Beyond Corporate Abandonment: General Motors and the Politics of Metropolitan Capitalism in Flint, Michigan
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JUH40110.1177/0096144213508080HighsmithJournal of Urban History
Special Section: The New Metropolitan History
Journal of Urban History
2014, Vol 40(1) 31–47
Beyond Corporate Abandonment: © 2013 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permissions:
General Motors and the Politics of sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0096144213508080
Metropolitan Capitalism in Flint, juh.sagepub.com
Michigan
Andrew R. Highsmith1
Abstract
Following World War II, executives from the General Motors Corporation (GM) implemented
a sweeping corporate growth plan that centered on the suburbanization of manufacturing. As
part of this agenda of metropolitan capitalism, company officials shifted resources and jobs away
from the city of Flint, Michigan—GM’s international manufacturing headquarters. However,
these capital migrations were not examples of corporate abandonment. Rather, the company’s
investment decisions were part of a larger effort to expand Flint’s boundaries and create a
regional government. Although suburban opponents ultimately defeated the proposal for a
“New Flint,” GM’s support for metropolitan government belies the notion of capital flight at
the heart of most literature on the “urban crisis.” Emphasizing the local struggles that unfolded
over GM’s postwar investment strategy, this case study posits metropolitan capitalism as a
new framework for explaining urban deindustrialization and, more broadly, the processes of
suburban development.
Keywords
Flint, Michigan, deindustrialization, metropolitan capitalism, corporate abandonment, regionalism,
industrial garden, General Motors, globalization
During the two decades following the onset of World War II, executives from the General Motors
Corporation (GM) devised an aggressive corporate strategy that centered on the spatial decentral-
ization of manufacturing. Nowhere was this strategy more evident than in the “Vehicle City” of
Flint, Michigan—a midsized industrial town seventy miles northwest of Detroit that was also
GM’s birthplace and international manufacturing headquarters. As part of this pro-growth
agenda—which we might refer to as metropolitan capitalism—company officials implemented a
sweeping suburban investment campaign that shifted resources and jobs away from Flint and
other urban manufacturing centers. Between 1940 and 1960, GM opened eight new industrial
complexes in Genesee County, all of them in the suburbs. By the close of the 1950s, the
1University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA
Corresponding Author:
Andrew R. Highsmith, Department of Public Administration, University of Texas at San Antonio, 501 W. César E.
Chávez Boulevard, San Antonio, TX 78207, USA.
Email: andrew.highsmith@utsa.edu32 Journal of Urban History 40(1)
twenty-one thousand men and women who labored in GM’s new suburban facilities accounted
for more than a third of the automaker’s overall workforce in the Flint metropolitan area.1
Although scholars have often framed such developments as examples of “corporate abandon-
ment” or “capital flight,” GM’s postwar suburban strategy was not an act of secession from the
central city.2 Rather, GM’s investment decisions were part of a larger agenda of metropolitan
capitalism. In practice, metropolitan capitalism entailed the shifting of corporate resources from
the city to the suburbs along with an ambitious urban growth plan that revolved around annexa-
tion and the creation of a Sunbelt-style regional government.3 The outward migration of corpo-
rate capital did not result in any meaningful “spatial mismatches” between urban workers and
suburban jobs, however.4 When GM executives ordered new plants built outside of Flint, they
chose sites very close to the city limits that were easily accessible to most local workers.
Moreover, they built the new factories with the explicit hope that the city would one day acquire
them. Accordingly, GM officials actively supported the annexation of their outlying facilities as
well as a 1958 initiative known as “New Flint,” which promised to consolidate the Vehicle City
and its urbanized suburbs under a more efficient metropolitan “super government.” Although
suburban opponents ultimately defeated the New Flint proposal after months of bitter contesta-
tion, GM’s staunch support for metropolitan capitalism and regionalism belies the narratives of
corporate abandonment and spatial mismatch at the heart of most literature on America’s “urban
crisis.” Furthermore, Flint’s extended experiment with metropolitan capitalism suggests the need
for a revised periodization for the deindustrialization of urban America—one that highlights the
significance of the 1970s rather than the postwar decades.5
Flint’s complex history of industrial suburbanization and regionalism also begs for new inter-
pretive frameworks for understanding post–World War II metropolitan development. Principally,
Flint’s divisive and polarizing experience with metropolitan capitalism fits uneasily with histo-
rian Robert Self’s vision of the “industrial garden.” In American Babylon: Race and the Struggle
for Postwar Oakland, Self argues that the patterns of industrial decentralization and housing
suburbanization that emerged in and around Oakland, California, after World War II were part of
a broader project by planners and civic boosters to create an industrial garden in the Bay Area’s
sprawling, overwhelmingly white suburbs. According to Self, the industrial garden—or at least
the one envisioned by local business leaders—was a self-consciously suburban landscape marked
by modern, sleek factories, tree-lined residential subdivisions, economic dynamism, racial exclu-
sion, and social harmony. But Self’s industrial garden was not simply an imagined entity. Instead,
he argues, it was equal parts “dreamscape” and reality—an aspirational and utopian construct
that, for a time at least, also found material expression in the “muted” class tensions of the East
Bay’s booming suburbs.6 In truth, though, the industrial gardens that proliferated in the East Bay
and other suburban areas after the war were seldom free from conflict. Indeed, as Flint’s story
confirms, conflicts over space, capital, and power were an almost constant feature of the metro-
politan political landscape in the decades following World War II. In order to acknowledge such
strife, I posit the framework of metropolitan capitalism—with all of its connotations of competi-
tion, conflict, profit seeking, and power—as an alternative to the more pacific metaphor of the
industrial garden.
