The demise of Northland Mall in Southfield, which eventually resulted in its closing earlier this year, just didn't happen overnight.
Northland Mall in its final days this year
Stephen Henderson and Kristi Tanner of the Detroit Free Press writes that it's a combination of racism, class and sprawl that lead to the mall's demise. He writes:
The part of the Northland story that's missing is how closely the mall's rise and fall tracks the movement of wealth in this region, from Detroit, out to the suburbs, and into the hinterlands.
And in that context, Northland is another data point in what should be an ongoing conversation about how sprawl, class-conscious policy-making and racism have shaped this region — in almost every way for the worst.
Northland’s death, like its life, isn’t just about one thing. It's about the complexity of the geographic and social dynamics that have roiled southeast Michigan for a half-century or more.
Henderson and Tanner write about the migration from the city into Oakland County.
When Northland opened in 1954, it was on the edge of areas that were growing, and growing more wealthy, thanks to the Federal Housing Act of 1934 and the GI Bill of 1944. Detroiters seeking spacious lots and idyllic neighborhoods were moving into Oakland County, and taking their wealth with them.
They were white Detroiters, by design. Both the housing act and the GI Bill left black families out of the move north until the late 1960s and early 1970s. And local laws as well as business practices also created white-only suburbs around Northland and out farther.
Even by the time blacks began moving in significant numbers to the suburbs, the economic die was cast. Because they were left out of the wealth-building that came with initial suburban home ownership, their ventures into the suburbs were mostly possible because of sprawl that made inner-ring areas like Northland poorer and more accessible.
The region’s wealth moved steadily along a northwest corridor and by 1970 — the earliest year for which data comparable to modern-day numbers is available — Northland was already at the trailing edge of the sprawl. Census data show many of the region’s wealthiest tracts still within a few miles of the mall, but so is the intense poverty of the increasingly isolated central city
