As Detroit Fades Away ...
I find this astonishing. The latest census will show Detroit having lost even more population, down to about 713,000 citizens from its peak of nearly 2 million back in the 1950s. Once again there are people saying, "Oh, not to worry, we're coming back."
Detroit's population plunged 25% in the past decade to 713,777, the lowest count since 1910, four years before Henry Ford offered $5 a day to autoworkers, sparking a boom that quadrupled Detroit’s size in the first half of the 20th Century.
Census figures released to the Free Press by a government source who asked not to be identified because the data has not been released publicly yet, show the city lost, on average, one resident every 22 minutes between 2001 and 2010.
I spent some time there when I was in college in the 1970s and it was in decline. But nothing like it is today. The unraveling of Detroit seems to me a terrible human tragedy. We all know the reasons -- too much government, mismanagement by auto industry and rent-seeking by UAW, white flight, etc. But it's sad.
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Dec '10
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
Many years ago in Michigan they passed a law allowing cities with over 1,000,000 residents to put a tax on utilities. This law was passed specifically for Detroit since no other city in Michigan has the requisite population. In 1999 the population requirement was revised down to 750,000 because Detroit's population was heading below the 1,000,000 mark. Now Detroit will no longer be able to collect this tax unless the law is changed again to lower the population requirement. If the Democrats were in power, they probably would do so, but the Republicans control both houses and the governorship. I wonder what will happen.
May '10
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
Does this have any clear precedent in world history? Has another major city simply evaporated due to any human influence other than war?
May '10
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
I remember the morning Detroit Mayor Coleman Young passed away. A WJW radio reporter asked L. Brooks Patterson, the Republican Oakland County Executive how Detroit should memorialize the city's first black mayor and, never one to pull a punch, Patterson exclaimed, "They should rename 8 Mile Road 'Coleman Young Boulevard' because nobody did more to separate the city from its suburbs!"
For non-Detroiters the boundary between the city of Detroit (and Wayne County) and Detroit's northern suburbs in Oakland and Macomb counties is formed by 8 Mile Road.
Dec '10
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
An excellent commentary that many of you have probably seen, but it deserves a repeat..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hhJ_49leBw&playnext=1&list=PL989B8BF361FC955F
Mar '11
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
I fear Chicago may be on the Detroit express, as well. Well, perhaps the local, not the express.
Jan '11
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
Producers, both black and white, are fleeing our major urban centers for the suburbs to escape the ruinous cost to them of supporting non-producers, both black and white. This flight, and the increasing relative density of non-producers, has reduced the charitable carrying capacities of urban areas; they're broke, no more money and with inadequate resources. All of this effect is man made, and was highly predictable to anyone who had the facts of finance and a pocket calculator. So, how did this happen?
Well, consider the conflict between the economic theories of Keynes and, say, Friedman, and their respective thoughts on the nature of free market dynamics. Obviously, Detroit, and other urban centers, practiced the Keynesian model, and we see the result. And. of course, unions were very helpful, too.
Now, consider which side liberals take, and which conservatives take.
The Al Gore crowd are worried about androgenic global warming, and ignore androgenic economic catastrophes. The question begged here is, in light of facts and experience, why?
Edited on Mar 22, 2011 at 1:59pmRe: As Detroit Fades Away ...
It's parallel to the loss of what the auto industry really was in its heyday: a driver of productivity. In the day, people talked about the Big Three the way we talk about Google, Microsoft or Apple.
May '10
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
It's more than sad; it's a disgrace. We have come to believe that we can be wealthy without the messy business of actually creating wealth. We believe that someone is supposed to take care of us, rather than being ashamed of being taken care of. Now, Detroit: they've run out of other people's money and see the result. Let the Michigan forests reclaim it.
Jul '10
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
Yes. St. Louis has actually lost a larger percentage of its population than Detroit. The city peaked at 857,000 in 1950. It's population today is 319,000 - a decline of 63%.
At one time, St. Louis vied with Chicago for the status as America's "second great city".. It had a higher number of Fortune 500 headquarters than any city other than New York. It was a manufacturing powerhouse, largely because of its location at the juncture of two great rivers and its central position on the national rail network.
There are a number of reasons for St. Louis' decline, but first and foremost, it's been a phenomenon of white flight, precipitated by a scheme which forced families from white neighborhoods to see their children bused into inner-city schools. In the 20 years after implementation of that program, the city lost nearly half its population.
The quality of life in the city's near suburbs is excellent, but St. Louis itself is a crime-ridden shell.
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
The plot thickens. The AP is now reporting that Detroit Mayor David Bing is now *protesting* the census numbers. Apparently if you go under 750,000 people, you don't qualify for some important aid.
Dec '10
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
Bill
Look at comment #1.
Sep '10
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
And in the auto industry's heyday, the auto workers' unions persuaded the management to agree to "spread the wealth around" and to ridiculous work rules, because both parties thought the profits would never end. Funny how that parallels the decline of the auto industry.
