Muskegon Heights: The Planned Industrial City
Near Grand Haven, Michigan
When the Muskegon lumber boom collapsed in the eighteen eighties, local investors did not wait around. In eighteen ninety, investors bought land just south of the main city and began selling lots. The plan was to build a planned industrial city from scratch.
It worked fast enough that the city incorporated on January second, eighteen ninety-one. Decades later, during the Great Migration, African Americans from the South came to work in the Heights foundries and were met with redlining, segregated recreation, and restricted public spaces. That history is still remembered in the community today.
