Imagine for a moment that every single person living in the city of San Jose, Calif., plus an additional 150,000 or so, just up and left. Vanished. Poof. Gone. Leaving their homes, business buildings and factories behind.
That is, in effect, what has happened to the city of Detroit, according to 2010 U.S. Census data. The city that boasted 1.8 million residents in 1950, and was the nation's economic engine for most of the 20th century, now is home to 714,000 people, a population loss of 1.1 million - with a 25 percent drop in the last decade alone.
Video: Detroit Is Dying
It's an unprecedented collapse of a major American city. It's not as if the population was dropping nationwide; it's going up. Just not in Detroit. It's closest "outmigration" rival is Chicago, a five-hour drive to the west, which has lost about 964,000 people since 1950 but still holds about 2.7 million people, down 25 percent from its peak of 3.62 million in 1950.
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In Detroit, the loss amounts to a staggering 60 percent of the city's peak population. It is now smaller than Charlotte, N.C., and Fort Worth. More people have left Detroit than live in San Francisco; more people have left in the last decade than live in St. Petersburg, Fla. If a similar collapse happened to San Francisco or San Diego or Denver or Dallas, there would be national cries for intervention. Detroit we treat like a crash on the freeway: something to gawk at, then forget while we blame auto executives - the driver - for their follies and ignore the injured passengers.
The collapse of Detroit has roots in intentional de-industrialization by the Big Three automakers, which in the 1950s began aggressively spider-webbing operations across the nation to produce cars closer to regional markets, and to reduce labor costs by investing in less labor-friendly places than union-heavy Detroit.
Racism plays a significant role too. Detroit's white flight exploded in the 1950s and '60s, after courts struck down local and federal policies that had allowed segregated housing. That was followed by middle-class flight as crime endemic to high-poverty, high-unemployment neighborhoods began spreading. As people of all races have fled the city, its vast socioeconomic problems become even more distilled, more pronounced.
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One in three Detroiters, triple the national rate, lived below the federal poverty line in 2007 - before the economic crisis and auto industry bankruptcies and bailouts - making Detroit the poorest of the nation's big cities. Detroit's per capita 2009 income was estimated at $15,310, compared with a national rate of $27,041. And that was when the population was estimated to be more than 900,000.
As a nation, and as a mature society, what are we going to do about Detroit?
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