Taps Coogan – June 9th, 2021

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First we looked at Chicago, then Philadelphia, and now our tour of Rust-Belt America turns to Detroit.

Motor City was once best known for being America’s wealthiest city and the industrial capital of the world. For decades in the mid-20th century it was the fourth most populous city in the country, behind only New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

More recently, it has become infamous as ground zero for America’s deindustrialization, culminating in GM’s 2009 bankruptcy. However, Detroit’s problems have been brewing for longer than that. The city’s population actually peaked all the way back in the 1950 census at 1.85 million people and has fallen by a staggering 60% since the last Republican mayor stepped down in 1962 and 65% since the city’s 1950 peak. Detroit’s population, which is still shrinking, is now the same as it was the mid 1910s, just a few years after Henry Ford opened his first factory in the city. Detroit’s unravelling has taken the city from the fourth most populous in the nation to the 26th.

Next stop: Milwaukee.

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