Families in the suburbs around Detroit are moving their loved ones out of the city’s cemeteries, according to this report in the Detroit News (h/t:Christian Unverzagt):
By now the statistics are as well known in London as they are in Livonia. Detroit has lost half its population since its heyday of the 1950s, and every year the city hemorrhages an estimated 5,000 people more. First it was white flight to the suburbs; then with the city’s continued spiral into poverty and violence, blacks began to flee to those same suburbs. And while census figures show that whites are returning to some of the nation’s largest cities, Detroit is experiencing a flight of a different kind. As the Imbrunones’ second funeral demonstrates, Detroit is experiencing the flight of the dead.
The movement of the dead from the nation’s largest black city to its overwhelmingly white suburbs is a small, though socially symbolic phenomenon, revealing the grinding problems of race, crime and economics that plague both sides of Eight Mile.
From 2002 through 2007, the remains of about 1,000 people have been disinterred and moved out of the city, according to permits stored in metal filing cabinets in the city’s department of health. Looked at in another way, for about every 30 living human beings who leave Detroit, one dead human being follows. Moreover, anecdotal evidence compiled by a Detroit professor suggests the figure may be twice as high, meaning city records may be incomplete and that thousands upon thousands of deceased people have been relocated from the city over the past 20 years.
August 13th, 2008 at 12:57 am
I wish migration data was more readily available because it’s hard to understand what’s really going on in cities like Detroit without more detailed information. According to IRS data, Wayne County experienced a net loss of 29,000 residents due to moves in 2006-07, with 66,269 people moving out and 37,269 moving in (obviously, this data only includes people who filed taxes). Of the people moving in, about 30 percent came from nearby Oakland County and another 30 percent came from out-of-state somewhere (Chicago, Toledo, and Phoenix were the top three). It’s sad to keep reading these stories about the outmigration in Detroit. I’d love to hear from somebody with first-hand knowledge of the inmigration, especially from out-of-state. What’s attracting people to (or back to) Detroit and Wayne County? Is it the same forces at play that we’ve been hearing about in other cities?