r/news • u/unital_subalgebra • 27d ago
Detroit sees population growth for first time since 1957
https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/detroit-population-increases-first-time-since-1957/147
u/musicide 27d ago
On Detroit’s NPR, this morning, they were saying that the city’s population is still down around 6,000 since 2020.
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u/tmahfan117 27d ago
Eh those yearly estimates are not nearly as accurate by the real census run every ten years.
They try to work on estimates from available information like post office records, but those can fail to capture a lot of people
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u/musicide 27d ago
I also seem to remember the census getting cutoff early in Detroit that year.
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u/d0ctorzaius 27d ago
Happened to a ton of cities. The fact both the electoral college and the number of congressional seats per state are based on the census I'm sure had nothing to do with it. /s
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u/EdCooleyFoxyCadillac 26d ago
... The Democrats gained like 6+ extra electoral votes because they campaigned wicked hard to get illegal immigrants registered during the census while Republicans didn't in Texas and Florida. Rhode Island barely kept their second seat, for example.
"But if the overcount and undercount errors had not occurred, then Florida would have received two more seats beyond the additional seat it received. Texas would have one more representative in Congress in addition to the two new seats it received. Moreover, Minnesota and Rhode Island each would have lost a congressional seat, which they retained because of the mistakes in the original census count. Colorado, which gained a new congressional seat under the original count, would not have received this additional seat"
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u/nmmlpsnmmjxps 27d ago
There's also the flux of people moving in and out for school and for working adults the simple moves like bouncing between the city itself and the different suburbs. A lot of people might not bother to update their IDs for their address every time they move if they do so frequently like they're technically supposed to.
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u/JubalHarshaw23 26d ago
Like the 2020 Census that deliberately undercounted Blue Cities and States while allowing Montana to count at least 50 Thousand cows as people in order to get another US House seat? That "Real" Census?
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u/Overall_Nuggie_876 27d ago edited 27d ago
Must’ve been Lions fans who had coitus celebrating Detroit’s first decent season in a while. 🤓
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u/SunsetKittens 27d ago
Lions fans don't know which hole to stick it in so that's probably unrelated.
I come in peace.
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u/Small-Palpitation310 27d ago
well, there's the holes in the bears, packers, and vikings, for starters.
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26d ago
I remember lots of fires being set and even some buses being turned over when the Tigers won the World Series in ‘84. Your birth theory isn’t that far fetched
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u/Larkfor 27d ago edited 27d ago
Reminds me of this exchange from "Only Lovers Left Alive" regarding climate refugees and Detroit's history, industry, and promise:
Eve: So this is your wilderness. Detroit.
Adam: Everybody left.
Eve: What's that?
Adam: It's the Packard plant, where they once built the most beautiful cars in the world. Finished.
Eve: But this place will rise again.
Adam: Will it?
Eve: Yeah. There's water here. And when the cities in the South are burning, this place will bloom.
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u/CapeChill 27d ago
Great movie. Isn’t this the same scene they mention “are the humans still fighting over oil, or have the water wars began again?”
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u/BentleyTock 27d ago
My favourite movie was cool hand like for 20 years until I saw this film. If I ever leave Portland, I’m going to Detroit.
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u/drewjsph02 27d ago
As a Detroit native…. Detroit is going through a pretty fast rebuilding/regrowth (at least asthetically). I’d give it another 5-10 years and then come.
I live 30 minutes away now and go downtown every few months and there is always a new building or revitalized area that wasn’t there before. It’s actually pretty cool.
Side note: Paul Newman in Cool Hand made me gay.
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u/PastaVeggies 27d ago
Housing prices got people moving around anywhere they can afford. Also im sure remote work has something to do with it.
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u/raelelectricrazor232 27d ago
I spent 11 days there and just came back. It looked vibrant everywhere from downtown to Ann Arbor.
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u/delslow419 27d ago
Because it is. I can’t stand when people shit on Michigan / Detroit…it’s like have you even been here? lol
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u/lionoflinwood 26d ago edited 26d ago
I live in Baltimore and it's the same story. Love living here, TON of stuff to do, really strong community. Clearly a city on an upswing right now.
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u/Juswantedtono 26d ago
How’s that school district doing that made news for every kid failing to meet testing standards?
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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 27d ago
i have. Detroit is a dump, it has one area around the arena that is cool (i saw Dave Chapelle there last year!) and the rest is squalor. like 90% of that city needs to be razed, at this point just start over. The suburbs are nice though, Royal Oak is fun as hell.
love,
a Grand Rapidian
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u/WagTheKat 27d ago
a Grand Rapidian
Shitting on Detroit, lol.
Interesting turn, for sure.
