White flight
Contributions of city revenue and expenses to the cash-flow shortfall help explain the immediate causes of Detroit’s bankruptcy filing, but Detroit’s complex history provides greater context for the city’s financial problems. The decline of population and employment opportunities in Detroit had been going on for decades prior to the bankruptcy filing. Detroit’s population declined from 2 million in 1950 to 714,000 in 2010. Jobs followed the population, as over two-thirds of businesses in Detroit closed between 1972 and 2015. Many of these residents and jobs left Detroit for the surrounding suburbs during the process of white flight from the city. White flight occurred in conjunction with federal housing policy and Detroit real estate industry practices in the decades following World War II that excluded black Detroit residents from loan opportunities and confined them to neighborhoods with continually deteriorating housing.