"The history of American music was literally shaped by the single family housing character of Detroit," writes Aaron M. Renn. 

David Maraniss's new book, Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story, points to the signs of decline as early as 1963 when the city was in its economic and artistic heyday. (As Adam Gopnik keenly describes it in The New Yorker, "Humpty Dumpty's most poignant moment [was] just before he toppled over.") But here Renn zeroes in on a housing lesson that runs counterintuitive to today's thinking about urban planning. The single-family homes of Detroit allowed working- and middle-class families to accommodate pianos; and the piano was the springboard for the great musical energy that would become known around the world as Motown.1

Maraniss asks “Why Detroit? What gave this city its unmatched creative melody?” He lays out his theory of the case with regards to Motown Records.

The family piano’s role in the music that flowed out of the residential streets of Detroit cannot be overstated. The piano, and its availability to children of the black working class and middle class, is essential to understanding what happened in that time and place, and why it happened, not just with Berry Gordy, Jr. but with so many other young black musicians who came of age there from the late forties to the early sixties. What was special then about pianos and Detroit? First, because of the auto plants and related industries, most Detroiters had steady salaries and families enjoyed a measure of disposable income they could use to listen to music in clubs and at home. Second, the economic geography of the city meant that the vast majority of residents lived in single family homes, not high-rise apartments, making it easier to deliver pianos and find room for them. And third, Detroit had the egalitarian advantage of a remarkable piano enterprise, the Grinnell Brothers Music House. [emphasis added]

Like most things, the rise of Motown Records was multifactoral. Maraniss keys in on the prevalence of pianos in black homes. Note his factors creating this, to which one could also add the first rate musical education available to public school students at places like Cass Tech that he refers to multiple times throughout the text.

But of course I highlight: “the vast majority of residents lived in single family homes, not high-rise apartments, making it easier to deliver pianos and find room for them.”

It’s no secret that Detroit, like most Midwest cities, is a city of single family homes. Detached houses have a bad rep in planning circles today, but in this case the space they afforded allowed black families to have a piano – and in Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, Jr.’s case, a baby grand at that. This would be much more difficult in a microapartment to say the least.

• 1. Source: Planetizen