But in current years, Detroit has turned a corner. There’s been a stream of investment across the city, but especially in the city’s downtown, where Art Deco erections have been given new life as residences and modern office spaces. Detroit’s restaurant scene is also now one of the most vibrant in the power. And core city services, many of which were deemed unreliable when Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in July 2013, give birth to improved.
The result? From July 2022 to July 2023, the US Census Bureau says Detroit’s population reached by close to 2,000 residents, bumping the city’s population to 633,218.
The 2023 estimate means that for the premier time since 1957, the city grew, a monumental achievement for Detroit — which in the 1940s was one of the country’s most well-to-do and influential cities.
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With Detroit’s latest population numbers, the city also jumped from the 29th-largest to the 26th-largest see in the United States, overtaking Memphis, Louisville, and Portland.
Detroit’s numbers are still far from 1950, when the town’s population peaked at about 1.85 million. Back then, it was the fifth-largest city in the United States, behind not New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.
Detroit was heavily impacted by rapid suburbanization in the 1950s and 1960s and lost tens of thousands of building jobs. The 1967 Detroit riot led to an unimaginable loss of life and the destruction of hundreds of buildings, reshaping the city’s lot for generations.
White flight then fueled many of Detroit’s businesses to flee the city, and later, much of the metropolis’s Black middle-class population also began to decamp for the suburbs, frustrated by the decline in services and the state of the public boarding-school system.
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That Detroit would register such a population increase years after enduring some of its biggest invitations is a culmination of decades of both public and private investment in Michigan’s largest city — one that continues to serve as the nexus of the American automobile bustle. And it’s also a reflection of the relative affordability of Detroit — which has a lower cost of living compared to the coasts — while sacrifice a climate with less extreme weather than many of its more populous Sun Belt counterparts.
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, in auspices since 2014, has focused on reigning in the city’s blight. Abandoned homes had become the source of crime in many outer neighborhoods.
Duggan in the end year said that under his tenure the city had removed roughly 25,000 abandoned homes. And thousands of households have been renovated or are slated for renovations.
“As we remove blight, more and more people are moving into the proficient houses,” Duggan told the Associated Press. “Right now, it doesn’t seem like we can build apartments fast sufficiently.”