Detroit and New Orleans both have epic problems, but Detroit is not the "new" New Orleans, no matter how you divine the numbers from the latest Federal Census.
According to the last Census, the city of Detroit is hitting a new nadir, worse than the dives it took in the early 1980s. Detroit lost a crushing quarter-million people in the last decade, while Sun Belt cities like Las Vegas and Atlanta boomed. In the city limits, the population has sunk to 713,000 people, from nearly 2 million in the 1950s, and nearly a million in the 2000 census. By the numbers, the city lost an average of 65 people a day, over the past ten years--shrinking it back to a size it hasn't seen since 1910, before the auto industry boomed.
The Detroit suburbs are growing, but the city itself is now only twice as large as New Orleans. Both are disaster zones of a kind: Detroit's become the auto industry's painful appendix, while New Orleans has replaced its port for the most part with hordes of tourists, but still has crushing poverty and crime and huge swaths of land left empty by Hurricane Katrina.
