[2] Postwar suburbanization and industrial restructuring caused massive job loss and population changes in the city.

Detroit developed as the most important French city between Montreal and New Orleans, two major areas of colonial settlement.

Its European population was 800 people in 1765, shortly after France ceded its territory east of the Mississippi River to Great Britain after being defeated in the Seven Years' War.

After the American Revolutionary War and settlement of the northern boundary between Canada and the United States, Detroit and Michigan became part of US territory.

In the early 20th century from 1910 to 1930, Detroit was among the many cities in the North that attracted immigrants from southern, central, and eastern Europe as well as African American migrants during the Great Migration.

The promise of lucrative employment opportunities in the burgeoning auto industry in addition to readily available property brought many people to Detroit.

[7] From at least 1880 to the 1980s, the greatest number of immigrants and their descendants living in Wayne County, Michigan (where Detroit is located) were from central and eastern Europe.

[9] The population grew largely because of an influx of European immigrants, in addition to the migration of both black and white Americans to Detroit.

[10] During the Great Migration, beginning around 1920, black people left the South in search of better jobs as well as to escape Jim Crow laws.

During the first wave of the Great Migration, thousands of African Americans settled in Detroit, as part of the total of 1.5 million black people who left the South in the first half of the 20th century looking for opportunities in the Northeast and Midwest.

[15] During the 1940s, the booming defense industries attracted large numbers of workers, who enjoyed the readily available jobs and often higher wages.

[9] While there may have been many jobs available to new immigrants to the city, the rapidly growing population created a significant housing crisis in Detroit.

These choices in housing were largely dictated by restrictive covenants that prevented black people from purchasing homes in white neighborhoods.

[22] Eric Lacy of MLive wrote "Consider that data either proof downtown Detroit is on an upswing, other neighborhoods are deteriorating fast or a mixture of both.