Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
Well that sure is an unexpected one.
Detroit city proper lost another 10% over the past decade, but the MSA got a little bit denser overall?
Milwaukee, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh all lost central city population as well, and got a little less dense at the MSA level, but somehow metro Detroit bucked that trend. Strange.
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Think of Detroit’s phenomena like dead-heading a flowering shrub. If you remove the dead buds, the roots grow and so, too, do new blossoms at the tips.
As Detroit has pursued an aggressive model of nature reclamation in some areas, what remains is more densely populated, the city is getting back to its roots and what little growth has happened in the suburbs has likely been blossoming of new infill between where the good old buds’ houses were.
If your population growth is close to flat, your weighted population density can still change given internal population movements. Example: teenagers moving out of their childhood home and getting their own apartment in the city (making the metro more dense) or young newlyweds buying their first house in the exurbs moving from the city where they lived with a roommate (making the metro less dense). If your growth is negative, those internal shifts can even outweigh the population loss (Detroit). Furthermore, population gains do not necessarily translate to weighted population density increases (San Antonio) if new housing development takes place in previously unpopulated areas at residential densities that are beneath the previous metro weighted average.
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