Columbus Blazes a Trail for ‘21st Century Cities’

There are no smokestacks on the skyline of this Midwestern city. That fact, as much as any other, is the secret to its current success.

In a decade that saw all its neighboring Rust Belt cities--Cleveland, Toledo and Cincinnati--lose population, unglamorous Columbus is booming, adding 78,560 residents since 1990. Downtown is bustling, while new neighborhoods sprout on land where crops grew a generation ago.

“There are 20th century cities and there are 21st century cities,” Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman said. “The 21st century cities are increasing in population. The 20th century cities are not.”

The pattern in Ohio has been repeated throughout the United States, symbolic of a decade that saw mixed fortunes for America’s oldest and largest cities. Reversing a 50-year trend, Chicago added to its population, as did Boston. New York reached its highest population ever. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, on the other hand, continued a decades-long slide.

What, exactly, is happening in urban America? Are the famous cities of the first two American centuries poised to come back stronger than ever? Or will some forever languish in the shadow of their newer suburbs, the empty “hole in the doughnut” of the American landscape?

Some of the answers can be gleaned from the minutiae of the 2000 census. Those numbers point to a formula critical for success: immigrants, services and an elusive quality called “lifestyle.”

“They can turn themselves into new-economy hubs or they can bail themselves out with immigration,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, a global economics think tank. “Those two factors make the difference between gaining and losing.”

Suburbanization Is Documented

The decline in population in many cities was countered by a growth in nearly all of the nation’s standard metropolitan statistical areas, the census term for a central city and its outlying suburbs. (Of the top 50 metro regions, only Pittsburgh and Buffalo lost residents.) Thus, the new figures gave further evidence of the country’s suburbanization.

Little more than a century after the Census Bureau famously proclaimed the Western frontier “closed” in 1890, the current census also provides ample proof of the triumph of the Sun Belt metropolis.

All the large cities of the West and South gained in population, some dramatically so. Phoenix became the nation’s sixth-largest city after a decade in which it grew by 34%. Los Angeles grew a more modest 6%, and even San Francisco managed to add more than 52,000 residents to its crowded 47-square-mile city limits.

But even for mayors in the Northeast and Midwest, the census offers reason to hope that the next decade will bring good times. Cities that lost population--such as Detroit and Milwaukee--did so at a much slower rate than in the 1970s or ‘80s.

In the 1990s, a generation of young people riding a record economic boom rediscovered the pleasures of an urban lifestyle their parents had turned their backs on. They filled growing state capitals such as Indianapolis and Austin, Texas--both of which registered especially strong population increases--and also places such as Brooklyn Heights in New York and Lincoln Park in Chicago.

“We’re talking about 25-year-olds with starting salaries of $50,000 and up,” said Veronique Pluviose-Fenton, principal legislative counsel for the National League of Cities. “They want culture, they want night life. They want cities, not suburbs.”

Some experts argue that population serves as an inadequate, even misleading, barometer of a city’s overall health.

“If you look at measures of well-being--income, unemployment rates, poverty rates--they are not associated with population growth,” said Janet Rothenberg Pack, a professor of business and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “There are a lot of good things happening in places that do not have high population growth.”

Still, officials in many cities see population figures as symbolic and as emotional signposts of a place’s desirability and direction. Population growth also implies economic growth.

The fact that crime dipped dramatically throughout the decade--a result of the strong economy and aging population, among other things--helped accelerate the repopulation of many city neighborhoods.

“Parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx that had been abandoned in the 1970s and early ‘80s have been repopulated because people believe they are safe,” said Joseph B. Rose, chairman of the New York City Planning Commission.

“After the 1990 census, everyone was writing New York’s obituary. Were people just going to conduct business on laptops from Aspen? This census has proved that it is possible to have a successful older urban model.”

Columbus is an older city that doesn’t feel like one.

Founded in 1812 as a state capital built from scratch on rolling farmland, Columbus was for years a second-tier burg in the Buckeye State. No automobiles or steel or tires were made here--those same industries powered the rise of Cleveland, Dayton and Akron.

In the 1990s, Columbus attracted new businesses, including shipping centers for retailers such as The Gap and Eddie Bauer. They like the city’s central location--within a one-day truck drive of 90% of the populations of the U.S. and Canada--and its cargo airport, Rickenbacker International, the world’s largest public airport dedicated entirely to shipping freight.

