III.

Population

Detroit’s population has declined dramatically since its peak of 1,850,000 in 1950. In 2000 the population was 951,270. By 2005, Detroit's population was estimated at 886,671. This population decline was a concern to city government because the drop below one million could jeopardize funding from the federal and state governments and other forms of revenue, hurting city services.

At the time of the 2000 census, African Americans made up 81.6 percent of the population of Detroit; whites, 12.3 percent; Asians, 1 percent; and Native Americans, 0.3 percent. Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders numbered 251. People of mixed heritage or not reporting race were 4.9 percent of inhabitants. Hispanics, who may be of any race, were 5 percent of the population.

Detroit’s metropolitan area had a population of 5,456,400 in 2000. The metropolitan area also includes significant minority groups, including the largest community of Arab Americans in the nation, numbering 102,000 people in 2000. There are very few distinct ethnic neighborhoods within Detroit or its metropolitan area.

At the turn of the century the population of Detroit was about two-thirds native-born, mainly of French, Canadian, and American ancestry, but with some descendants of German and Irish immigrants. In the first half of the 20th century, the percentage of foreign-born residents declined, even though many immigrants arrived from eastern Europe. During World War II (1939-1945), both whites and blacks were attracted from the South to work in the city’s defense industries. In 1950 foreign-born and black residents each made up about 16 percent of the total population.

In the five decades after 1950, the city lost almost half of its population, as many white residents moved to adjacent counties. As businesses and industries gradually spread to the suburbs, much of the white population followed. Detroit’s outlying areas grew much faster than the inner city and by the mid-1960s had twice the population of Detroit proper. Two other factors also contributed to white flight from the inner city. Blacks moved into inner city neighborhoods, and government programs were established to provide housing loans.

Mortgage and insurance companies actively encouraged white flight by refusing to guarantee housing mortgages in predominately black areas. This policy, known as redlining, made it much easier and cheaper for a white family to buy a new house in the suburbs than to buy or repair an existing house in a black inner-city neighborhood. The attraction of jobs and cheap land, together with concerns about crime, the quality of schools, and declining property values, made the suburbs attractive throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

During the same decades that whites left the city, Detroit’s black population grew. The substantial number of factory jobs that still remained in the city attracted African Americans. Many blacks successfully found higher paying jobs, but their success was often short-lived, as the auto plants and their related industries either closed or moved in partial response to foreign competition. At the same time, blacks were often denied housing loans, which effectively prevented them from following whites out of the city.

The Detroit area is home to a large number of religious groups, including a large Catholic population that dates back to the first French families; a large Jewish community; Muslims (both Arabs and members of the Nation of Islam); Chaldeans (Christian Arabs primarily from Iraq); a small number of Buddhist and other Asian denominations; and a broad range of black and white Protestant denominations.