USA TODAY article: Inner-city boom over?

Big-city booms now look like blips By Larry Copeland and Barbara Hansen, USA TODAY The urban renaissance that reinvigorated many of the nation's cities in the 1990s has faded since 2000, according to Census population estimates out Thursday. (Related story: Inner-city resurgences cool) Thirty-six of the USA's 251 current largest cities lost population in the 1990s, but 68 have declined this decade. Among them are Chicago and Boston, two cities that were often described as turnaround stories in the 1990s. Scores of other cities — including Phoenix, Austin and Denver — are still growing but at slower rates. (Full list: Slowest-to-fastest growing | Alphabetical) If trends from 2000-04 continue through 2010, nearly three-fourths of cities that have populations above 100,000 would fare worse this decade than in the 1990s, says demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. "The late '90s may have represented a blip that led many people to the conclusion that (older) cities were coming back, and they were going to regain their primacy," says Joel Kotkin, author of the 2005 book The City: A Global History and senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank. "But what we're seeing is growth of some smaller cities." BIG 10 CHANGES San Jose bumped Detroit to become the 10th-largest city. Population changes of the biggest U.S. cities from 2000 to 2004: City 2004 pop. Change New York 8,104,079 1.2% Los Angeles 3,845,541 4.1% Chicago 2,862,244 -1.2% Houston 2,012,626 2.8% Philadelphia 1,470,151 -3.1% Phoenix 1,418,041 7.3% San Diego 1,263,756 3.3% San Antonio 1,236,249 7.4% Dallas 1,210,393 1.8% San Jose 904,522 1.0% Source: Census Bureau July 1, 2004, estimates Nobody is predicting the kinds of population declines that ravaged large cities in the 1970s, but the population estimates from July 1, 2004, dim the lofty expectations of urban revival raised by the gains of the late 1990s. Key factors in the leveling off in growth: • High housing costs in cosmopolitan cities that have almost no vacant land for construction. Smaller, less glamorous places have plenty of room to grow. "Boston and San Francisco are two cities that continue to do very well economically and continue to be considered very attractive places to live," says Chris Hoene, research manager at the National League of Cities. "Their population declines could be driven by the sheer cost of living there, and housing costs in particular." • Changes in immigration patterns. "In the beginning and middle of the 1990s, cities were bargains, not just for the fabled yuppies but for immigrants looking to establish themselves in the United States," says Robert Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. As cities tried to attract the "creative class" of singles, gays and childless couples, "they might have priced themselves out of the reach of these immigrants," Lang says. "An increasingly larger share of immigration is benefiting older suburbs rather than central cities." Big cities that are continuing to grow — including Houston, Charlotte, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Fort Worth — are attracting large numbers of immigrants because of relatively low housing costs and diversified economies, Kotkin says.>