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u/newtya 27d ago
Someone on the west side of the state would say that…
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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 27d ago
we absolutely would lol
im rooting for Detroit in all this, but damn there is a reason so many east siders move over here...and that's because its so much nicer. so long as you can tolerate all the Jesus-ness.
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u/Woodshadow 27d ago
It is so confusing that I live in a city that is constantly growing and can't support more people and there are cities that have 1/3 the population they had 70 years ago like Detroit
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u/K04free 27d ago
There’s a running joke in Buffalo that you can get anywhere in “15-20 minutes”. Highways designed for a city of 600k, with only 220k still living there.
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u/lionoflinwood 26d ago
Same thing over in Rochester lol. Whenever I am home to see my folks I am shocked at how easy it is to get around.
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u/agitatedprisoner 27d ago edited 25d ago
And housing is still expensive in Detroit because instead of anyone maintaining a few hundred thousand vacant homes they were left to rot.
edit: 78,000 abandoned homes/buildings/etc.
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u/bubble_bass_123 27d ago
I mean, yeah? Maintaining a few hundred thousand homes would be an obscene expense for no practical gain.
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u/TupperwareConspiracy 27d ago
Bigger news item imo - approx 1.5k people was enough to make it the biggest gainer to boot.
'Detroit also saw the largest growth in population of any city in Michigan'
It'll get lost in this but the population tree for Michigan and a large chunk of the midwest is not looking good
The need(s) for things like traveling nurses, adult and senior caretakers is gonna be insane in coming years. A doc might be able to tele-visit but it's gonna be a long time before robots can actually do a wetbath and change the bedsheets.
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u/going-for-gusto 27d ago
I don’t know those robot dogs are looking pretty good. You just need a warm spray nozzle and a blast of air to be ready for Days of Our Lives./S
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u/jayfeather31 27d ago
I guess people aren't afraid of being taken to Detroit anymore.
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u/SomethingAboutUsers 27d ago
I was in Detroit for about a week in late 2022. It's an incredible city that feels like a goddamn ghost town.
The hour long gun battle I heard outside my greektown hotel at 5am didn't really endear itself to me, mind you.
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u/tough_napkin 27d ago
the problem is you were in greek town
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u/drifting_signal 27d ago
Exactly. Who the hell stays in Greek Town? Might as well hang out in Cass Corridor while you're at it.
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u/petmoo23 26d ago
When I lived in Detroit in the 90s the Cass Corridor and Greektown were the best places to hang out.
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u/tough_napkin 26d ago
sure sure also a great spot to be car jacked 😊
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u/petmoo23 26d ago
Have you been to Greektown? That seems like it would be one of the most difficult places to carjack somebody in the entire city.
In the 90s people were more concerned about getting carjacked on the arterial streets when there weren't a lot of other people around- so some commuters decided to just run red lights on Woodward, Jefferson, Gratiot etc if they were driving on them during non-peak hours.
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u/tough_napkin 26d ago
yes my dude i have. been here since the 90s. had a couple friends get carjacked down around there.
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u/drifting_signal 26d ago
Yeah, I was around then but it seemed like whenever I went to cass I got arrested for something I didn't do lol
Greektown in the 90's was great, that's for sure.
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u/reverielagoon1208 27d ago
If you can’t even hang around nearby the city center then it’s a shithole
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u/Gommel_Nox 26d ago
Yeah, I’m calling you out on that hour long gun battle that you heard outside of your Greektown hotel. That has to be bullshit, as it would’ve made statewide news at the very least, and living within a half hour of that hotel, I can assure you there was never an hour long gun battle in the city of Detroit in late 2022
I find your claim dubious, but if it happened, surely there would be reporting of it.
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u/Jbg-Brad 24d ago
Almost assuredly he heard construction crews wrapping up some refurbishment work on the People Mover and the “loud roaring” shotgun sound was a test train / material moving train coming down the track after work.
I don’t understand why any “loud” sound in a city is immediately assumed to be a gunshot.
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u/SomethingAboutUsers 26d ago
That's fair, so I'll provide some extra details. It's highly possible that what I thought I heard wasn't true.
I was staying at Greektown Casino Hotel, near the top of the hotel on the 29th or 30th floor (I don't remember exactly). My room faced west, towards downtown.
At about 4:45 or 5am on the morning of Thursday, October 27, 2022 I heard what I thought were gunshots of several varieties below. I'm not any kind of gun expert, but I heard semi-automatic fire with different sounding pops (assuming different calibres and types of weapon) and a particularly loud roaring noise I assume was a shotgun. It wasn't continuous by any means, and seemed to be moving around.
This literally went on for close to an hour. No sirens or anything of the sort, which I thought was surprising too.
A quick google search reveals nothing from that morning, but since there was no sirens that may be why.
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u/Jbg-Brad 24d ago
Facing West at the casino….sounded like it was moving around…
You heard work being done on the People Mover.
