I was a teenager in Detroit in the '70s and remember those years quite well. We lived on the east side and my family was quite involved in neighborhood and civic affairs. I was riding the buses every day to/from school, often through downtown. As a curious kid I rode buses all over the city, and once i had my drivers license and a car around 1976, went exploring everywhere.
In the late '60s the city was still full [[my near east side elementary school was so overcrowded that we needed portable classrooms on the playground). A lot of white folks did leave after the '67 riot, but more black families moved further out into the neighborhoods as the whites were leaving to take their place. Although the overall population of the city began to decline in the mid-50s, most streets were lined with occupied houses in a way that's almost inconceivable looking at the city today. Most neighborhoods remained reasonably populated into the mid-80s.
Significant abandonment of housing really began with the ill-fated and ill-administered HUD rehab programs under Nixon and his HUD Secretary George Romney from 1969 into the early '70s. Several neighborhoods "targeted" by the HUD program, like the area between Cadillac and Conner on the east side, were hit pretty hard by this and suddenly had a noticeable number of empty houses. There was also a fair amount of emptying out or clearance of neighborhoods for urban renewal projects that never panned out, or that sank in a morass of poor administration, like what happened to Brush Park. By the late 70s there were noticeable numbers of vacant houses in many neighborhoods, and a slow program of demolitions had begun.
As for your question about racial residential patterns, you have to keep in mind that Detroit was essentially a segregated city into the early '50s. Black residents were effectively allowed to live only in a few very overcrowded neighborhoods, mostly on the near east side [[Black Bottom - where Lafayette Park and Elmwood Park are today, Paradise Valley directly to the north - which included Brush Park and the areas where the Chrysler Freeway and much of the Med Center are now, and further north of Grand Blvd. in the old North End east of Woodward). There were a few black pockets on the west side, most notably the area around Tireman just west of Grand Blvd., as well as a section of the far southwest side down into River Rouge and Ecorse. Conant Gardens, east of Conant and south of 7 Mile, was built in the 1930s as an isolated middle-class black neighborhood.
This pattern all began to change quickly with the 'urban renewal' destruction of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley in the '50s, the building of large public housing projects, and the Supreme Court ruling ending restrictive covenants in deeds. As Bham indicates, in the 1950s blacks started moving into the Dexter-12th St. area north of the Blvd. on the west side as the area's predominantly Jewish population began moving further to the northwest, and in the 60s followed them further northwest up into the Mumford High area. On the east side, after the destruction of their old neighborhoods, blacks quickly moved eastward across much of the lower east side. By 1970, the east side south of Harper was predominantly black from Elmwood Park to east of Connor. And also north of Hamtramck up Conant to 7 Mile. On the west side the black population stretched north of I-94 and west over to Schaefer or Greenfield.
I actually still have a lot of nostalgia for the early '70s in Detroit. Despite all the fears, there never was another large riot. Some neighborhoods seemed to stabilize as integrated for a while, downtown was struggling but still full of stores and commerce, a number of redevelopment schemes were being proposed, abandonment was mostly confined to certain neighborhoods, and there seemed to be some strong hope of political and economic progress. But the 1973 mayoral campaign turned very racially toxic, especially around the issues of policing that were instrumental in sparking the riot. There was a long grinding and vicious fight over school desegregation. Crime started to rise again with the heroin boom. And most damaging of all, the economy slowed dramatically in the mid- to late-70s, with the energy and 'stagflation' crises, and the auto industry took a huge hit [[from which it never really recovered). The brief era of optimism ended pretty damn quickly.
Here, from the Detroit 1701 site, is a map of the racial composition of Detroit from the 1970 census:
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