The case study that follows employs a metropolitan scale of analysis that highlights the sig-
nificance of local actors and conditions in the broader history of urban deindustrialization. Over
the past generation, scholars have written extensively on the transregional and transnational capi-
tal migrations that occurred during the late twentieth century. Although the historiographical
emphasis on national and international developments is not at all misplaced, discourses on glo-
balization, neoliberalism, Sun Belt formation, and other macroeconomic processes have too
often served to conceal the local concerns that also influenced capitalist geographies.7 The urban
plant closures that devastated the economies of Flint and other industrial cities during the late
twentieth century were not simply the epiphenomenal outcomes of global economic restructuringHighsmith 33
and other large-scale capitalist forces. To the contrary, in Flint and other cities, local consider-
ations played a major role in driving the spatial reorganization of capital. Because municipal
actors possessed a great deal of agency in the battles over GM’s regional growth strategy, the
decline of manufacturing in the Vehicle City was in no way inevitable. Indeed, had area residents
succeeded in their quest to implement a metropolitan government, then the city of Flint would
have remained an industrial powerhouse through the close of the twentieth century and beyond.
The decision to reject New Flint and metropolitan capitalism thus had extraordinary implications
for the city’s economic fate.
Suburban Strategies
During the 1940s and 1950s, GM executives built a sprawling network of modern, single-story
manufacturing and assembly plants surrounding the city of Flint (Figure 1). The new factories,
eight of them in all, formed an arc around the city. In contrast to the densely arranged, inefficient,
multistory structures that lined the city’s original industrial corridors along the Flint River and
rail lines, the new suburban factories signaled GM’s preference for larger, single-story plants and
highway-centered facilities. Embracing an aesthetic ideal that celebrated the harmony between
manufacturing and suburban homeownership, GM consciously modeled its outlying plants after
surrounding residential landscapes.8 According to a reporter from the Detroit Free Press, GM’s
new plants resembled “modern country club structures, with low, sleek lines graced by landscap-
ing.”9 Although corporate architects and city planners hoped that the complementarity of subur-
ban factories and residential subdivisions would translate into new forms of civic comity, their
utopian desires quickly gave way to a more contentious reality as local residents competed over
the spoils of industrial decentralization.
The decision to build new factories outside of the city marked an important spatial shift in the
local economy. Prior to the Second World War, all of GM’s major industrial facilities in Genesee
County were located inside of Flint.10 Beginning in the 1940s, however, GM executives replaced
their strategy of industrial urbanism with a new, hotly contested philosophy of metropolitan capi-
talism. Although signs of the emerging metropolitan order were evident all across the region,
they were most noticeable in the southwest suburb of Flint Township, where GM constructed an
ultramodern manufacturing, assembly, and corporate office complex near the intersection of Van
Slyke and Bristol Roads.11 The opening of the new facilities in the late 1940s and early 1950s set
off a hiring frenzy that drove GM’s countywide employment to nearly eighty thousand.
Nevertheless, GM’s investment in Flint Township and other suburbs came at the expense of
major cutbacks and plant closures inside of the city, which infuriated many workers and corpo-
rate critics. Within the Chevrolet division, for instance, the opening of the Van Slyke facility in
1947 triggered the termination of body production and assembly work at Flint’s densely packed
“Chevy in the Hole” complex, one of GM’s oldest industrial sites. Similarly, the opening of
highly automated engine and stamping plants at the Van Slyke complex in the early 1950s ren-
dered more labor intensive factories at Chevy in the Hole obsolete.12 In a 1954 speech to the Flint
Industrial Executives Club, Chevrolet general manager T. H. Keating reflected triumphantly on
GM’s new suburban plants, claiming, “Flint is the fastest-growing center in the automobile
industry.”13 Missing from Keating’s statement, though, was an acknowledgement of the fact that
virtually all of GM’s major postwar construction initiatives in Genesee County occurred in sub-
urban areas such as Flint Township. Yet this was significant, of course, because Flint officials
could not tax the new suburban plants.
Still, escaping Flint was not one of GM’s primary objectives. Instead, a variety of political,
economic, and social forces drove the suburbanization of auto work in Genesee County. Chief
among them were urban land shortages. In describing the criteria that company leaders used for
postwar plant construction, Frederick G. Tykle, the director of GM’s Argonaut Real Estate34 Journal of Urban History 40(1) Figure 1. Map of the major General Motors facilities erected in Flint and Genesee County, Michigan, between 1900 and 1960. division, explained the urban land limitations that led to industrial sprawl. “First of all, when we plan a new plant we look for a site of 250 or 300 acres. That automatically puts us more or less out in the country. There are no such sites left in cities.”14 Beyond such land shortages, a complex combination of corporate production interests and public policies drove GM’s shift toward the urban fringe.15 Cheap agricultural land, the growth of automobile markets outside of cities, lower
Highsmith 35
suburban tax rates, federal subsidies for industrial decentralization, demands by United Auto
Workers (UAW) union members for large employee parking lots, readily available city services
in the suburbs, and, crucially, the construction of interstate highways, all shaped Genesee
County’s sprawling patterns of industrial development.16
None of GM’s capital shifts would have been possible, however, without support from elected
officials in Flint. Indeed, municipal subsidies were the sine qua non of GM’s suburban strategy.
In order to operate their facilities, plant managers required large quantities of water, sanitary
sewers, and other municipal services generally unavailable in Flint’s suburbs. Consequently,
plant managers and other corporate officials aggressively lobbied Flint’s city commissioners to
extend water and sewer lines to each of their new suburban plants. By the close of the 1950s, their
efforts had resulted in new water and sewer hookups for at least seven of GM’s suburban
complexes.17
As with the decision to shift work away from older urban factories, the city commission’s
willingness to subsidize GM’s outlying facilities was a source of controversy. Even prior to
building its new suburban factories, GM used more than half of the city’s annual water supply.
