment. The generalizations about housing costs in California and New York don’t apply to Flint.