Highland Park, 1914. Henry Ford makes a decision that sends shivers through his accountants: five dollars a day. Double the average factory wage. On the plantations of Mississippi, a Black sharecropper sweats for $5 a month78. The news spreads like wildfire. Whole trainloads start heading north.
Ford is not acting out of philanthropy. His reasoning is simple: well-paid workers buy cars. Capitalism feeding on itself. Ford democratises the automobile. A century later, RealT will claim to democratise real estate. In both cases, the same people stay renters.
General Motors and Chrysler follow. The carmakers turn Detroit into the world capital of the automobile9, where the legendary Cadillacs, named after the French settler, will be built. As early as 1907, the port of Detroit was already handling 67 million tonnes of goods, more than London or New York10. The city had become the busiest commercial artery on Earth. In forty years, Detroit goes from mid-sized town to 1.85M inhabitants. Factories line up like steel cathedrals, and its workers become the best paid in the country.
Between 1910 and 1930, the Black population grows from 6,000 to 120,00011. These men and women are fleeing Jim Crow, lynchings and the misery of the cotton fields of the South. For the dignity of work. By 1950, there will be 300,000 of them, more than 16% of the city12, but less than 2% of property ownership. The figure will soon climb to 30%. The share of Black residents, that is. Not of owners.
But the North has its own rules. No “Whites Only” signs, granted. Invisible lines everywhere instead. Black workers can get jobs at Ford (Henry Ford is one of the few industrialists to hire African Americans in large numbers), but they will live in Black Bottom or Paradise Valley13. Nowhere else.
In Detroit, every promise of prosperity comes with an invisible border. Ford doubled wages, but he doubled the walls too, perhaps without even realising it. Dearborn, Grosse Pointe, Highland Park: the new suburbs show off their immaculate lawns and their invisible fences.
In Black Bottom, rents rise faster than wages. A Black tenant pays twice what a white one does for a crumbling slum. Banks literally draw red lines on maps, redlining, to systematically refuse loans in Black neighbourhoods14. Restrictive covenants: a blockchain before its time, an immutable legal code that excludes. Today, RealT owns dozens of properties in the very neighbourhoods the banks once shaded in red. Brightmoor, Yorkshire Woods, Denby. The names have barely changed.
A decorated Black sergeant with a Purple Heart comes home from the Pacific. He is refused his GI Bill loan15 by the same bank that is financing the house of his white neighbour, a mere army cook. The GI Bill and FHA loans16 pour money into home ownership, but for white people only17. Systemic exclusion, not anecdotal. The suburbs boom for white families: detached houses, gardens, double garages. Black families stay renters, shut out of wealth building. Two Detroits coexist: the one that owns and the one that rents.
While he obviously does not condone that segregation, Jean-Marc Jacobson, who co-founded RealT with his brother Remy, embraces the city’s capitalist heritage.
Yes, he says, he is a capitalist, and yes, he is after profit: this is not social work.
He belongs to a Detroit lineage: Ford was after profit when he paid $5 a day. The banks were after profit when they practised redlining. The developers were after profit when they bulldozed Black Bottom. Jacobson is after profit by tokenising the homes of the most precarious. Each in his own era, with his own tools. The logic stays the same: extract value wherever you can.
When America enters the war after Pearl Harbor, Detroit becomes the Arsenal of Democracy18. The assembly lines that turned out Buicks now build B-24 bombers. Between 1940 and 1943, 350,000 newcomers arrive. More jobs, more people - but the same invisible walls. The city creaks, but holds.
The explosion was inevitable. In June 1943, tensions boil over. Three days of rioting, 34 dead19. The army steps in. The first urban plans are already sketching the destruction of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley to make way for freeways. Land ownership becomes a weapon: Black neighbourhoods are demolished in the name of progress.
At the 1950 census, Detroit has 1,849,568 inhabitants. The fourth-largest city in America. Chrysler workers have their own house with a garden. Their children go to college, the first generation to do so. On Saturdays, the Tigers at the ballpark. On Sundays, gospel in Black Bottom, incense in Hamtramck. In Paradise Valley, the jazz clubs host Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. Barbershops buzz with politics, churches overflow. Black businesses thrive. A city within the city, alive, self-sufficient. Detroit makes half the world’s cars. Ford, GM and Chrysler directly employ 300,000 people, a million indirectly. A total one-industry town. When Ford sneezes, Detroit catches a cold.
Then the freeways arrive. I-75, I-94, I-96: concrete gashes slicing through the poor neighbourhoods. Black Bottom razed20. Paradise Valley destroyed. The clubs where Billie Holiday played become interchange ramps. Thousands of Black families displaced, their businesses wiped out, their social networks pulverised. They call it progress.
The summer of 1967 promises to be scorching. The Detroit Police Department, 93% white, patrols neighbourhoods that are 70% Black21. Raids on blind pigs, the after-hours drinking dens, are multiplying. On Sunday 23 July, at 3:45 in the morning, at 9125 12th Street, officers expect a handful of customers22. They find 82 people celebrating the return of 2 Vietnam veterans.
A crowd gathers outside during the arrests. A bottle flies. A rumour spreads that the police have beaten a pregnant woman. It is false, but it doesn’t matter. Years of police brutality have made any rumour believable. The first looting targets shops run by absent white owners, who drive home to the suburbs every evening with the takings.
From the rooftops, you can see three columns of smoke rising: 12th Street, Grand River, the East Side. Firefighters refuse to go in without a police escort. The fires spread unopposed. Willie Horton of the Tigers, still in uniform, tries to calm the crowd. In vain. The National Guard opens fire. Tanya Blanding, 4 years old, is killed: soldiers thought they saw a threat in the glow of a cigarette.
5 days. 43 dead. 2,500 shops destroyed. Mayor Jerome Cavanagh waxes philosophical.
“We stand amidst the ashes of our hopes.”
The Kerner Commission23 would find that in these neighbourhoods, Black unemployment was double that of white residents, and ghetto rents were 20% higher than in the suburbs.
Today, 9125 12th Street no longer exists. The address has vanished, the street renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard. A small park now stands where the speakeasy was. The park has replaced the ashes, but not the poverty. In these same streets, where 60% of residents live below the poverty line, RealT has acquired six properties. In 1967, white slumlords owned Black Bottom from their suburbs. In 2025, anonymous investors own slices of LLCs from their laptops.