According to Flint’s public works and utilities director Ted Moss, the city simply did not have
enough water to sustain GM’s suburban operations.18 Other critics denounced the city’s pro-
suburban policies for helping to speed the flight of industry from Flint. As City Commissioner
Robert Egan lamented in 1957, the water and sewer extensions only helped to “send the plants
away from Flint.”19 To Robert Clark, the director of the local Congress of Industrial Organizations
(CIO) political action committee, the city’s pro-business policies seemed unfair because they
allowed GM’s suburban plants “to enjoy all of the major services rendered by the city, including
fire and police protection; water and sewage disposal—everything except the doubtful privilege
of paying city taxes.”20
The city’s stratified rate structure for water customers amounted to an additional subsidy for
corporate decentralization. Unlike Seattle, New York City, Chicago, and other major cities where
customers purchased water at uniform rates, the city of Flint maintained a complicated three-tier
plan with separate costs assigned to residential, commercial, and industrial users. Residential
consumers purchased water at a rate of thirty-two cents per one hundred cubic feet for up to
10,500 cubic feet. Industrial users, by contrast, paid at the discounted rate of twenty cents per
hundred cubic feet for all water in excess of 105,000 cubic feet. The city’s policy, which rewarded
the largest consumers of water with significantly lower rates, constituted a large subsidy for local
manufacturers. While industrial customers typically used about 54 percent of Flint’s water output
in any given year, they accounted for only 37 percent of the city’s water revenue. Conversely,
residential customers contributed about half of the city’s water revenue while using only a third
of the total water purchased. Although the city charged suburban water customers a special pre-
mium for service, the discounts for industry more than offset the additional charges. For Temple
Dorr of the Taxpayer’s Protective League, the city’s water policy constituted an unnecessary
burden for ordinary residents. “We, of our organization, believe that we should love our neigh-
bor,” Dorr conceded. “But I don’t think we should love our neighbor to the extent that if his
house needs a coat of paint that we buy the paint and put it on, too. And that’s just what we’re
doing on this water and sewer problem.”21 Defenders of the city’s policies countered such criti-
cism by pointing to GM’s importance to the region as a whole and the company’s role in generat-
ing jobs and growth for the Flint area economy. “We have to live here,” Commissioner Craig
asserted, “and without GM Flint wouldn’t exist.” “I don’t believe in taxing or throwing them out
of business.”22
Without fail, GM boosters highlighted the company’s commitment to the metropolis as a
whole, arguing that subsidies for suburban growth benefited the entire region. Embracing growth
wherever it occurred, Flint’s civic leaders thus celebrated all of GM’s new plants—even those
located in Grand Blanc, Beecher, Flint Township, and other suburbs. In 1954, Flint Mayor36 Journal of Urban History 40(1)
George Algoe described the special bond that had developed between town and company: “The
City of Flint . . . is proud, justifiably so, to be the birthplace of GM, and it is appreciative, deeply
so, for what GM has meant to the City. . . . As a good neighbor, GM’s record in Flint is truly
memorable.”23 Looking back upon GM’s meteoric rise to industrial supremacy, Algoe and other
Vehicle City boosters believed that they were truly fortunate to live in a company town such as
Flint. They applauded all of GM’s plants, even those sitting outside of the city, because they
subscribed to a brand of metropolitan capitalism that rejected distinctions between the city and
its suburbs. To proponents of this view, growth anywhere in the region was a boon to everyone
in the region.
Not everyone accepted GM’s logic, however. In fact, GM’s suburban strategy provoked
intense social contestation—particularly among city dwellers, suburban homeowners, and
elected officials. Among critics in the city, the shift toward industrial decentralization seemed to
mark the initial phase of Flint’s urban crisis. To substantiate their fears of deindustrialization,
local activists pointed out that all of GM’s new plants were located outside of Flint. Others
asserted that “new” positions created in the suburbs merely replaced existing jobs performed by
workers in the city’s aging plants.24 Often, in fact, GM’s postwar expansions actually coincided
with sharp declines in employment, primarily due to automation. At GM’s Buick facility on the
city’s North End, for instance, the number of hourly rated employees dropped from 27,500 to
10,000 between 1955 and 1961.25 During one especially candid meeting of the Flint City
Commission, City Manager Thomas Kay acknowledged the growing trend toward automation
and job loss, noting, “Fewer and fewer men are now producing more and more automobiles. . . .
From a high of 87,000 manufacturing jobs in this area in 1955 we have dropped to barely 70,000
and this trend will continue.”26 To many workers in Flint, the company’s suburban strategy
seemed to amount to a zero-sum spatial game in which “new,” highly automated suburban jobs
came at the expense of “obsolete” urban jobs.27
As GM’s critics were quick to point out, without either annexation or some form of metropoli-
tan government, the lines between city and suburb mattered greatly. In the words of one
researcher, “industrial development is increasing disproportionately in the areas beyond the city
limits, which means that taxable wealth is being added more rapidly in the fringe than in the
city.”28 Even more than tax imbalances, though, the suburbanization of automobile manufactur-
ing and other industries helped to transform the spatial arrangement of power in metropolitan
Flint. In addition to Flint Township, the county’s primary beneficiary of industrial growth, the
urbanized suburbs of Swartz Creek, Beecher, Fenton, and Grand Blanc—along with the town-
ships of Mundy, Grand Blanc, and Burton—gained substantially from the suburbanization of
employment. After a flurry of postwar relocations, Burton Township could claim a portion of
GM’s AC Spark Plug plant on Dort Highway, Genesee Cement Products, Atlas Concrete Pipe,
Moore’s Iron Works, Dort Manufacturing, Mead Containers, and the General Foundry
Corporation. In south suburban Fenton, where local Chamber of Commerce officials embar-
rassed their more laggardly counterparts in Flint by creating the county’s first industrial develop-
ment committee, new tool and die manufacturing and aircraft engine finishing operations helped
to drive an economic renaissance.29 Just between 1940 and 1955, the number of industrial plants
in the townships surrounding the city increased from seven to 119. Fueling this suburban manu-
facturing boom were nearly a dozen new highway-oriented industrial parks that opened outside
of the city after World War II.30 Throughout the metropolitan area, these and other capital migra-
tions brought newfound wealth and power to suburban communities. In Flint Township, for
example, the opening of GM’s $78-million complex at Van Slyke Road brought a financial wind-
fall to the Carman school district. By 1960, GM’s Chevrolet division was paying 80 percent of
Carman’s school taxes, and the district could boast of a per pupil property tax valuation that
doubled the city of Flint’s.31 Among many urban boosters, the rise of Flint’s suburbs signaled the
birth of a new, highly decentralized economic order—one in which cities were rapidly declining
in significance.Highsmith 37
In reality, however, the situation in Genesee County was much more complex. For starters, the
decision by GM executives to build new plants in suburban Flint did not stem from a desire to
flee the city. Although GM’s suburban factories drew capital, taxes, and resources away from the
city, the opening of new plants just across Flint’s border was not the equivalent of building facili-
ties overseas or far away in the Sunbelt. For most workers living in Flint—where automobile
ownership was nearly universal—the suburbanization of industry presented few geographic
obstacles to employment. Consequently, when GM moved plants from the city to suburban areas,
most local employees—including African Americans, who were well represented among the
city’s automobile owners—could and did commute to work.32 Because most of the area’s work-
ers were highly mobile, “spatial mismatches” between the city and suburbs did not create signifi-
cant barriers to employment.33 And from the perspectives of local GM executives and Flint’s
political leaders, the implications of suburban development were even less consequential. Indeed,
to the creators of GM’s suburban strategy, Flint and its surrounding communities were part of a
regional whole.34 Consequently, local GM executives hoped that the city of Flint would one day
take possession of all of the company’s suburban factories. But this was not simply an empty
wish. To actualize their vision of metropolitan capitalism, GM officials threw their support
behind the controversial New Flint campaign of 1957–1958.
