A new report by one of Detroit's bankruptcy consultants predicts the city's long-falling population will continue tumbling -- to around 610,000 in 2025.
That prediction does not bode well for Mayor Mike Duggan, who has gone out of his way during his first six months in office to say population gain should be the chief barometer of how he is performing in office.
"The single standard a mayor should be defined on is whether the population of the city is going up or going down," Duggan told Matthew Dolan of the Wall Street Journal last month.
Dolan added:
If he fails, he says he doesn't expect to run in 2017 and win—marking the boldness of his undertaking, considering the long odds he faces.
The bankruptcy report surfaced Wednesday in a story by Joe Guillen and Nathan Bomey in the Free Press.
The report used financial projections as of July 2 and was prepared by Charles Moore, the city’s operational restructuring adviser and a senior managing director for Conway MacKenzie, a Birmingham-based financial advisory firm.
The report says Detroit's financial restructuring will result in 12.5% more police officers on the streets and 17% more firefighters. The Free Press adds:
But the projections suggest that the financial restructuring of Detroit city government won’t be enough to keep residents from leaving the city.
The projections show Detroit's population eventually increasing to 641,000 by 2053 -- when Duggan would be 95.
Detroit's population was officially 1.85 million in the 1950 U.S. Census, but demographers say it increased to 2 million in the early 1950s before it began falling as job flight and suburbanization took hold.
By the 2010 census, the population had reached 713,777 -- a 24 percent loss in the previous decade. Earlier this year, the Census Bureau estimated Detroit had 688,701 residents as of last summer. The next official census will be taken in 2020.
In his first six months in office, Duggan has received high marks for the way he appears to handling the daily operations of city government and launching new initiatives for reviving Detroit's neighborhoods. But population gain is a lot tougher than demolishing abandoned houses.
In his article, Dolan noted the the degree of difficulty in Duggan's quest to increase the number of city residents.
Those who have studied Detroit's population cast doubt on the mayor's ability to boost the number anytime soon, citing high crime and poorly performing schools, among other factors. "A more achievable goal would be to slow the rate of population loss," said Margaret Dewar, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan.
