The Decline of Detroit

From Michael Barone comes this startling picture of Democrat failure.

I was in kindergarten in Detroit in April 1950, when the Census Bureau count for the city was 1,849,568. In the intervening 60 years the city’s population has declined by 1,135,791 people. The city’s population is down 61% in those years. When people ask me why I moved from being a liberal to being a conservative, my single-word answer is Detroit. The liberal policies which I hoped would make Detroit something like heaven have made it instead something more like hell.

UPDATED March 25 - The Toledo Blade calls it a "a bleak, urban disaster"  With reason.

The numbers painted a picture of sheer urban devastation unlike any in modern experience, of the depopulation and ruin of a once-major American city.

How bleak?

This year, census enumerators found a mere 713,777 people left in what a popular Web site calls the "ruins of Detroit."

More than four-fifths of them are black. Many of the rest are Hispanic or Asian. The city's white population has dwindled to 7.8 percent — 55,604 souls. Sixty years earlier, it was 1.6 million.

In ten years, Black Flight has meant 185,393 people who hurredly left. More than 95 percent of Detroit's 1951 white population has disappeared.