"Dan Gilbert is an irritation as far as our economic development" -L Brooks Patterson

[iheartthed]

Same problem. By definition, cities with transient populations lose their transient populations when they start to decline. Detroit used to attract huge number of people from outside the area. It stopped doing that when there stopped being lots of jobs.

I don't think that's the same thing. By transient, I mean people moving both in and out. Think of transient cities as being like water in the ocean, while stagnant and/or declining cities are like polar ice caps affected by global warming. The ice caps are losing old water molecules but are also not adding new molecules, either. But the liquid ocean is replenished regularly.

Transient cities maintain their populations not by keeping long term residents but by continually attracting new blood. Take New York City, which has a foreign-born population around 40%. If the secret formula to New York was keeping long term residents then New York's population would be much higher than it is right now. Why? Because New York's population 50 years ago was just about 1 million fewer than it is today, but over 3 million of the residents who live in the city today weren't even born in this country. So nearly half of New Yorkers today are not even descended from American parents, let alone mid-20th century residents of New York City. When you add in American born non-native New York City residents, like me, I'm sure that pushes it to be well over half of the residents of NYC today are not native to the city.