The politics of land use and housing in World War II Michigan: Building bombers and communities.

摘要

The decision to locate the Ford Motor Company's Willow Run Bomber Plant in soybean fields twenty-five miles west of Detroit serves as the catalyst for this study of suburbanization and industrial decentralization just before and during World War II. At the time the largest manufacturing plant in the world, the plant stood in relative rural isolation in a landscape only beginning to experience the pressures of suburbanization. Ypsilanti, the nearest city to the plant, was home to around 12,000 people. Peak employment estimates reached 100,000 workers.; In the two years leading up to World War II, the federal government financed defense-related industrial expansion in metropolitan areas across the nation. Expanded industrial production prompted mass migrations to these war boom communities. The federal government preferred land use patterns distinct from and often at odds with the desires of local Michigan communities. Little friction arose over the construction of the massive express highway system that funneled workers to the plant. The official federal policy favoring the more intensive use of existing housing and new multi-family housing in planned communities ran head on into the local preference for single-family houses. The United Automobile Workers union, architects advocating “modern housing,” and federal planners squared off with private real estate interests, local leaders, and the Ford Motor Company over how to house the plant's workers. The conflict eventually scuttled plans for a 10,000-unit model city, and the resulting compromise had significant implications for suburban housing developments, public housing, and racial housing patterns postwar.; The Willow Run Bomber Plant drew workers from a constellation of small, medium, and large cities up to fifty miles away. The study uses two events of metropolitan-wide significance—the plant itself and the impasse between Detroit and its suburbs over where to house in-migrating African Americans—to transcend local political boundaries in order to enable a study of metropolitan politics. This method enables the study to capture the conflict, competition, and cooperation that dominated governing in the politically fragmented Detroit metropolitan area.