Detroit

Ta-Nehisi Coates takes a look at Detroit, and its black middle-class.  One important thing to note about the history of Detroit, is that it really boomed in the early 20th century, and its growth was completely auto-centered.  Here's TNC:

In that endeavor, one of the first things I had to get was that the concept of owning your own home, in Detroit, is different in degree and scope than in other cities. Homeownership is a religion in America, but the fanatics of Detroit are without peer: 85 percent of Detroit housing consists of single-family homes. In that sense, Detroit is reflecting Michigan's traditional ardor for the single family dwelling. In 1900, Michigan's home-ownership rate was 16 percentage points higher above the national average. In 2000, it was 7 points above. The gap had shrunk, but, overall, Michigan still had the third highest home ownership rate in the country. 

The second thing to get was that the city was really built for the car. Woodward Avenue, which marks Palmer Woods' eastern border and was once the Sauk Indians' Saginaw Trail, is the country's oldest paved road. And the city's far-flung neighborhoods of detached homes, many of them with driveways, were built on the same suppositions as the surrounding suburbs. Space was dogma. Density, anathema.

Prewar Detroit spawned at an epic clip, its population doubling between 1910 and 1920, its assessed valuation quadrupling from $350 million to $1.4 billion. In 1914, Henry Ford announced the five dollar work day, summoning forth European immigrants and blacks from the South desperate for wages. In 1916, GM announced dividends of $50 a share, the largest in Wall Street history up to that point. "When Henry Ford did his five dollar a day, that was not by accident," said Dan Pitera, director of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center at the University of Detroit Mercy. "At that time you could buy a home and own a car on five dollars a day... . He made it possible for everyone he employed to buy a Ford." 

During the boom years of the Big Three automakers, Detroit essentially functioned as a sprawling bedroom community for the auto plants in Highland Park, Hamtramck and Dearborn. "I like to call Detroit the largest middle class city ever built," Jason Booza, a demographer at Wayne State told me. "Everybody had to have a car. What you have is, essentially, a flat city. New York and Boston were vertical. You didn't have that in Detroit.

"It was part of that American Dream, what you saw in the Levittowns. We didn't want to live in overcrowded tenements like the vertical cities. We had the ability, wealth and land to spread out. You couldn't do that as much in New York. Our only constraint was the river. We were completely flat. Nothing hindered our horizontal expansion." 

Detroit, singular among America's older big cities, boomed in the first half of the 20th century, just as luxury items--specifically the car and the detached home--became available to the urban working classes. Thus the city was built on a kind neo-Jeffersonianism--detached single-lot homes with lawns, driveways for cars, and an undercurrent animus toward renters, many of whom happened to be black.

This automobile-based development, which spawned the suburbs and all the Sun Belt development, is probably the single biggest cause of our financial difficulties.  Why do I say it is the biggest cause?  First off would be our trade imbalance, with imported oil.  Secondly, the percentage of household budgets which go to transportation.  Finally, the abandonment of the central cities, and the booming prices in the exurbs, were major factors in the housing bubble, factors which are completely dependent on auto transportation.  This will be the cross we have to bear in the forseeable future.  Unfortunately, the scourge of race is also mixed in, making it even harder to handle.  Throw in crazy reactionary populist politics, and we have our work cut out for us.  His entire piece is very informative, and goes in a different direction than I am.