(from USA Today)
By Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg, USA TODAY
The housing crisis and economic downturn that have forced many Americans to stay put are boosting older cities where population had been shrinking or was stagnant, according to Census estimates out Wednesday.
Last year, Los Angeles recorded its biggest annual increase since 2002 and New York its second largest this decade. Chicago, where population had declined for five years this decade, grew by 0.73%.
CITY-BY-CITY: A closer look at the Census numbers
"The old big cities are actually doing better than the new hot spots," says Kenneth Johnson, demographer at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute. "Any place that was being hurt by migration is being hurt less, and any place that depended on inflows — suburbs, exurbs and hot new markets — is not doing well."
The July 1, 2008, estimates reflect at least a year of the housing bust but just the beginning of the recession that started in December 2007.
The collapse of the housing market has hit new suburbs and Sun Belt boomtowns especially hard because that's where home construction has proliferated. Las Vegas, which was growing by as much as 3.3% a year earlier this decade, inched up barely 0.4% from mid-2007 to mid-2008.
"That's a dramatic decline," says William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. "It's something no one would've expected a few years ago. … Cities that took the biggest hits were cities that were very heavily dependent on housing construction and consumer growth."
The estimates also show:
• New Orleans, which successfully challenged 2007 Census estimates the city said were too low, is rebounding closer to pre-Katrina levels. It was up 8.2% in 2008 to 311,853, the highest growth rate among the 273 U.S. cities that have populations of 100,000 or more. New Orleans had 455,000 residents in 2005 before the hurricane hit.
Other cities, including San Francisco, also were helped by proving that the Census Bureau had missed people last time.
• Despite a slowdown in many cities in the South and West, seven of the 10 most populous cities are in the Sun Belt.
Four of the 10 fastest-growing large cities from 2007 to 2008 were in Texas (Round Rock, McKinney, Killeen, Fort Worth). Dallas is the eighth most populous, above San Diego and San Jose. Three of 11 cities that topped 100,000 for the first time are in Texas. Others are scattered from Wilmington, N.C., and Palm Bay, Fla., to Rochester, Minn., and Gresham, Ore.
The recession has caused the biggest slowdown in migration since World War II. That, in turn, reshapes growth patterns.
Central cities are catching up to suburban growth in contrast to earlier this decade, when suburbs were growing more than twice as fast as central cities, Frey says. "Suburbs in America's major metros sustained the lowest growth this decade," he says.
Cities' rebound may be a result of people not being able to sell their homes or condos or not having jobs to allow them to leave cities.
"It's not temporary," says Carol Coletta, head of CEOs for Cities, a national network of urban leaders. Research shows that homes in neighborhoods that encourage walking instead of driving to work and stores retain their values better.
"The other thing … is that people are calculating the cost of transportation when they're thinking of housing," Coletta says. "That changes the equation."
That may be why the closest suburbs to major cities are doing well. Arlington and Alexandria, Virginia suburbs of Washington, were among the 25 fastest-growing major cities. The cities were thought to have little room to develop, but they built high-rises and other projects on vacant lots in developed areas, says Robert Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech.
"I'm surprised to see them in the top 25," he says. "They were thought to not be growing anymore."
Moving ahead
Several major cities leapfrogged others in population from mid-2007 to mid-2008."
Link to chart of 2000-2008 population change in major cities here:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2009-07-01-citypops_N.htm(Jacksonville jumped from 14 to 13 in the rankings with a 9.8% increase in population)
