Many residents expected to continue to move out of Detroit

Though many in Detroit were shocked by the recent Census Bureau report that showed the city's population had dropped nearly 25 percent since 2000, according to the Detroit News, the population is expected to continue to decline.

The recent Census report showed the population was 713,777, reflecting a loss of 237,493 residents during that span.

Akinya Khalani, owner of a small planning firm in Detroit, projects that the population will bottom out at 500,000 in 2016, according to the Detroit News.

"A half-million, that's the core of the population that can't afford to leave," he told the source. "At that point, when we bottom out, even the service industries like fast food restaurants won't have enough people in the city with disposable income to support them. At that point, the population is so poor, so poorly educated and spread out that the city becomes an urban prairie, a wasteland."

Some city officials are using the recent report as a wake-up call, to reconsider land use and come up with new plans to attract more residents to the state as well as work to retain the remaining residents, the source says.

City officials in some parts of Florida have adopted a similar plan to deal with the population losses in the state, where Census reports did show overall population growth, but much less than usual.  

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