Decline of Detroit

The city of Detroit, in the U.S. state of Michigan, has gone through a major economic and demographic decline in recent decades. The population of the city has fallen from a high of 1,850,000 in 1950 to 701,000 in 2013. The city's automobile industry has suffered from global competition and has moved much of the remaining production out of Detroit. Local crime rates are among the highest in the United States, and vast areas of the city are in a state of severe urban decay. In 2013, Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy case in U.S. history, which it successfully exited on December 10, 2014. However, poverty, crime, and urban blight in Detroit continue to be ongoing problems.

The deindustrialization of Detroit has been a major factor in the population decline of the city.

"Detroit rose and fell with the automobile industry." Before the advent of the automobile, Detroit was a small, compact, regional manufacturing center. In 1900 Detroit had a population of 285,000, the thirteenth largest city in the U.S. Over the following decades, the growth of the automobile industry, including affiliated activities such as parts manufacturing, came to dwarf all other manufacturing in the city. The industry drew in a million new residents to the city. At Ford Motor's iconic and enormous River Rouge plant alone, opened in 1927 in Dearborn, there were over 90,000 workers.

The shifting nature of the work force stimulated by the rapid growth of the auto industry had an important impact on the city's future development. The new workers came from diverse and soon far-flung sources. Near-by Canada was important early on, many of the workers came from Eastern and southern Europe, a large portion of them being ethnic Italians, Hungarians and Poles. An important attraction for these workers was that the new assembly line techniques required little prior training or education to get a job in the industry.

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