Posted on 03/23/2011 2:06:40 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Detroit lost 25% of its population - or 237,000 people - over the last decade, according to new U.S. Census data.
It's the largest percentage drop for any American city, the NYT reports, with the exception of New Orleans, which lost 29% of the pop. after Hurricane Katrina. The exodus was driven primarily by the collapse of the auto industry and the mass migration of middle-class African Americans to the suburbs.
Detroit's official population is now 713,777, the lowest it has been since 1910. That's down from a peak of 2 million in 1950, when Detroit was the nation's fifth largest city.
Even demographers who track Detroit's population were surprised by such a dramatic loss.
“I never thought it would go this low,” demographer Kurt Metzger told the NYT. “All of us are kind of shocked, but it means we have to work that much harder.”
Mayor David Bing plans to challenge the census findings, saying the city can qualify for more federal and state funding if it can get its population count to 775,000.
It remains to be seen how the staggering population loss will affect Bing's plans to revitalize the Motor City by shrinking city finances and infrastructure in line with Detroit's new size.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Farmland.
What a shame, the greedy Unions along with liberal politicians destroyed a once great industrial city.
Very Sad
“Detroit is dying. I was there a couple of years ago and saw for myself that half the houses in the lower income (not the projects) areas were boarded up and empty. The city is offering some abandoned properties for $1 but no one is buying because they want you to invest tens of thousands of dollars to fix the place up. No thanks.”
Detroit was a amazing place Huge factories good jobs,you could get anything made there ,then the leftist bastards killed it.
And my parents got made at me for losing my little brother in Walmart?
Detroit, my hometown is a reminder that civilization is delicate, that it does not always progress, that it can regress.
In Detroit, civilization is in reverse gear.
Detroit is the endpoint, the goal of democrat/labor union governance. It is where everyone, except party members of course, are equal in squalor. It is where the rats and their labor union butt boys would take the US. I ran away from Detroit forty years ago to find it forty years later, catching up with me.
it’s an amazing thing to talk to my friends and family who are still living there... sheesh... you’d think the place was Shangri-La.... and every time, we talk they say “so, when are you moving back”...not anytime soon, I tell them...not interested in 5 months of bad weather..
there is this strange Detroit pride thing there, always has been... and I find it strange because the darn place is nothing to be proud of , other than the cool lakes throughout Michigan.
“it’s an amazing thing to talk to my friends and family who are still living there... sheesh... you’d think the place was Shangri-La.... and every time, we talk they say “so, when are you moving back”...not anytime soon, I tell them...not interested in 5 months of bad weather..
there is this strange Detroit pride thing there, always has been... and I find it strange because the darn place is nothing to be proud of , other than the cool lakes throughout Michigan.”
I know what you mean, some of my friends are from there and in the summer it is a neat place to visit.
Well here's another MAJOR bombshell: With Detroit's population dropping below 775,000, they can't charge utilities taxes anymore either......
For those of us that have been in metro Detroit have watched the decay steadily even before the ‘67 riots - and racist bigot Mayor Coleman Young really was the final nail in the coffin so to speak.
Of course this story is big news here and callers to talk shows call in with their ideas to *save the city* but no one seems to want to admit the truth.
A person says ‘I would never move to Detroit’ are of course called racist - but let’s put it another way: Why would any thinking person move to a place that’s %95 DEMOCRAT and essentially lose/waste your vote?
I don’t think it’s nuts to want to live in a city or state where you have a chance to be surrounded by say 40% -60% of like-minded individuals, but why put yourself in an environment where you are a 5% minority intellectually?
Besides, the City of Detroit the way it taxes through ‘permits and ‘inspections’ on anything and everything at any time makes it impossible to run a business in the first place.
Does anyone know what the red building in the photo is?
But I thought the commie from Berzerkeley, Gov. Grubby Granholm, turned Detroit into a “cool” city with stolen tax dollars. Are people saying it’s not “cool” anymore?
Any warrants out for her arrest yet?
It is amusing that you can buy houses there for $750 or even less. But the taxes are still $2000 plus.
Union workers built Detroit.
I did not know that. I suppose, such a thing will hasten their bankruptcy.
Same for Duluth, MN and Superior, Wisconsin. Duluth was expected to grow to about 300 thousand people and Superior around 250 thousand people and probably outstrip or rival MPLS/STPL as the major metro area in the Upper Midwest. It’s a good thing they didn’t though, could you imagine liberal MN with 15-20 electoral votes instead of 10?
They lost the equivalent of the population of Saint Petersburg, FLA.
No chance for a comeback for Detroit unless 100,000 FReepers move there and make it a model city for the world. That would probably take only a decade or less and the comeback would be mind-boggling.
I know what you’re thinking, but way less than 95 percent of them were murdered.
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