The Battle Over New Flint
The New Flint plan grew out of the economic turmoil of the 1950s. During that otherwise pros-
perous decade, the city experienced three major economic recessions that brought the implica-
tions of GM’s suburban strategy into sharp relief. The severest of these downturns, occurring
between 1956 and 1959, brought automobile manufacturing in the region to a virtual standstill.
At Buick, for instance, the recession drove annual vehicle production down from a postwar high
of 800,000 in 1955 to just 232,000 in 1958.35 During the prolonged slowdown, dubbed the
“Eisenhower Recession” by the president’s Democratic opponents, General Motors laid off
nearly thirty thousand workers in Genesee County, causing unemployment to increase to 10 per-
cent.36 Among African Americans, joblessness reached nearly 20 percent during this period. By
1957, the situation had become so severe that the federal government formally classified Flint as
an economically depressed area.37 Desperate to shift attention away from Flint’s flagging econ-
omy, GM President Harlow Curtice adopted an outwardly carefree demeanor during much of the
meltdown. Behind the scenes, though, Curtice and his colleagues were hard at work planning a
major new policy solution for the region’s deep economic crisis.
Unveiled in 1957, New Flint was a Sunbelt-style economic stimulus proposal to consolidate
most of the metropolitan region under one government. In the short term, GM executives hoped
that the creation of a much larger city would resuscitate the region’s ailing economy. Yet New
Flint was also part of a broader, long-range plan to overcome the growing gulfs between the
Vehicle City and its suburbs. At its core, New Flint represented a metropolitan approach to solv-
ing both underemployment in the city and overdevelopment in the suburbs. As such, it drew
widespread support from across the political spectrum. From the outset, in fact, New Flint was
the product of a complicated partnership among academic researchers, corporate growth boost-
ers, city commissioners, and concerned citizens.38 The plan first took shape in the mid-1940s,
when scholars affiliated with the University of Michigan’s Social Science Research Project
(SSRP) began producing dozens of reports on metropolitan development in Genesee County.
Under the leadership of professors Basil Zimmer and Amos Hawley, researchers from the SSRP
assailed the economic and political problems associated with unplanned sprawl and metropolitan
fragmentation. According to Zimmer and Hawley, Flint’s “fringe problem” derived from a mis-
match between the limited resources of out-county governments and the increasing desire for
urban services among suburbanites. Residents and business owners wanted better schools and38 Journal of Urban History 40(1)
roads, clean water, and sanitary sewers, yet their arcane village and township governments did
not possess the taxing power required to fund such developments. Fortuitously, however, the
problems of the city and the urban fringe appeared to be complementary. Although the city pos-
sessed the services required to sustain new subdivisions, shopping centers, and industrial plants,
it lacked the necessary land for expansion. Undeveloped land was still plentiful in the suburbs,
however. “The city of Flint has the service and the Flint area has the space to form a perfect union
for the benefit of all,” proponents of New Flint claimed.39 Seeking to unite the city and suburbs
over a shared set of problems, Zimmer and his colleagues advocated a single government for the
entire urbanized area.40
New Flint boosters found ample evidence to support their belief that metropolitan fragmenta-
tion was one of the nation’s most pressing problems. By the late 1950s, there were 174 major
metropolitan centers in the United States. Within those densely populated regions, there were an
astonishing 15,658 local governments. Although the entire greater Flint area covered only 150
square miles of land during the 1950s, it contained at least forty-five separate units of govern-
ment, each with its own governing authority, tax levy, and administrative structure.41 Hoping to
combat what social critic Lawrence Lader referred to as the “chaos of conflicting local govern-
ments,” advocates of New Flint called for combining twenty-six political jurisdictions within the
urbanized area of Genesee County into a single city with a unified school district and a regional
planning agency.42 The proposed new municipality was more than 162 square miles in total area
and included the cities of Flint, Mt. Morris, and Grand Blanc as well as numerous townships sur-
rounding the city (Figure 2).43 By forming this large new city, regionalists hoped to stimulate
economic growth, modernize the county’s infrastructure, deliver greater governmental effi-
ciency, and ensure parity for all taxpayers and schoolchildren. “With its 26 separate govern-
ments,” a New Flint leaflet noted, “the present Flint Community is like an automobile consisting
of a Chevrolet engine—Cadillac body—Ford transmission—Buick chassis—and Chrysler
wheels. . . . But, it can virtually be Aladdin and his magic lamp bringing progress—security—
opportunities for each and every one of us!”44 The major challenge, of course, lay in persuading
area constituents that the seemingly disparate fragments of the metropolis were in fact
compatible.
