rent than whites in equivalent apartments". Spending the majority of their meager wages on rent, Blacks had no disposable income left to afford the upkeep and repair of their rental properties. Lacking maintenance, the decrepit homes of Black neighborhoods turned substandard: grossly congested, lacking water and ventilation, infested with vermin, and prone to fires. White homeowners attributed Black poverty to "individual moral deficiencies", strengthening their collective desire to preserve segregation. President Roosevelt's New Deal tried to alleviate the housing crisis by simultaneously subsidizing the construction of public housing and private, single-family homes. Working-class whites staunchly opposed public housing, claiming that it jeopardized the construction of new homes and disturbed the "racial and architectural homogeneity" of their neighborhoods. The anti public-housing movement appropriated World War II rhetoric to denounce public housing as a communist conspiracy, a catalyst of racial struggle that would "destroy traditional American values". Too poor to join the cohorts of whites fleeing to racially-homogenous suburbs, working-class whites banded together to terrorize Blacks out of their neighborhoods. In 1941, the Detroit Housing Commission announced the construction of the Sojourner Truth housing project in the Seven-Mile Fenelon neighborhood. Months of protest by the Seven Mile-Fenelon Improvement Association climaxed on February 28, 1942, the day the first black families moved into the project. A vicious race riot resulted in 40 injuries and 220 arrests, the majority of which were black. Seven years later, Mayor Albert Cobo announced he was "putting brakes on all public housing development outside of heavily black inner-city neighborhoods" much to the delight of the white voters who elected him. Although President Roosevelt's promise of private homeownership was meant to extend to Blacks, local implementation of housing policy further solidified the ghettoization of Black neighborhoods. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) subsidized "home purchases and improvements with low-interest loans" in order to "protect homeownership from foreclosure". The appraisal practices of HOLC agents, which determined eligibility for subsidized loans and mortgages, excluded Blacks from private homeownership through the structurally racist process of redlining. Racially restrictive housing covenants further limited housing options for Black people, even after the 1948 Supreme Court case Shelley vs Kraemer reversed the legality of such covenants. During World War II, Detroit became a center of industry, largely due to its innovative roots. The treatment of African Americans during World War II, however, represented the duality between an increase in labor and a decrease in the