DETROIT – Last month, Detroit, or at least the city’s officials and the media, erupted in celebration. According to a new U.S. Census Bureau estimate, the city had gained population for the first time in nearly a lifetime.
“This is a day of celebration!” crowed Mayor Mike Duggan, who has always said his administration should be judged by whether the city gained people. Kurt Metzger, the city’s best-known demographer, said he thinks that despite what the census bureau said, the city has been really gaining people for some time.
He believes, as does Mayor Duggan, who took office in 2013 that that the growth will accelerate as more and more new buildings go up in the city. They said this was the start of a new era.
Unfortunately, you could also argue — as I would — that this is, if not much ado about nothing, a whole lot of fuss about very little.
Look at the bigger picture: No large city in America has suffered the kind of population loss Detroit has. The city officially had 1,849,568 people in 1950, and was briefly the nation’s fourth largest, behind only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Seventy years later, the U.S. Census found only 639,111, barely a third of the peak number. In all probability, the city kept growing in the early 1950s, before starting to lose population in a trickle that became a flood. By 2000, the population was down to 951,000, and more than one-fourth of those vanished in the next decade. The population continued to decline, before finally registering an uptick between July 2022 and July 2023.
So … how many people does the census bureau think Detroit, the city that had lost more than 1.2 million people, gained that year?
A mere 1,852.
The U.S. Census Bureau also agreed to revise their earlier population estimate up by 10,990 people, to settle a dispute with the city over how to estimate population losses when buildings are demolished, as many derelict ones have been in Detroit.
The census was subtracting two people per demolished building, whereas the Duggan administration maintained that no one lived in these buildings at all. We won’t get a full and official population count until the next census six years from now.
But even with the census adding population and declaring that there finally was a tiny bit of actual growth, the city is still officially down to 633,218, less than the abysmal 2020 count. The population now is about what it was around 1914.
That may well increase some. Demographer Metzger thinks the population now may really be as high as 660,000, and thinks it has been growing for years. But it’s worth noting that in past decades, census population estimates have been higher than the actual count.
But beyond that, there are some huge, possibly insurmountable obstacles to anything like a massive population explosion in the city. One of the most obvious is car insurance. This columnist lives in a small, older suburb barely two miles from Detroit’s northern border, the famous Eight Mile Road.
To use myself as an example: Our household has three cars; a newer Lincoln SUV, an older Acura SUV and an old Fiat convertible. We have the maximum insurance protection we can buy, and our car insurance bill this year will be $4,920.00.
But if we were to move three miles south, that figure might triple. Earlier this year, the consumer financial services company Bankrate said that a driver who lives in Detroit spends an average of $5,687 per year to get full coverage for just one car.
Financially, moving to Detroit would make no sense for thousands of suburbanites, no matter how much they love the city.
Plus, the mere mechanics of living in Detroit, from getting around to shopping to getting a service person to come to your house is nearly always more of a challenge than elsewhere.
“I love Detroit, but it just wears you out,” the award-winning writer Desiree Cooper told me when she was moving away.
What the city does have is space, lots of it. In terms of geography you could put Boston, San Francisco and Manhattan inside Detroit’s city limits and have 22 square miles left over.
Having watched the city’s struggles for decades, I am convinced there is a solution to the population problem, though one not likely to be politically popular now: Allow any immigrant from anywhere to come to Detroit, as long as they don’t have a serious criminal past.
The only requirement would be that they live in the city itself for a decade. Within a few years, they would be starting businesses, improving the city and hiring both immigrants and the native-born. This is what immigrants have done throughout American history.
Any such proposal would be bound to go nowhere this year, given that border security is a top issue in the presidential campaign.
But thinking out of the box to help our cities grow might not be a bad idea. Especially, as everything else has essentially failed.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