To sell their plan, New Flint boosters created a sophisticated publicity campaign designed to
appeal to city dwellers and suburbanites alike. Well aware of suburban opposition to annexation,
supporters of New Flint carefully framed their proposal as a cooperative endeavor.45 For resi-
dents of industrialized suburbs, New Flint advocates promised to bring sewers, clean water, fire
and police protection, and paved roads. In residential suburbs, where homeowners alone bore the
costs of government, proponents of New Flint took a different approach, offering a unified school
district with equalized resources. At a New Flint rally in Mt. Morris, Zimmer spoke directly to
the concerns of homeowners in Flint’s numerous bedroom communities, asserting, “Plants now
located in townships belong to all the people in the community, not just to those who happen to
live on one side of the road and therefore in one school district and not another.” Inside of the
city, by contrast, the New Flint campaign centered squarely on the issue of economic growth. “In
the new city of Flint there will be ample room and facilities to entice new industries and the
expansion of present industries for the benefit of all,” supporters of the plan claimed. “Industrial
development has reached its peak in the Flint area unless a more favorable atmosphere can be
created.” Other supporters of metropolitan government argued that Flint, a city whose products
helped to drive suburbanization, had a special duty to ameliorate the problems associated with
urban sprawl. According to Flint Journal writer Homer Dowdy, “Since Flint has contributed so
greatly to suburban living by helping motorize America, it has an obligation to contribute to the
solution of suburban problems.”46 Irrespective of the audience, supporters of New Flint believed
that they had something positive to offer just about everyone.
With its dual emphases on governmental efficiency and economic growth, New Flint attracted
strong support from GM executives and other members of the city’s pro-growth coalition. TheHighsmith 39 Figure 2. Overview map of Genesee County, Michigan, and the proposed city of New Flint. leadership of the New Flint Planning Committee thus included Harding Mott, vice president of the GM-backed Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, AC Spark Plug executive Joseph Anderson, and William Kelly of the Manufacturers Association of Flint. According to Anderson, one of the plan’s most outspoken proponents, “We need one government unit that should include all of
40 Journal of Urban History 40(1)
Genesee County.” “Just think of all the money that would save.”47 Predictably, Mayor George
Algoe and other members of the city commission went along with GM and offered their unani-
mous endorsement of the measure.48 But so too did Robert Carter, the regional director of the
UAW, and Norm Bully, president of Flint’s CIO chapter, both of whom viewed New Flint as a
potential source of jobs. Noticeably absent from New Flint’s broad coalition were African
Americans, however. This was due in large part to the exclusionary practices of the Flint Area
Study Group and the New Flint Planning Committee. Because the leaders of both organizations
excluded African Americans (and women) from membership and largely avoided discussions of
race, many black voters, even those who saw the promise of regionalism, had strongly mixed
feelings about New Flint. Another factor driving black skepticism toward the measure was the
fear that a metropolitan government might dilute the power of African American voters. Out of
respect for black public opinion, leaders from the Flint branches of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League took no formal positions
on New Flint.49
The plan elicited no such ambivalence in the suburbs, however. There, white voters and politi-
cians reacted to the New Flint proposal with outright hostility. From the outset, proponents of
metropolitan government faced stiff opposition in the out-county. In rapidly industrializing areas
such as Flint Township, home of GM’s $78-million complex of Chevrolet plants, anti-Flint senti-
ment had been a part of the political landscape since at least the early 1950s. In 1954, opposition
to the city exploded into the open when reports surfaced that Flint city commissioners were plan-
ning to annex the Chevrolet plants along Van Slyke Road. In response, Flint Township Supervisor
Arthur Markham led an unsuccessful municipal incorporation drive. Although Markham’s pro-
posal failed because of popular concerns over increased taxes and a desire to preserve the area’s
semirural character, his hostility to both annexation and metropolitan government struck a pow-
erful chord with suburban voters.50 Soon after the release of the New Flint proposal in the fall of
1957, Flint Township Supervisor John R. Dickenson denounced the plan, claiming, “The biggest
majority out here are against it [New Flint]. They moved out to get away from the city as it
was.”51 Echoing his colleague, Earl Swift, a county supervisor representing the south suburb of
Grand Blanc, expressed his firm opposition to regional government. “I think we can run our own
business without Flint coming in. The only reason Flint wants Grand Blanc is because of the
[GM] tank plant. . . . This deal [New Flint] is all to their advantage, not to ours. I’ve talked to a
lot of people and found only one in favor of it.”
Resistance to New Flint intensified in the winter and spring of 1958, when activists began
circulating petitions to have the proposal placed on the fall ballot. In response to the canvassing,
Carman School District Superintendent Frank Hartman vowed publicly to fight against the
plan.52 Following Hartman’s April 1958 announcement, school district and township officials in
Grand Blanc, Beecher, and Flint Township also came out against the initiative. New Flint sup-
porters countered by organizing informational meetings throughout the county, but suburbanites
turned out en masse to voice their opposition. On April 10, at a New Flint meeting hosted by
Sheldon LaTourette in Mt. Morris Township, an unidentified woman excoriated the plan, stating,
“Flint doesn’t need us and we don’t need Flint.” Minutes later, a skeptic from Beecher informed
LaTourette, “There is not one thing in New Flint that can help us in Beecher.”53 At meeting after
meeting, suburban residents from across the county showed up in droves to condemn the pro-
posed new city.
By the summer of 1958, suburban opponents of metropolitan government had formed the
New Flint Resistance Committee (NFRC). Led by Louis Traycik, a resident of Grand Blanc,
Superintendent Hartman of Flint Township, and Joseph Parisi of the Michigan Township
Association, members of the NFRC charged that New Flint would “subjugate our suburban peo-
ple” through unmanageable government bureaucracies, substandard schools, and, most of all,
higher taxes. “Super cities,” NFRC petitions claimed, “mean super tax dollars.”54 Because manyHighsmith 41
suburbanites had already voted to fund new water and sewer systems and other expensive infra-
structure projects, skepticism toward the prospect of additional taxes and development was espe-
cially acute. “We’ll eventually have sewers and things anyway,” Flint Township Supervisor
Dickenson maintained.55 Other members of the NFRC argued that a metropolitan government
would forever undermine their new identities as suburbanites. After attending a March meeting
in Grand Blanc, a Flint Journal reporter described how the growth of suburban consciousness
was undermining New Flint: “At the meeting there was not as much an indication of being
‘against New Flint’ as there was ‘for Grand Blanc.’ Those at the meeting indicated that they
wanted to keep their identity as a community.”56 Whether they were pro-suburban or anti-Flint,
thousands of white homeowners united around the NFRC to block the New Flint initiative.
