Downtown!

The tale of downtown revitalization has been a big one for the past couple of decades. Urban cores across America that had declined into post-apocalyptic chaos during the '60s and '70s have reinvented themselves as havens for the hipster swarm, called forth by their insidious overmind. Goodbye hobos, hello adorable lattes. And some new numbers from the Census Bureau seem to add weight to this trend:

Via Nate Berg at Atlantic Cities: Big city downtowns are becoming people places – again or, for some, for the first time. New figures [PDF] out from the U.S. Census Bureau show that downtown areas saw huge jumps in population between 2000 and 2010. The biggest of these metro areas, those with populations of 5 million or more, saw a collective growth rate of more than 13 percent in the areas within two miles of city hall, a stand-in measurement that, for these purposes, designates "downtown."

In all U.S. metro areas, 16.1 million people were living within two miles of City Hall by 2010, about six percent of the total metro area population of 258 million.

Combined with the populations slightly farther out, in the two to four mile radius outside city hall, the numbers increase dramatically. Together, the total metro population living within four miles of city hall is more than 54 million – almost 21 percent of America's metro population. That's 17.5 percent of the national population living within a quick car ride, 30-minute bike ride or hour-long walk of the center of a big city.
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The report also shows that areas farther from city halls are still dominant population centers. And that's especially true in the largest metropolitan areas. While the close-in areas in these metros' downtown saw double-digit growth between 2000 and 2010, so did areas 30 miles and beyond. So while it's true that people are moving into downtowns, that doesn't mean they're still not moving out to the suburbs and exurbs as well.

As the commentator noted, the real story of downtown America isn't the death of suburbia, which is alive and well. It's likely that American cities will never become the dense, centralized places they were in the past. In most cases, downtown is simply becoming one thriving neighborhood among many, and an attractive regional destination. The end result is more choice for middle-class consumers and home owners/renters, which is generally a good thing.

On the other hand, the trends that are revitalizing downtown areas in big cities don't seem to be doing anything for the decaying inner-ring neighborhoods of mid-sized cities that were hit hardest by the changes in America's economic landscape. Pockets of persistent poverty and inequality remain the biggest challenges facing American cities. And no, these problems won't be solved by artisanal cupcake shops.