Detroit neighbor losing population, too

Everyone in Michigan is familiar with the population decline in Detroit and population stagnation in state overall.

Put negative population trends are not contained to Detroit's or Michigan's borders.

Right across the river from Detroit, Windsor, Ontario, is seeing its own population drop -- a fairly significant one it appears in this mapping tool based on 2006 and 2011 population figures.

Census tracts in red denote ones where population fell between '06 and '11. Those in gray reflect growth tracts. As you can see by zooming in onWindsorin the mapping tool, there's much more red than gray.

And the worst of the losses are coincidentally located on the route leading to, yep, the Ambassador Bridge linking Windsor with Detroit. Perhaps that's a motivation for the Canadian national and provincial governments to be so gung-ho about a new bridge link between the cities -- a bridge link that is NOT located next to the Ambassador Bridge.

If you direct the mapping tool over to the Toronto area, you will see another interesting trend: Heavy population growth in areas that, to my eye at least, would be inner-ring suburbs of  Toronto proper. True, the map does not show a reversal of the population flow from city centers to ring areas. Neither, though, does it appear to show a continuation of the sprawl model of population changes so familiar in the U.S. in the last 30 years. Or maybe I'm just really bad at Canadian geography. Check out the link and you decide.