New Flint generated an especially vigorous backlash in the southwestern suburb of Swartz
Creek. Enraged by the plan, voters there effectively seceded from Flint by incorporating as a city.
Prior to 1958, Swartz Creek was an unincorporated, predominantly residential area consisting of
parts of Gaines, Clayton, and Flint Townships. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Swartz
Creek area was among the fastest-growing residential suburbs in the county. In 1957, GM pro-
vided a major boost to the local economy by opening a new Chevrolet parts and service plant in
the area. Fearful over the possibility of losing the plant, concerned homeowners waged simulta-
neous campaigns for the incorporation of Swartz Creek and against New Flint. “We must incor-
porate now to keep the tax base backing of the Chevrolet Plant in our school district,” a member
of the Swartz Creek Incorporation Study Committee urged. New Flint boosters responded by
pointing out that the boundaries of their megacity included neither the proposed city of Swartz
Creek nor GM’s warehouse facility. Unconvinced by such reassurances, incorporation activists
argued that the implementation of New Flint would lay the foundation for the subsequent annex-
ation of the Chevrolet facility and the likely evisceration of the area’s tax base. “If this city
incorporation fails to pass,” one resident warned, “there is a possibility the plant will be annexed
to Flint. If this happens our backing per school child will DECREASE 50%. We need this plant!
We must vote YES!” Ultimately, fears over losing the plant and the desire for incorporation
drove hundreds of Swartz Creek residents to the polls. On August 5, 1958, these citizens declared
their independence from both Flints, new and old, by creating the city of Swartz Creek.57
The Swartz Creek incorporation election stunned supporters of regional government.
Nevertheless, because the recently formed city was not included in the New Flint boundaries, the
campaign for metropolitan government continued. Despite strong grassroots opposition in the
suburbs, New Flint’s well-funded supporters had little difficulty collecting the necessary signa-
tures to have the initiative placed on the November ballot. In August, advocates of the new city
submitted their petitions for certification to the Genesee County Board of Supervisors. However,
suburban opponents of the plan formed a clear majority on the county board. The strongest oppo-
sition came from representatives of the townships, who feared losing electoral support, political
power, and perhaps even their jobs if New Flint became a reality. Although the board’s legisla-
tive affairs committee had determined that the petitions were valid and legal, opponents of New
Flint nonetheless urged all supervisors to reject the request for an election. On August 12, subur-
ban supervisors did just that by denying the New Flint petitions. Acting against the advice of their
own legal counsel, county supervisors, by a vote of twenty-five to thirteen, declined to place the
New Flint proposal on the fall ballot.58
Following the board’s vote, members of the New Flint Planning Committee immediately filed
an emergency appeal with the Michigan Supreme Court.59 In response, activists from the NFRC
invoked their constitutional rights as minorities. “The American concept of justice in government
grants no given majority the power of indiscriminate transgression upon the rights of its ranking
minorities,” an NFRC statement maintained.60 After agreeing to hear the case, the justices hosted
a hearing on September 9, 1958. Speaking on behalf of the county board, attorney John David
argued that consolidation, rather than incorporation, was the only legal means of forming New42 Journal of Urban History 40(1)
Flint. In support of his position, David repeatedly reminded the justices that New Flint violated
a state law prohibiting the incorporation of already incorporated areas. Because New Flint
included already incorporated cities such as Grand Blanc, David urged the court to rule against
the initiative.
On October 8, the justices granted David’s wish by delivering a mortal blow to the New Flint
plan. In a unanimous decision authored by Justice Harry F. Kelly, the court accepted David’s
arguments on consolidation and refused to order the November election.61 Although Kelly’s
opinion kept alive the possibility of a new consolidation effort, the ruling marked the unofficial
end of the movement for metropolitan government in Genesee County. For regardless of the
openings left by the court’s decision or the future machinations of New Flint’s powerful backers,
suburban voters had clearly articulated their opposition to metropolitan capitalism and regional-
ism. New Flint was dead, and, to many observers, Old Flint seemed to be dying.
The New Flint defeat left the Vehicle City in an extremely precarious economic position.
Because proponents of the initiative failed in their quest to establish a metropolitan government,
the capital migrations of the postwar era effectively diverted thousands of jobs and millions of
dollars in tax revenues from the city to neighboring suburbs. Making matters worse, residential
and commercial developments in the city had left GM’s remaining urban plants with almost no
room for expansion. In order to grow and prosper, Flint needed more space. However, in Michigan
and numerous other northern and midwestern states, cities such as Flint and Detroit suffered
under a legal and political system that severely inhibited urban growth. Although municipal lead-
ers continued to search for new expansion opportunities in the decades following the New Flint
debacle, primarily through “slum clearance,” the state’s anti-urban annexation policies and lib-
eral municipal incorporation statutes allowed most suburbanites to maintain their independence
from the city.62
In the end, the battles over metropolitan capitalism yielded a deeply divided metropolis with
a landlocked, shrinking, and increasingly impoverished black city at its core. The implications of
Flint’s isolation became painfully clear in the 1970s, when the nation’s economy suffered two
deep recessions that wreaked havoc on the Vehicle City. In response to these economic chal-
lenges, GM implemented a harsh, long-term deindustrialization program that devastated Flint’s
economy. Just between 1973 and 1982, plant closures and layoffs drove GM employment in the
Flint region down from 73,900 to 55,400. By century’s end, there were fewer than ten thousand
GM jobs left in this embattled company town and Flint was the “Vehicle City” only in name.63
Surrounded by a wall of hostile suburbs, the city of Flint faced the economic calamities of the late
twentieth century in virtual isolation. Once the envy of the industrial world, Flint had become an
epicenter of the so-called Rust Belt.
