[2] The dedicated and driven residents constructed homes by scraping together meager resources gathered from junkyards, demolition sites, and occasional purchases for windows and doors.

The houses grew as families expanded but the residents were unable to obtain loans and mortgages because of racist legislation and oppressive policies of redlining and blockbusting.

The Eight Mile community suffered from extremely poor living conditions even though the majority of residents owned homes through land contracts or mortgages.

In the eyes of the Federal Housing Administration(FHA), Eight Mile blight prevented them from subsiding and insuring the construction of single-family homes in areas of northwest Detroit.

In the 1940s, the area around Eight Mile was scattered with housing on a terrain of truck farms and woodlands that the city planned to utilize as future development as populations expanded.

The neighborhoods of Palmer Woods and Sherwood Forest lay less than a mile east and were populated with enormous two-three story homes, pools and tennis courts.

The FHA refused to fund development projects of all-white subdivisions west of black neighborhoods because they were designated high-risk areas by appraisers because of their proximity to slums.

[3] Impoverished and oppressed residents of the Eight Mile community desperately lobbied the Franklin Roosevelt administration for housing benefits and utilized their voting power in the New Deal to do so.

"[6] Avery drew strong parallels between the government's plan to relocate landowners of Eight Mile and replace them with public housing and the evictions of sharecroppers in the South.

Community organizers led a phenomenal clean-up drive on the eve of Foley's visit resulting in him praising them at a city Plan Commission hearing.

Daines settled, in the CHPC report, on a proposal he saw as "seemed feasible from both the point of view of the Negro and his more fortunate white neighborhor in the adjacent areas."

The CHPC proposed a new community "in a comparable area ... close to an industrial center of employment ... where Negros have already settled, and garden space is available" would then be built.

Instead, they believed in temporary housing for war workers or movement of impoverished black residents, as the CHPC report suggested, in order to prevent slum expansion.

Therefore, in 1942, the Federal Public Housing Authority and DHC proposed one thousand five hundred units of temporary warehousing for back workers in vacant Eight Mile land.

[3] Individual Contracts viewed the Eight Mile community as an opportunity to greatly increase profits by attaining "scavenger lots"—land held by the city or state because of nonpayment of taxes.

Horace White, a leading Detroit minister and mediator in the Sojourner Truth project, advocated through black newspapers for development of the area.