When Did Deindustrialization Start? Reexamining Industrial Decline in Metro Detroit

This paper argues that the starting date of deindustrialization in the United States Rust Belt hinges on the scale at which it is studied. The term deindustrialization is commonly used to describe the erosion of manufacturing employment at a national or subnational scale, especially since the 1970s. Urban and labor historians have argued that cities in the Rust Belt began deindustrializing earlier, in the 1950s, as firms decentralized their factories and adopted labor-reducing technology. Yet by examining industrial restructuring in Metro Detroit at the scale of factory districts, this paper shows that the region’s oldest districts began declining in the late 1910s and 1920s—not the 1950s or 1970s—due to the relocation of firms to outlying industrial districts and the decline of legacy industries as firms contended with declining product demand, changing technology, competition with firms in other regions, and the effects of mergers.