Conclusion
During the first half of the twentieth century, a combination of corporate expansion strategies,
federal development initiatives, and municipal growth policies transformed the Vehicle City
from an obscure mid-Michigan hamlet into a major industrial metropolis. As a by-product of that
dramatic growth, however, the Flint area became one of the most sprawling and politically
divided regions in the nation. Despite numerous efforts to remedy Flint’s fragmentation—many
of them orchestrated by the city’s corporate leaders—the metropolitan capitalism of the 1950s
ultimately gave way to an era of suburban secession. Although the importance of this develop-
ment went largely unnoticed in the 1950s, the passing of Flint’s metropolitan moment would
have a profound impact on the Vehicle City and its people.
In reality, though, the significance of Flint’s experience extends far beyond the city’s borders
and well outside the realm of political economy. The rise and fall of Flint’s metropolitan capital-
ist order also sheds fresh new light on the causes and periodization of America’s urban-industrialHighsmith 43
crisis. For nearly two decades, scholars and public intellectuals have argued that the deindustri-
alization of the North American Rust Belt began during the postwar era as a result of capital
flight or some other form of neglect perpetrated by big business.64 As the Flint case confirms,
however, this view often depends upon an overly circumscribed spatial conception of the city. In
Flint and perhaps other cities, postwar capital migrations were not part of a binary, zero-sum
contest between cities and their suburban rivals. Rather, Flint’s story demonstrates that GM’s
leaders remained firmly committed to the city even as they were shifting resources to the sub-
urbs. In fact, had GM executives succeeded in enacting the New Flint plan, the Vehicle City
would have emerged as one of the nation’s largest metropolises and one of the world’s premier
manufacturing centers. That Flint never rose to such heights had more to do with the recalci-
trance of suburban homeowners and politicians than it did with corporate neglect or capital flight.
This is not to suggest, however, that GM bears no responsibility for Flint’s economic decline.
To the contrary, GM layoffs and plant closures helped to destroy Flint’s industrial economy. But
it was not until the 1970s and 1980s when the company began disinvesting from the city and
region altogether.65 Prior to that time, companies such as GM remained staunchly committed to
decentralizing manufacturing and growing the city. Indeed, it was the pursuit of that two-pronged
agenda that resulted in the battle over New Flint. In light of these and other developments, histo-
rians should consider replacing concepts such as corporate abandonment, spatial mismatch, and
the industrial garden with new frameworks that account for the full contexts in which companies
moved capital across political borders as well as the intense social contestation generated by such
migrations. If that sort of conceptual shift is to occur, then the Vehicle City’s divisive experience
with metropolitan capitalism and the New Flint plan will no doubt be instructive.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Elaine Lewinnek, Adam Green, Michan Connor, and Hillary Jenks for making this collab-
orative endeavor not only possible but also enjoyable. Also, an extra-special thank you to the four most
important people in my life—Bobby Sasson, Asha May Highsmith, Mira Pauline Highsmith, and Aneel
Gerald Highsmith—for filling my world with more love and happiness than I ever imagined possible.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
1. Chevrolet Motor Division Scrapbook, v. 1 (LaCrosse, WI: Brookhaven Press, n.d.), Flint Public
Library (FPL), Flint, Michigan; Donald Mosher, ed., We Make Our Own History: The History of UAW
Local 659 (Flint: UAW Local 659, 1993), 59–61; Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of General Motors
Corporation (Detroit: General Motors Corporation, 1948); and Amos H. Hawley and Basil Zimmer,
“Resistance to Unification in a Metropolitan Community,” in Morris Janowitz, ed., Community
Political Systems (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1961), 153.
2. For examples of scholarly works that emphasize capital flight and corporate abandonment, see Barry
Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community
Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982); Thomas J.
Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996); William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban
Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1997); Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest
for Cheap Labor (New York: New Press, 1999); Cowie and Joseph Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins:44 Journal of Urban History 40(1)
The Meanings of Deindustrialization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Heathcott and
Maire A. Murphy, “Corridors of Flight, Zones of Renewal: Industry, Planning, and Policy in the
Making of Metropolitan St. Louis, 1940-1980,” Journal of Urban History 31, no. 2 (January 2005):
151–89; Steven High and David W. Lewis, Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of
Deindustrialization (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); and Colin Gordon, Mapping
Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2008). I borrow the term “suburban strategy” from Matthew Lassiter, who has used it in a very dif-
ferent context to describe conservative politics in the American South. See Matthew D. Lassiter, The
Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
3. On regionalism, see Jon C. Teaford, City and Suburb: The Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan
America, 1850-1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); David Rusk, Cities without
Suburbs (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1993); Myron Orfield, American Metropolitics:
The New Suburban Reality (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2002); Peter Dreier, John
Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom, Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century, 2nd ed.
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); and Teaford, The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of
Post-Urban America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
4. On spatial mismatch, see John F. Kain, “Housing Segregation, Negro Employment, and Metropolitan
Decentralization,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 82, no. 2 (May 1968): 175–97; Kevin Boyle,
“There Are No Union Sorrows That the Union Can’t Heal: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the
United Automobile Workers, 1940-1960,” Labor History 35 (1995): 5–23; Sugrue, The Origins of the
Urban Crisis, 125–52; and Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great
Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 57–130.
5. Thomas Sugrue and Robert Self are two of the most prominent scholars who argue for the centrality
of the postwar period. See Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis; and Robert O. Self, American
Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Sugrue’s book is also the key text in the literature on the postwar “urban crisis.” On the significance
of the 1970s, see Heather Ann Thompson, Whose Detroit? Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern
American City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), esp. 192–223; Bruce J. Schulman,
The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press,
2001), esp. 121–43; Cowie, “‘Vigorously Left, Right, and Center’: The Crosscurrents of Working-
Class America in the 1970s,” in Beth Bailey and David Farber, eds., America in the 70s (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2004), 75–106; and Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States
Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
6. Self, American Babylon; and Self, “California’s Industrial Garden: Oakland and the East Bay in the
Age of Deindustrialization,” in Cowie and Heathcott, eds., Beyond the Ruins, 159–80.