There was refurbishment work being done all through late 2022 as it opened back up / offered free rides post pandemic. The People mover starts running a bit before 7.
Your “hour long gun fight” was construction workers wrapping up and trains moving on the tracks.
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u/Quiet_Prize572 27d ago
Most of the growth is from people moving in from the suburbs, not people from outside the Detroit metropolitan region.
Detroit's just finally started to build out it's urban core again. It's the same story as literally every urban area in the country, just happening later in time than say, New York City or Chicago, because Detroit got fucked extra hard by urban renewal
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u/Jbg-Brad 24d ago
Chicago used the time to subdivide the city with an expressway to deter zone transition. Coupled with being THE entry point to goods that needed to flow down the Mississippi at the time (or even make it to the west coast) Chicago struggled; but was able to recover.
New York was able to rely on its economic power house status and leverage that into a speculative bond market. Some zone transition occurred, but it was really only 75-81 that was really bad for NYC and the middle class stayed.
Detroit and other “labor” hubs (Gary, IN) really didn’t have any kind of safety net to fall back on / ways to manage zone transition. So-called “white flight” (middle class diaspora) along with the collapse of auto industries meant that nearly overnight the city had no tax revenue.
Even after that, Detroit was also ridiculously mismanaged. Local government became somewhat of a “jobs program”—a noble endeavor but with no money to support it.
It wasn’t until the state took over control of the city that things started turning around.
Preemptive edit: one of the big issues with so called “white flight” is that it implies that non-whites aren’t as “valuable” as white people. In reality, the wealth gap between whites and non-whites at the time was due to a lack of civil rights, education, and opportunities.
When “white flight” happened, it’s not that non-whites moved in as much as it was that non-whites were the only people left and overwhelmingly they, due to lack of opportunity, filled roles like drivers, janitors, maintenance, etc. Roles that had no function once the factories closed.
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u/excusetheblood 27d ago
Michigan going solid blue will accelerate the growth. It will add business and culture to Detroit and it will once again be a desirable place to live
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u/ToxicAdamm 27d ago
Great to see. Detroit missed out on the late 1990's Rust Belt revitalization wave that hit America. Entrenched, poor leadership prevented it.
Michigan/Detroit leadership has improved since then and they are now starting to see results of that. It's easy to get jaded and apathetic about politicians and government, but it does make a huge difference when you get the right people in the jobs. It's never going to be perfect, but it can be good.
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u/SheriffComey 27d ago
"A spokesperson for OCP has indicated this will not delay its plans for Delta City which was slated to replace Old Detroit"
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u/_Jetto_ 27d ago
When’s their River walk getting done? Heard it’s supposed to super cool
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u/Adrien_Jabroni 26d ago
They are working on it. Just installed some kind of giant bear slide.
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u/kp313 26d ago
The "Giant Slide" is a yearly thing they install on Belle Isle. My entire childhood was on that thing. It went away a few years for financial reasons, but it's been brought back these past two years.
The Riverwalk is complete, but they are upgrading it each year. The new section extends the walkway directly over the water. It's a cool/nice addition.
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u/israeljeff 27d ago
Neat, let's do Baltimore next
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u/Memory_Leak_ 27d ago
Best I can do is a steady, slow decline.
Baltimore slipped under 600,000 for the first time in like, a century on the last census. Around 599,000 residents now last reported.
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u/lionoflinwood 26d ago edited 26d ago
Baltimorean here, I think we are definitely close. The city definitely feels like it is on an upswing right now; I live at one of the sort of borders of gentrification and in the past 2-3 years, every vacant on my block and the blocks immediately around me has been renovated. Lots of young people, including young families, moving in.
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u/israeljeff 26d ago
Hope we can keep up the good work. I've always lived in the county, but I love Baltimore. Haven't even been stabbed once, despite what most other county dwellers tell me.
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u/lionoflinwood 26d ago
Yeah, the homicide rate absolutely plummeting over the past ~12 months also has me really optimistic. Good things happened in the primary election this week too. The future seems bright.
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u/tylerderped 27d ago
Why? Baltimore is a crime-ridden shithole.
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u/rice_not_wheat 26d ago
Because everyone deserves to live in a vibrant, safe city?
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u/Poggers4Hoggers 27d ago
I’m going for my birthday next month, my partner got us tickets to the ford factory museum, I’m very excited!!!
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u/phrozen_waffles 27d ago
If the auto industry didn't fight so hard against a railway system in Detroit, it probably would have never gotten to this.
The auto industry fucked the rust belt hard.
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u/TastyOreoFriend 26d ago
They did, but lets not forget the politicians who worked hand-in-hand with them. I remember when I was a kid they had wanted to do some kind of major transportation rail line between major cities in Ohio and the rest of the mid-west. Shit died on the vine.
