After decades of decline, Detroit is broke. On Thursday, the Motor City filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history on its $18 billion of debt, and faces a future where only one thing is certain: lots of people are going to get much less money than they were promised.

Now, I don't like to say that something was ever inevitable, but Detroit's Chapter 9 bankruptcy sure looks that way. Since 1950, its population has retreated from 1.8 million to 700,000 today. And, as you can see in the chart below, via Nate Cohn ofThe New Republic, it's shrunk 26 percent in just the last decade. That's left a small tax base to pay for the pension promises of a more populous yesteryear.

But why has Detroit's decline been of the far more terminal sort than other post-industrial cities? It's easy to say it's all about the city tying itself to the crumbling auto industry and nothing else, but that's not right: the Big Three have come back from the dead to boast healthy profits today, while Detroit is dying. The reality is the reverse. Detroit is on life support now, not because it's too tied to the carmakers, but because it's not enough. As Alec MacGillis of The New Republicpoints out, the Big Three -- along with wealthy and working-class whites -- decamped for the suburbs decades ago. Today, there are only two car factories left within Detroit's (vast) city limits. Gone are the solidly middle-class manufacturing jobs that had paved the city's rise. Indeed, Detroit had 296,000 such jobs back in 1950, and only 27,000 by 2011. The rump city is mostly poor and African-American, but still has a huge geographical area to provide services to. Detroit itself is 139 squares miles -- as MacGillis notes, that's bigger than Boston, Manhattan, and San Francisco combined -- and could probably use some downsizing.

The article continues at the link below.