7. See, e.g., Bluestone and Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America; Schulman, From Cotton
Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Ann R. Markusen et al., The Rise of the Gunbelt: The Military
Remapping of Industrial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Kim Moody, “NAFTA
and the Corporate Redesign of North America,” Latin American Perspectives 22, no. 1 (Winter 1995):
95–116; Cowie, Capital Moves; High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt,
1969-1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); and Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City:
Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2007).
8. For Robert Self’s description and interpretation of this relationship, see Self, American Babylon,
23–60.
9. “For Plants of Tomorrow, Country Club Air,” Detroit Free Press, n.d.
10. Richard P. Scharchburg, ed., GM Story (Flint: General Motors Institute, 1981), 14; Alan K. Binder and
Deebe Ferris, General Motors in the Twentieth Century (Southfield, MI: Ward’s Communications,
2000), 9–10; Charles Stewart Mott to Floyd A. Allen, April 2, 1942, Charles Stewart Mott Papers,
box 29, 77-7.6-1.1b, Genesee Historical Collections Center (GHCC), University of Michigan-Flint,
Flint, Michigan; Alan Clive, State of War: Michigan in World War II (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1979); Richard M. Langworth and Jan P. Norbye, The Complete History of General
Motors, 1908-1986 (New York: Beekman House, 1986), 169; Michigan: Annual Survey of Industrial
Expansions, 1955 (Lansing: Michigan Economic Development Department, 1956); Buick MotorHighsmith 45
Division Scrapbook, v. 1-3 (LaCrosse, WI: Brookhaven Press, n.d.), FPL; “Finally It’s Official—
Ternstedt Is Coming,” Flint News-Advertiser, March 27, 1953; and Ternstedt Division Scrapbook
(LaCrosse, WI: Brookhaven Press, n.d.), FPL.
11. Chevrolet Motor Division Scrapbook, v. 1-3 (LaCrosse, WI: Brookhaven Press, n.d.), FPL; Thirty-
Ninth Annual Report of General Motors Corporation; and “Keating Says Civic Co-Operation Has
Maintained Flint as No. 1 Plant City for Chevrolet,” Flint Journal, October 28, 1950.
12. Flint Journal, August 31, November 29, 1951, July 1, 1953.
13. Chevrolet Motor Division Scrapbook, v. 1.
14. “For Plants of Tomorrow”; and Ronald Larson and Eric Schenker, Land and Property Values in
Relation to Dort Highway Improvements (East Lansing: Michigan State University Traffic Safety
Center, 1960).
15. Survey of Recent Industrial Move-Ins and Expansions in Michigan (Lansing: Michigan Department of
Commerce, 1967), Library of Michigan, Lansing, Michigan.
16. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 266–71; and Self, American Babylon, 23–60. On one occasion, UAW mem-
bers in Flint threatened to unleash a “Boston Tea Party” if GM refused to provide more off-street park-
ing. See Flint Weekly Review, October 3, 1953, January 15, December 10, 1954. On industrial location
policies, see Eva Mueller, Arnold Wilken, and Margaret Wood, Location Decisions and Industrial
Mobility in Michigan, 1961 (Ann Arbor: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan,
1962); Michael T. Oravecz, Locational Preferences of Manufacturing Firms: Flint-Genesee County,
Michigan (Flint: Economic Development Commission of Genesee County, 1974); and Keith Chapman
and David Walker, Industrial Location: Principles and Politics (New York: Blackwell, 1987).
17. Searchlight, April 17, 1952; AC Sparkler, October 29, 1953; and Proceedings of the Flint City
Commission, July 8, 1957, FPL.
18. “Commission Hints Shift in Policy,” Flint News-Advertiser, March 26, 1954; and Memorandum,
Herman D. Young to Ted Moss, August 6, 1953, City Manager Files, Office of the Flint City Clerk,
Flint, Michigan.
19. Proceedings of the Flint City Commission, July 8, 1957, FPL.
20. “Flint Taxpayers ‘Pay the Shot,’” Searchlight, April 17, 1952.
21. Proceedings of the Flint City Commission, July 12, 1960, 1829–1851, FPL.
22. Proceedings of the Flint City Commission, February 10, 1960, 1581, FPL.
23. Flint Journal, November 22, 1954.
24. Charles W. Minshall, Genesee County Economic Conditions Conclusions Report (Columbus, OH:
Battelle Memorial Institute, 1969), 3-15.
25. Flint Weekly Review, March 2, 1961; and AC Sparkler, April 15, 1960.
26. Proceedings of the Flint City Commission, March 4, 1963, 88, FPL; and James R. Custer, ed., Applied
Automation (Philadelphia: Chilton Company, 1956), passim.
27. Flint Weekly Review, January 12, 1961.
28. Zimmer, Flint Area Study Report, v. 1 (Ann Arbor: Institute for Human Adjustment, University of
Michigan, 1957), ch. 4.
29. Minshall, Genesee County Economic Conditions, 3–40.
30. Flint-Genesee County, Michigan: Data Profile (Flint: Flint-Genesee Corporation for Economic
Growth, n.d. [ca. 1983]), 35.
31. Civic Research Council of Flint Files, box 1, folder 2, GHCC.
32. On Flint’s high rates of automobile ownership, see Richard Hebert, Highways to Nowhere: The Politics
of City Transportation (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1972), 8.
33. On spatial mismatch, see Kain, “Housing Segregation,” 175–97; Boyle, “There Are No Union Sorrows,”
5–23; Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 125–52; and Sides, L.A. City Limits, 57–130. As I have
argued elsewhere, racial imbalances in Flint area workplaces were primarily a function of discrimina-
tory personnel policies rather than spatial mismatches. See Andrew R. Highsmith, “Demolition Means
Progress: Race, Class, and the Deconstruction of the American Dream in Flint, Michigan” (PhD dis-
sertation, University of Michigan, 2009), 261–66.
34. Clarence H. Young, Big-Crossing-Place: Flint ~ General Motors ~ 1958 (Flint: Charles Stewart Mott
Foundation, 1962), 2.You can also read
