Detroit

Detroit’s record begins with the 1946 Detroit Plan and ends, in its live 2026 phase, with the federal Reconnecting Communities study of I-375. Black Bottom, on the east side near the Detroit River, and Paradise Valley, the commercial corridor along Hastings Street that Black Bottom residents patronized, together formed the most important African-American district in the Midwest outside Chicago’s Bronzeville. The Detroit Housing Commission began acquiring Black Bottom parcels in 1946 under the city’s own urban renewal ordinance, anticipating the federal Housing Act of 1949. The Gratiot Redevelopment Project cleared 129 acres of Black Bottom and sold the land to a developer group led by Herbert Greenwald and Samuel Katzin, who hired Mies van der Rohe to design the mid-century modern Lafayette Park complex. Construction of the Chrysler Freeway (I-75) and the downtown I-375 connector through the late 1950s and early 1960s completed the erasure. Hastings Street vanished. The Black Bottom Archives, founded in 2015 by P.G. Watkins, has built the recovery record; Detroit People’s Platform carries it into the present reparative-development fight.