Detroit continues to lose residents, as the U.S. Census Bureau released an estimate Wednesday that put the population at 688,701 as of summer 2013.
That's down nearly 10,000 residents from 2012, as Christine MacDonald notes in the Detroit News.
The rate of decline, though, has slowed to an average of 7,500 per year since 2010, compared with 24,000 per year in the 2000s, when the city lost nearly 25 percent of its population between 2000 and 2010. Still, the continuing losses do not bode well for Detroit's revenue needs in the post-bankruptcy era.
Detroit last had fewer than 700,000 residents before World War I, as its population soared from 465,766 in 1910 to 993,678 in 1920 during the early years of the auto industry boom. From 1920 to 1950, Detroit was the nation's fourth largest city; in 1950, it fell to fifth largest. Today, it ranks 18th.
According to official U.S. Census counts at the beginning of each decade, the city's population peaked in 1950 at 1,849,568, but experts believe the number continued to climb to almost 2 million by the early 1950s, when it began what is now a 60-year decline, as white residents moved to the suburbs and jobs disappeared on a growing scale.
Here is the decade-by-decade figures since then:
1960: 1,670,144
1970: 1,511,482
1980: 1,203,339
1990: 1,027,974
2000: 951,270
2010: 713,777
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan told MacDonald he’s committed to ending the decline. The metric-focused Duggan has pegged the success of his first term as mayor to stopping the hemorrhaging, though given the seeming inexorable outflow of residents, that's a high-stakes gamble.
“This is why I ran,” Duggan said. “I am going to be judged on one thing: whether the administration can reverse that trend. We are totally focused on salvaging our housing stock and moving people back in the city.”
The census data don’t indicate where Detroit residents are going, but show that some outer suburbs are booming six years after the real-estate meltdown.
Suburban counties — Oakland, Macomb and Livingston — gained about 1 percent in population, while Wayne County lost about 1 percent, the records show. Its decline is fueled largely by Detroit.
