Detroit - geography.

« Automobile industrialist Henry Ford was born near Dearborn, Michigan, in 1863.

Ford built his first automobile in 1893 and establishedhis own manufacturing company ten years later.

The Ford Company headquarters are in Dearborn, as is the Henry Ford Museum,shown here, which tells of the transition of the United States from an agricultural to an industrial society, a change in which Fordplayed a central part.Townsend P.

Dickinson/Photo Researchers, Inc. The Detroit city center also houses one of the largest collections of early 20th-century skyscrapers in the United States.

The Guardian Building, built in 1929, is strikinglyaccented with Detroit's signature Pewabic pottery, glazed ceramic tiles that were an important architectural element in buildings of the 1920s.

Other buildings from thisperiod include the 47-story Penobscot Building, constructed in 1928, for many years the tallest building in Detroit; the Book Building, constructed in 1917; and the DavidStott Building, which is modeled on a design by famous architect Eliel Saarinen. During the 20th century, Detroit became a center of the growing automobile industry, and both industrial and residential suburbs grew in the metropolitan area.

Theindustrial suburbs, dependent on the transportation systems of the center city, formed in a ring around Detroit, while the residential areas formed in a larger ring around theindustrial suburbs.

These inner- and outer-ring suburbs cover much of Oakland, Macomb, and Wayne counties, with the western outer-ring suburbs extending almost 65 km(almost 40 mi) to the city of Ann Arbor. As businesses have gradually moved out of the city center, economic growth in the suburbs has become concentrated in the northern outer-ring area, beginning withBirmingham and Bloomfield Hills about 24 km (about 15 mi) north of Detroit and stretching well past Pontiac into Oakland county.

The southern suburbs, which include theolder inner-ring areas of Dearborn, Ecorse, and Grosse Ile, are slower growing than their counterparts.

Hamtramck and Highland Park are independent cities that areentirely surrounded by the city of Detroit. In recent decades, heavy industries such as automobile manufacture and metal production that had supported many of the older inner-ring suburbs have relocated or shutdown many of their factories.

Although some jobs have been replaced by jobs in diversified light manufacturing, these areas are burdened with high unemployment and areduced tax base.

They are attempting to rebuild and solve problems of crime, poverty, and underemployment. The relationship between the city and the suburbs is one of the many problems that Detroit faces today.

The metropolitan region combines a battered inner core showingimpressive signs of new investment, an economically challenged inner ring of older suburbs, and an outer ring marked by intense investment, typically in large homes,office or manufacturing parks, and shopping malls.

As the suburbs expand, conflicts about zoning the outer fringe for either farming or development have also increased. III POPULATION Detroit’s population has declined dramatically since its peak of 1,850,000 in 1950.

In 2000 the population was 951,270.

By 2005, Detroit's population was estimated at886,671.

This population decline was a concern to city government because the drop below one million could jeopardize funding from the federal and state governments andother forms of revenue, hurting city services. At the time of the 2000 census, African Americans made up 81.6 percent of the population of Detroit; whites, 12.3 percent; Asians, 1 percent; and Native Americans, 0.3percent.

Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders numbered 251.

People of mixed heritage or not reporting race were 4.9 percent of inhabitants.

Hispanics, who may beof any race, were 5 percent of the population. Detroit’s metropolitan area had a population of 5,456,400 in 2000.

The metropolitan area also includes significant minority groups, including the largest community of ArabAmericans in the nation, numbering 102,000 people in 2000.

There are very few distinct ethnic neighborhoods within Detroit or its metropolitan area. At the turn of the century the population of Detroit was about two-thirds native-born, mainly of French, Canadian, and American ancestry, but with some descendants ofGerman and Irish immigrants.

In the first half of the 20th century, the percentage of foreign-born residents declined, even though many immigrants arrived from easternEurope.

During World War II (1939-1945), both whites and blacks were attracted from the South to work in the city’s defense industries.

In 1950 foreign-born and blackresidents each made up about 16 percent of the total population. In the five decades after 1950, the city lost almost half of its population, as many white residents moved to adjacent counties.

As businesses and industries gradually spreadto the suburbs, much of the white population followed.

Detroit’s outlying areas grew much faster than the inner city and by the mid-1960s had twice the population ofDetroit proper.

Two other factors also contributed to white flight from the inner city.

Blacks moved into inner city neighborhoods, and government programs wereestablished to provide housing loans. Mortgage and insurance companies actively encouraged white flight by refusing to guarantee housing mortgages in predominately black areas.

This policy, known asredlining, made it much easier and cheaper for a white family to buy a new house in the suburbs than to buy or repair an existing house in a black inner-city neighborhood.The attraction of jobs and cheap land, together with concerns about crime, the quality of schools, and declining property values, made the suburbs attractive throughout the1950s and 1960s. During the same decades that whites left the city, Detroit’s black population grew.

The substantial number of factory jobs that still remained in the city attracted AfricanAmericans.

Many blacks successfully found higher paying jobs, but their success was often short-lived, as the auto plants and their related industries either closed or movedin partial response to foreign competition.

At the same time, blacks were often denied housing loans, which effectively prevented them from following whites out of the city. The Detroit area is home to a large number of religious groups, including a large Catholic population that dates back to the first French families; a large Jewish community;Muslims (both Arabs and members of the Nation of Islam); Chaldeans (Christian Arabs primarily from Iraq); a small number of Buddhist and other Asian denominations;and a broad range of black and white Protestant denominations. IV EDUCATION AND CULTURE. »