Cities aren't back - by Jed Kolko - Slow Boring

Urban growth rebounded in 2024, but the pandemic intensified the shift to the suburbs.

Every year, the Census releases local population estimates for counties and metropolitan areas in the US. The latest release shows that in 2024, urban counties grew at their fastest rate in eleven years. But this doesn’t herald the return of last decade’s (overstated and misunderstood) urban revival. Rather, recent urban growth was driven by a temporary national immigration surge and is likely to reverse: Both urban residential areas and downtown neighborhoods have grown more slowly since 2019 than before the pandemic, falling farther behind suburban growth in the vast majority of metro…

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