So Are People Moving Back to the City or Not?

When the 2010 Census results came back earlier this year, many urbanists were left disappointed. Americans were to make their great march back to the city during the 2000s, but the numbers — at least to many observers; more on this below — seemed to suggest the opposite trend. Municipalities accounted for less metro area growth in the 2000s than they had in the 1990s, 9 percent to 15 percent, according to Wendell Cox at New Geography. Meanwhile the suburbs attracted 91 percent of the growth in the decade, up from 85 percent from the decade before.

The silver lining for urban advocates was the city core. Even in places that experienced general declines in city population, such as St. Louis, downtowns showed some impressive residential growth. A new analysis of intra-regional migration patterns of four large cities, using data from I.R.S. tax returns, gives this lining an additional layer of depth. Writing at New Geography, Aaron Renn concludes that movement from the suburbs to the downtown core slightly increased during the 2000s, while a shift from the core outward stayed flat or declined over the same period.