Sunday, May 9, 2010

Like living in a house that's too big

A Free Press Editorial discusses problems related to residents fleeing Detroit (which they've been doing since 1950) and also the entire metro area. The Detroit Water department supplies water for the whole metro area. Water usage is down 24% in the last decade. Yet, even though there is less income the department still has to maintain the same infrastructure of purifying plants and pipes. The same kind of thing is true for roads and power (though electricity usage hasn't dropped much because we keep coming up with more powerful gadgets that need it). What's a region to do?

Alas, the online version doesn't have the cool population graphic. So I recreated it as best I could. The data is from SEMCOG (Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, which is the counties of Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Washtenaw, Livingston, Monroe, and St. Clair and stretches from Toledo's northern suburbs to Ann Arbor, Howell, Oxford, and Port Huron) Note the population for the metro region has been essentially flat since 1970.

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