Detroit’s economic decline and population flight to the suburbs was a long and gradual process. But there was an iconic event that serves as a precise marker of when it started.
That would be March 1954, when the Lodge Freeway was completed and Northland, then the world’s largest open-air shopping center, opened at the freeway’s end, across the border in Southfield.
People poured out of the city to shop, and soon decided they might as well live in the suburbs as well.
Detroit’s main department store was J.L. Hudson’s, and Hudson’s opened a huge satellite store that served as the main anchor of the Northland Mall.
What nobody saw is that Northland, and the other suburban malls that would follow, would suck the life out of retail in the city, and the downtown flagship store. The downtown Hudson’s, which was almost as synonymous with Detroit as General Motors, closed in 1983, and was imploded in a spectacular explosion fifteen years later.
But by then, Northland was already starting to slip. The neighborhood around it was becoming African-American.
Affluent white suburban consumers pushed further out and patronized new malls. One woman came here from New York when her husband had a job interview in the 1970s.
She had been looking forward to shopping at the famous Northland, but was told, “Oh, everybody goes to Somerset now.”
Slowly, the mall weakened. The other anchor stores disappeared, racial fears surfaced, and it was common to hear white women say they no longer felt comfortable there.
Last year, everything pretty much fell apart. In January, a young man who was acting bizarrely but who wasn’t armed died after being restrained and pepper-sprayed by poorly trained security guards in front of a jewelry store at Northland.
The guards were not charged, but the result may have speeded the mall’s death sentence. Target soon announced it was closing, and this fall, the mall filed for bankruptcy.
Over the years, Hudson’s became first Marshall Field’s and then Macy’s. Yesterday came the totally unsurprising announcement that it will soon become one more huge vacant building.
What nobody knows now is what will happen to the mall that, for the suburbs, was the start of it all. It seems very hard to imagine the few remaining shops surviving without any big anchor store.
What may be more important is what will happen to the city it helped create. Southfield is the state’s best example of a healthy majority black city that has remained mostly middle-class.
But it has been a struggle since the Great Recession. The loss of Northland won’t help the revenue picture, and a huge abandoned dead shopping mall isn’t something any city wants or needs.
How Southfield copes with this will be a challenge. But there’s also a question for all of us. Does Metropolitan Detroit’s white population just keep moving north, using up communities and shopping centers and then abandoning them?
Macy’s has been shrinking the size of its store at Oakland Mall in Troy.
I once told a demographer that I thought suburban sprawl had to stop sometime, that Metropolitan Detroiters clearly couldn’t commute to Escanaba. He looked at me, and …
“Don’t be too sure about that,” he said.
Jack Lessenberry is Michigan Radio's political analyst. You can read his essays online at michiganradio.org. Views expressed in his essays are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Michigan Radio, its management or the station licensee, The University of Michigan.
