Without the ability to take advantage of the government subsidized FHA loans, due to redlining, many African Americans looked to land contracts as a means of homeownership. Paying in installment plans, it often took 15-20 years for homeownership to be transferred. With inflated sales prices, more often than not eviction took place when one month's payment was late. Thus, no equity was accumulated. This was cyclical. Once an eviction took place, the speculator could start the process over again, taking advantage of another desperate want-to-be-homeowner from the black community.

Coupled with land contracts, came blockbusting. Scheming in the buffer areas between black and white communities, speculators would buy property with the intention of renting or selling to African Americans for well above market price. In addition, such speculators would try to scare whites into believing that their neighborhoods were turning into slums, and that values would soon plumet. In a panic, white homeowners would sell their homes for less than its value. Blockbusters got creative in their tactics and would often employ African Americans themselves to do the scaring. For example, they would hire African American women to push babies in strollers through white neighborhoods, or have African American men blast their radios as they drove through white neighborhoods. [4] Such tactics continued to further white flight out of the city, thus shrinking Detroit's tax base, putting a strain on public services.

Incorporation of cities and towns was essential to keeping undesirables out. In fact, the 1950s saw the largest wave of incorporation, with 1,074 new governments created nationwide. In Metro Detroit, 31 new home-rule cities were established between 1940 and 1965. Suburbs in Oakland and Wayne counties annexed approximately 4,000 acres combined through incorporation. [11] Once an area was officially incorporated, those in power (whites) had zoning power; the ability to restrictively zone land. 

Zoning ordinances were often used by those in power to protect the racial homogeneity of their neighborhoods. More specifically, they would do so by limiting or excluding apartments and public housing entirely using zoning laws and would often times limit or exclude moderately priced homes. By setting minimum sizes for residential plots, many suburban communities were able to keep their population density low. For example, in 1960 there were only 2,674,000 apartment units in U.S. suburbs, in comparison to 15,180,000 single-family units. And while there were more apartments built in the late 1960s, the existing zoning ordinances bottlenecked the areas in which apartments could be built, which tended to be in the poorer areas. In fact, while there was a large housing shortage in the city of Detroit, suburbs like Troy and Southfield, kept large tracts of land undeveloped, so that way they could control what developers could build, and which developers could build it. In fact, while there was a large housing shortage in the city of Detroit, suburbs like Troy and Southfield, kept large tracts of land undeveloped, so that way they could control what developers could build, and which developers could build it. [12] Zoning was a tool that was used by those in power (whites) to exclude people based on their incomes, which was more often than not also based along racial lines. 

Zoning science created exclusionary language that tiptoed around loaded racism. [13] Zoning ordinances adopted in Metro Detroit borrowed from the language of Michigan's original planning and zoning acts of 1921. "Thus local suburban statutes required that regulation be part of a plan designed to 'promote public health, safety, and general welfare,' and they stipulated that all land-use decisions be made 'with reasonable consideration' of a district's 'peculiar suitability for particular uses, the conservation of property values and the general trend and character of building and population development.'" [14] While there is no direct use of racist or exclusionary language, the implication is that certain groups of people weren't suited for particular areas of the Metro Detroit area. Thus, zoning power allowed whites to keep the suburbs homogenous. 

The Public Works Administration (PWA) was established in 1933 with the purpose of reducing unemployment and creating public infrastructure. Creating twenty-six housing projects in the Northeast and Midwest, sixteen of the housing projects were reserved for whites, while only eight were reserved for African Americans, with two projects being integrated. Projects for African American residents were located in low-income neighborhoods, further segregating neighborhoods not only by race, but economically as well.

The federal government ended the practice of directly funding the construction of public housing in 1937, but quickly replaced this centralized system with a more decentralized system in which localities wanting such projects could build their own with use of federal government subsidies funded by the U.S. Housing Authority (USHA). The USHA continued to maintain policies of segregation, claiming to respect existing neighborhood racial characteristics. [19] 

In 1941, the federal government commissioned a bomber plant to be built in Willow Run, which was an undeveloped suburb of Detroit that had no preexisting racial housing arrangements. When the government built housing for workers, they instituted a policy that only whites could live there. [20] Thirty plus miles from the city of Detroit, which is where the majority of the African American community resided, the opportunity to work at Willow Run did not flow to all Metro Detroiters.