Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
I suspect it was a factor in destabilizing a lot of neighborhoods. It enabled the remainder of white flight and also enabled a lot of black flight, since middle class black Detroiters were/are disproportionately employed by the city of Detroit. The timing was also terrible, since the manufacturing collapse of the early 00s, the housing crisis, the financial crisis, and auto bankruptcies all occurred within a decade of the state law that struck down the residency requirement in Detroit.
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So 1990 would have been the last census that both Chicago and Detroit had city worker residency requirements.
It's interesting to note the different population tracks the two cities have taken since then:
Detroit: 1,027,974 (1990) - 639,111 (2020) | -38%
Chicago: 2,783,726 (1990) - 2,746,388 (2020) | -1%
Now, the bulk of that difference is typically (and probably correctly) explained by the far greater levels of Latino and Asian immigration Chicago has experienced to offset the city's substantial white and black flight over the past 3 decades, but it seems like the residency requirement might have led to a bit less flight to begin with, relative to Detroit, that needed to be backfilled.
It might be a much less talked about piece of the puzzle.