10th Anniversary Post: Can Cities Change Their Luck?

The hit 90s TV series Friends was a harbinger of the "back to the city" years:Where are today's "friends" living?(6/13/2026) Ten years ago this month, I looked back on what had been the best ten years for American central cities in a long, long time. By 2015, the "back to the city" movement that had been growing for decades had burst into full flower. From 2005-2015, the U.S. population grew by 8.4 percent; the combined population of the central cities of the 51 metropolitan areas with more than one million population grew almost exactly the same (8.2 percent); however, this masks a wide variety of individual experiences. Using the crude measure of central city population to measure progress, I classified these 51 cities into four categories: STARS (at least double the US population growth 2005-15): 14 citiesABOVE AVERAGE (exceeding US population growth rate): 12 citiesBARELY KEEPING UP (increasing but at less than the national rate): 11 citiesFALLING BACK (losing population over the…