Door No. 5: The Blueprint
- Dayna Denise @itsdaynadenise
- May 17, 2023
- 5 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
Before we drew the lines, we inherited them.
The first time I understood that cities could exclude people, I wasn't reading a history book. I was riding my bike.
Growing up on Detroit's east side, my sister and I spent countless afternoons riding down Korte Street toward Alter Road, the dividing line between Detroit and Grosse Pointe. We loved the ride, especially the hill leading to the bridge. As children, it felt like an adventure. We didn't know we were crossing one of the most studied municipal boundaries in America.
What we did know was that there was a barrier.
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We could see the neighborhood on the other side. The homes were different. The streets were quieter. Everything appeared just a little more polished. But there were places we couldn't go. We didn't yet understand why.
Years later, after researching housing policy and urban history, I realized that gate wasn't just a gate.
It was the physical manifestation of generations of decisions about who belonged, who deserved investment, and who did not.
That realization forced me to ask a different question. If gentrification is the consequence, what is the cause?
To answer that, I had to go much further back than redlining. I had to start with the blueprint.
Colonialism is often described as the establishment of settlements in conquered lands, but it was much more than geographic expansion. It was the introduction of an idea. Land could be claimed. Communities could be reorganized. Existing cultures could be displaced in the name of progress. The people already living there were often viewed not as neighbors, but as obstacles to development.
That way of thinking became embedded in the foundation of America.
While colonialism itself did not shape our cities exactly as we know them today, it established patterns of ownership, power, and exclusion that influenced everything that followed. The belief that some communities were more valuable than others gradually found its way into law, public policy, and eventually the design of our neighborhoods.
Cities do not simply happen. They are planned.
Every street, zoning ordinance, highway, and housing policy reflects a series of choices about what a community values and who it was designed to serve.
Throughout American history, race became one of the strongest influences on those choices.
Heather McGhee writes in The Sum of Us that a functioning society depends on our willingness to invest in one another through shared public goods such as schools, infrastructure, transportation, and healthcare. Yet for much of our nation's history, those investments carried an invisible condition. They were often designed to benefit white Americans while excluding everyone else.
That pattern appeared repeatedly throughout American history.
Following the Civil War, formerly enslaved people were legally free but economically constrained. Many remained on the same land as sharecroppers, working farms they did not own under conditions that offered little opportunity to build wealth. Others, including members of my own family, left in search of land, employment, and the chance to create something different for future generations.
Those stories are not separate from housing.
They are the beginning of it.
Although the Supreme Court ruled in Buchanan v. Warley in 1917 that explicit racial zoning laws were unconstitutional, many cities simply found new ways to achieve the same outcome. Local planners, lenders, and government officials developed policies that continued separating communities by race without explicitly saying so.
Atlanta, one of the cities that has shaped my own life, offers one example. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling, influential planners continued advocating for racial zoning because they believed segregation protected public order. Similar thinking spread throughout cities across the country, becoming embedded in planning decisions for decades.
The most enduring example arrived during the Great Depression.
Government agencies and financial institutions created residential security maps to evaluate mortgage risk. Neighborhoods outlined in green were considered desirable investments. Neighborhoods outlined in red, many of which were predominantly Black, were labeled hazardous.
Those red lines became more than markings on a map.
They became barriers to opportunity.
Communities that had been denied investment for decades eventually experienced deteriorating infrastructure, declining property values, and limited access to credit. The very conditions later described as "blight" were often the direct result of public policy rather than personal failure.
When those same neighborhoods became attractive for redevelopment generations later, many people saw opportunity without recognizing the history that had created it.
The story of gentrification, then, cannot begin with developers.
It begins with disinvestment.
Looking back, I understand why crossing Alter Road always felt different.
I didn't know what redlining was as a child. I didn't know about restrictive covenants, discriminatory lending, or exclusionary zoning. I only knew there was an invisible line that somehow carried enormous weight.
Years later, I searched for that same intersection using Google Street View.
The gate was gone.
In its place were shrubs and landscaping. The physical barrier had disappeared, yet the economic and social divide remained visible.
Sometimes we remove the fence without removing the system that built it. That discovery made another moment in history feel deeply personal.
In March of 1968, only months before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech in Grosse Pointe titled The Other America. Standing only a few miles from where I had spent my childhood riding my bike, he described two Americas existing side by side. One enjoyed prosperity, investment, and opportunity. The other experienced poverty, neglect, and exclusion.
His words were not simply about race. They were about geography. About neighborhoods. About the consequences of policies that separated people not only physically, but economically and psychologically.
More than fifty years later, his observations still feel remarkably current.
Researcher Heather McGhee reaches a similar conclusion. America's racial wealth gap did not emerge naturally. It was deliberately constructed through generations of policy decisions. Those same policies continue influencing where families can afford to live, how wealth accumulates, and which communities receive investment.
Understanding that history changed the way I thought about design.
I used to believe design was primarily about making things beautiful.
Now I see it as something much larger.
Design shapes behavior. Planning shapes opportunity. Architecture shapes movement. Stories shape perception. Every one of them influences how we experience place.
If policies helped divide our communities, perhaps thoughtful design and honest storytelling can help reconnect them. That possibility is what Every Door exists to explore.
What This Door Left Open
The more I studied housing policy, the less interested I became in assigning blame.
Instead, I became interested in understanding inheritance.
We inherit neighborhoods, but we also inherit ideas about those neighborhoods. We inherit maps, policies, narratives, and assumptions that quietly shape the way we move through the world.
Changing a city requires more than constructing new buildings.
It requires examining the blueprint we inherited and deciding which parts are worth preserving, which parts need repairing, and which parts must finally be redrawn.
Before we redesign our communities, we have to rethink the stories we've been telling about them.
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