It would be interesting to find out what percentage of the workforce at Google, Microsoft or Apple is unionized. My first guess: zero.
Edited on Mar 22, 2011 at 5:39pmNov '10
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
Kenneth
There are a number of reasons for St. Louis' decline, but first and foremost, it's been a phenomenon of white flight, precipitated by a scheme which forced families from white neighborhoods to see their children bused into inner-city schools. In the 20 years after implementation of that program, the city lost nearly half its population.
The quality of life in the city's near suburbs is excellent, but St. Louis itself is a crime-ridden shell. · Mar 22 at 2:18pm
Kenneth, don't forget about middle class "black flight" as well.
Oct '10
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
In 1966, 26,000 residents had left the city; but following the riots of 1967, almost 67,000 left in the last 6 months of the year, 80,000 in 1968 and 46,000 in 1969. Detroit was already in trouble, mostly due to development in the suburbs, but the riots finished off any chance for redevlopment.
Jan '11
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
Going through Detroit to get to Ontario, I saw -for the first time in my life- a late 20th century, high-rise office building with graffiti all over it. I expect to see signs of vandalism in alleyways, etc., but not on a big, bold, beautiful business office. Detroit is almost a ghost town.
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
On St. Louis, it should also be noted that the fading of the Mississippi River as a commercial artery probably had more to do with the city’s decline in the long term than the riots and black-and-white flight which followed, though they were the coup de grâce.
St. Louis vaulted to 9th place in 1850 and was #4 twenty years later, having doubled in size. It was 4, 5, or 6 until 1920. It slipped to 7 in 1930, and actually lost population between then and 1940, when it was #8. As Kenneth said, its absolute population peaked in 1950 (but was only 30K more than 1930). It dropped absolutely and relatively (#10) by 1960, and hasn’t been seen there since.
When Jonathan Franzen published his (promising but disappointing) first novel in 1988, he called it The Twenty-Seventh City, because that’s where it was at the time. (A theme in the novel is the city’s continuing inability to grasp it’s no longer a major city—noticeable to anyone who read the papers there at the time.)
It’s now #52.
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
I think the evacuation of industry and so forth were trailing indicators—sunk capital and so on. Upstate New York is an example of this at the moment—it’s losing industry and population that will likely never come back because the Great Lakes are no longer driving economic activity. They’re dead cities walking, but they stagger on.
The major difference between St. Louis and Detroit is that St. Louis was a "buggy-whip maker” capitalizing on Mississippi riparian and trans-continential commerce. (O’Hare Airport might be the major culprit in “who killed St. Louis?”) Like Upstate, geography was destiny.
Detroit on the other hand, was (was!) based around the manufacture of what’s still probably the most widely-owned big-ticket industrial good in the world with constantly expanding demand. The Big Three were a suicide—or rather they were in a suicide pact with the UAW, promising to deliver the Big Rock Candy Mountain the union demanded. Making cars? An afterthought. But we all know that story. The golden goose got killed, and its murderers were bailed out by the feds a few times.
It is a shock and a horror, in its way.
Jul '10
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
Bill, what you have to understand about St. Louis is that the flight of its population wasn't to other regions - it was a western ring of suburbs. The greater St. Louis area is still economically vibrant; it's just that there was wholesale white flight from the city proper.
Ask any long-time resident of the suburbs and they will tell you the precipitating event was the horrible rape and murder in a school bathroom of a girl who had been forcibly bused to an inner-city school. Within the next ten years, St. Louis lost nearly 30% of its population.
And, predictably, as the tax base rapidly shrank, the city's Democratic machine raised taxes and cut services, setting in motion a death spiral.
When I was living there, in the late '90's, the city's Mayor actually demanded the State legislature levy a special "white flight" tax on surrounding counties, claiming those folks should bear economic responsibility for their betrayal of St. Louis.
Edited on Mar 22, 2011 at 10:32pmRe: As Detroit Fades Away ...
No, I understand the phenomenon of St. Louis County—just like in my native D.C. where the suburbs boomed and the city emptied out. And I agree it’s what most dramatically emptied the city. But it’s no longer a national economic hub on any level. What are the big companies based in Greater St. Louis? Anheuser-Busch. Monsanto. Olin. Nestlé Purina. Boeing (i.e., legacy McDonnell-Douglas). Emerson. Edward Jones. Whatever A.G. Edwards is now called. Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Hardee’s. Panera. Brown Shoe.
Most of those were there in 1930. May they prosper on and on, but St. Louis tout court is economically way less important that newcomers like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, etc. Its gross metropolitan product was about $130B in 2010. It’s 20th in the U.S.—which is great, but nowhere near what it once was (as you say it was almost the Second City and will never forgive Chicago for taking the crown). That’s like half of metro Atlanta, which was also hit badly by the riots and ensuing white (and black) flight, but which has blown past St. Louis without ever cracking the 10 most populous list.
Re: As Detroit Fades Away ...
Also, lest I was too oblique in referring to reading the newspapers there, I have lived in St. Louis.