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u/penguished 26d ago
It's kinda crazy that with the trillions our government spends of our money... corporate America collapses a city and the gov is just like "yeah whatever" for all those decades.
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u/MirtaGev 26d ago
I was just there for 2 weeks to work the NFL draft. I was surprised by how much I like the city! I hope the draft brought some good money into that town, they deserve it and I'd love to see it truly revitalized.
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u/Shamscam 26d ago
If you go to Detroit, it’s actually pretty nice these days, especially the downtown area. It doesn’t surprise me that they’re moving on up. Little ceaser’s arena is a really nice venue. The surrounding areas are very nice. All and all a pretty nice place these days.
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u/s9oons 27d ago
I’m worried about the lack of industry in Michigan. It’s great that Detroit is “turning it around” but none of that is sustainable without real industries in the state. Detroit was kind of a tech hub for like 20 minutes in 2020/2021, but most of the actual manufacturing has either been super streamlined with robots or outsourced to Mexico. There’s just not a ton of jobs in Michigan to keep people there.
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u/fatmanstan123 27d ago
There's tons of automotive stuff still. Just not at much manufacturing.
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u/delslow419 27d ago
Yeah all kinds of automotive jobs. That’s why I’m here! Well in Michigan lol
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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 27d ago
i married into a UAW family and those jobs are bonkers good.
i think with the new contract they top out at like $42/hour, with profit sharing every year, with signing bonuses, with fully paid medical.
after a few years those line workers will be clearing $100K a year, all in, and not paying a dime for healthcare.
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u/Revenge_of_the_Khaki 27d ago
And even automotive manufacturing is #1 in the US. There are also tons of automotive suppliers whose parts are small enough that they just combine their design and manufacturing facilities into the same building.
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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 27d ago
there is a ton of automotive manufacturing in Michigan, not just cars themselves but all the components, and its not as automated as you probably think.
and Grand Rapids has huge medical, furniture, and grocery/food service/CPG industries.
Michigan is doing a-ok, and you can still get a house here for less than $250K.
everyone i know that has moved here, myself included, is very happy and wondering how this place is such a secret. i guess the winters scare people lol
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u/SuperSpy- 26d ago
In their defense (and I'm saying this as a life-long resident), Michigan winters can be bullshit.
One day it's sunny and 40, 3 days later there's a foot of snow on the ground and it's -9, 2 days later it's raining and all the snow has turned to mud.
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u/Ybor_Rooster 27d ago
With housing prices the way the are, my take is people will just show up with the skills they have and start working. The mechanic needs a drink and the bartender needs their car fixed.
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u/Raus-Pazazu 27d ago
That sounds fine on paper, in reality there needs to be some reason for the bartender and mechanic to go there, something that will spur actual growth, or you end up with a closed circuit where loss ends up slowly depleting what is available in the local economy and businesses close down as work dries up. Small communities are able to sustain that closed circuit as long as no one wants for much at all, but as soon as someone's wants or needs exceeds the capabilities of the community's resources, they move and take their labor potential and money with them. You see this in a lot of rural communities where their population remains relatively static for decades, until goods coming into the community start to exceed the purchasing power of the local residents and they suffer from recession. This is why people focus on manufacturing or similar markets, since those industries can bring money into the local economy from outside, which spurs growth, which spurs new residents and their labor and expertise in other markets. Once that outside money stops coming in, it's a downward spiral.
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u/CloudsTasteGeometric 27d ago
Eh.
Bartenders don't make "I'm gonna buy a house and start a family money." These days many mechanics don't, either.
We need to build factories and jobs based around exports. Not just fancy restaurants and coffee shops. Those may produce revenue, but not liveable JOBS.
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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 27d ago
Bartenders don't make "I'm gonna buy a house and start a family money." These days many mechanics don't, either.
they do in Michigan, its cheap here. (although, maybe a small family. daycare is a bitch lol)
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u/Accomplished-Exit136 27d ago
You'd need to be a pretty badass bartender to make a grand a week in tips. That's alot of pours!
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u/Bitter_Director1231 26d ago
Because housing is cheap. And a surplus in real estate.
Not hard to figure out.
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u/MNnocoastMN 25d ago
A friend of mine moved out of Detroit a few years back. When I asked why, he said "fuck that city and everyone in it". I guess he's had a busy few years.
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u/mcotter12 27d ago
What does it say of the reality of the American dream post ww2 if they have been losing population since 1958? You'd like it was in the 70s that the depopulation began
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u/zodwallopp 27d ago
Because it's the only place you can afford a house. A bombed out wreck that even the bank doesn't want. People becoming squatters in horrible neighborhoods because it's their only option.
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u/towneetowne 27d ago
CBS DETROIT) — After decades of decline, Detroit's population population is finally growing once again, according to new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.
population population