Since its heyday in the last century, Detroit has lost more than a million people to urban flight. In 1950 the Motor City population peaked at 1,849,568. Today it stands at 713,777. The 2010 census delivered a blow when it determined that the city had fewer than 750,000 inhabitants. It's a magic number, 750,000. Below it, Detroit no longer qualifies for certain federal and state aid.
Urban flight is nothing new. But a million people? William McGurn reports in the Wall Street Journal:
"Detroit is a classic example of how a culture that was legendary for enterprise and innovation was slowly eroded by toxic politicization from the 1960s on," says the Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president of the Michigan-based Acton Institute. "It's been class warfare on steroids, and the inevitable result is that so many Detroiters who had the means—black and white—have fled the city."
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What happened to this Detroit? In many ways the answer is liberal politics and expanding government. In the 1960s, for example, Detroit became one of Lyndon Johnson's "Model Cities." That meant it was on the receiving end of hundreds of millions of federal dollars to transform a nine-mile-square section of the city. It would be just the first of many government-funded redevelopment schemes that left behind one of the most blighted urban landscapes in the nation.
Notwithstanding its failures, government continued to grow while city services—e.g., police and fire protection—continued to decline. Whites moving to the suburbs took much of the tax base out of the city in the 1960s. The latest census numbers show that blacks are now following in the path of the whites before them. Apparently they don't like crime and the lack of decent schools for their kids either.
What's left is the city so embarrassingly exposed by the census figures, a place that people are fleeing as fast as they can. Think of all the dysfunctional measures you can: poverty rates, unemployment, crime, failing public schools, falling home values. Detroit has them all, and most of its indicators rank among the worst in the nation.
It's the progressive plan for America. Dependent constituencies mean progressive majorities. Detroit is a huge dependent constituency, for sure. Welcome to the progressive future.
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