where did you live as a child?

I grew up in Hamtramck, MI, a two mile square “city within a city” – inside Detroit that is). My childhood home (and where my mom and some family still live) is just shy of three miles from what a lot of people now know as 8 mile.

This was an inner city culture that I knew was rich in diversity, but recent surveys show that Hamtramck is really exceptional.

A recent survey found 26 native languages spoken by Hamtramck schoolchildren.

According to the 2000 United States Census Bureau, Hamtramck has 8,000 households and a population of almost 23,000.

Major ancestry groups reported by Hamtramck residents include:

Polish - 22.9%
Black or African American 15.1%
Yugoslavian Albanians 10.5%
Arab (Excluding Iraqi and Lebanese) 8.2%
Asian Indian - 5.4%
Ukrainian - 3.2%
German - 2.9%
Albanian - 2.8%
Bangladeshi - 2.7%
Irish - 2.2%
Italian - 1.8%
Russian - 1.4%
English - 1.1%
French (except Basque) 0.8%
Lebanese - 0.7%
Scottish - 0.7%
Mexican - 0.6%
Pakistani - 0.6%
Macedonian - 0.5%
Iraqi - 0.5%

I wonder how different census stats looked like in late 1970’s, and early 1980’s, when I was walking the streets as a punk getting into trouble all the time?