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Toxic Debt

By Josiah Rector

Toxic Debt Social Sciences

Toxic Debt

By Josiah Rector

0 - Default Title
Description
From the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, environmentally unregulated industrial capitalism produced outsized environmental risks for poor and working-class Detroiters, made all the worse for African Americans by housing and job discrimination. Then as the auto industry abandoned Detroit, the banking and real estate industries turned those risks into disasters with predatory loans to African American homebuyers, and to an increasingly indebted city government. Following years of cuts in welfare assistance to poor families and a devastating subprime mortgage meltdown, the state of Michigan used municipal debt to justify suspending democracy in majority-Black cities. In Detroit and Flint, austerity policies imposed under emergency financial management deprived hundreds of thousands of people of clean water, with lethal consequences that most recently exacerbated the spread of COVID-19. Toxic Debt is not only a book about racism, capitalism, and the making of these environmental disasters. It is also a history of Detroit's environmental justice movement, which emerged from over a century of battles over public health in the city and involved radical auto workers, ecofeminists, and working-class women fighting for clean water. Linking the histories of urban political economy, the environment, and social movements, Toxic Debt lucidly narrates the story of debt, environmental disaster, and resistance in Detroit.
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Number of Pages:
346
Release Date:
2022-04-05
Publication Date:
2022-04-26
Publisher:
The University of North Carolina Press
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
146966576X
ISBN13:
9781469665764
Weight:
590 g
Height:
156 cm
Width:
234 cm
Thickness:
21 cm
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