Coleman proudly points out that his city, once derided as a staid “cow town,” is now the home of the Victoria’s Secret lingerie empire.

“There’s a tremendous amount of momentum here right now,” said Coleman, who celebrated the March release of the census figures with a toast of diet soda.

The 2000 figures completed a historical flip-flop that has seen Columbus become Ohio’s largest city. It surpassed the city that remains Ohio’s industrial hub, Cleveland, in 1990.

In 1920, Cleveland was the fifth-largest city in America, with three times as many people as Columbus. In 2000, Cleveland slipped to 33rd, behind such Sun Belt metropolises as Austin (now the 16th-largest city), El Paso (23rd) and Tucson (30th). Columbus, meanwhile, climbed to 15th.

The reason for Cleveland’s decline is the same as for other old Rust Belt cities. Built in an era of coal-fired furnaces and dependent on the auto and steel industries, it lost population to white flight and global economic competition, notably to Japan, in the 1970s and ‘80s. Millions made money in Cleveland--then fled its streets for the suburbs, which quickly sprouted on its edges.

‘Real Estate Wears Out’

As smokestack industries were revamped in the latter part of the 20th century by more efficient, less labor-intensive, technologies, and with production moving to places such as South Korea and Brazil, Cleveland has managed to revive its downtown--but not to halt its slide in population.

“As a culture, we have never dealt with the implications of the fact that real estate wears out,” said Tom Bier, an urban affairs professor at Cleveland State University. “We just leave it and move on. In Cleveland, a lot of folks moved on.”

Columbus, on the other hand, weathered the booms and recessions of the 20th century without Cleveland’s social upheaval because its economy was based on three groups of people who could be counted on to come back year after year: students, professors and state government bureaucrats.

Coleman himself moved here 20 years ago from a Rust Belt city, Toledo, to take a government job as a state prosecutor.

And many of the tens of thousands of people who moved to Columbus in the most recent decade were immigrants, primarily from Somalia and Mexico. Somalis settled here as refugees from their country’s civil war, working in service jobs created by a local boom fed by retailers and insurance companies such as Nationwide and Cardinal Health.

As in previous decades of economic prosperity, immigrants breathed life into America’s largest cities, including Los Angeles, revitalizing old neighborhoods and filling the low-end jobs that made the economic boom sustainable. In the 1990s, New York City for the first time became a destination for a large number of Mexicans who joined the city’s already vibrant Latin mix of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and South Americans.

Gotham’s Latino population increased by more than 370,000 in the decade.

Some cities benefited from official campaigns to lure immigrants, including America’s oldest major city.

Boston’s pro-immigrant campaign helped reverse a decline that had seen it lose more than a third of its population since the 1950s. Its count inched up 2.6% in the 2000 census, in large measure because it added about 32,000 Latinos and Asians, offsetting the loss of whites to the suburbs and a virtually stagnant black population.

Two years ago, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino established the Office of New Bostonians, a social service agency that helps immigrants get settled. New communities of Haitians, Brazilians and Chinese have sprung up, transforming Boston into a city without an ethnic majority for the first time in its storied history.

“The mayor made a conscious decision to put out the welcome mat,” said Howard Leibowitz, a top aide to Menino. “Immigrants really help cities renew and reinvent themselves.”

By contrast, Baltimore--a similarly sized and aged Eastern Seaboard metropolis--saw its population shrink 11.5%, in part because it has not attracted its share of immigrants.

Baltimore’s population remains slightly larger than Boston’s overall, but its Asian community is a quarter the size of Boston’s, its Latino community barely one-tenth. Their tiny numeric gains were dwarfed by continuing white and black flight.

In Philadelphia, strong advances among Asians and Latinos helped offset a continued white exodus but were not enough to prevent the city’s numbers from dipping an additional 4.3%.

City Councilman James F. Kenney wants Philadelphia to compete aggressively for newcomers and is about to propose a 10-year plan to make the city an immigration “player.”

Among his ideas are a Cabinet-level agency similar to Boston’s Office of New Bostonians, tax incentives and more international flights to and from Philadelphia’s airport.

“These are the people we need,” he said. “They are less likely to be on welfare, more likely to be employed and start businesses and they’re willing to take on tough neighborhoods. This is about continuing to feed this capitalistic society with people who expect nothing more than an opportunity.”

Philadelphia Lags in Job Growth

Philadelphia’s population decline continued despite a successful effort to woo young professionals back to its revived, restaurant-filled central business district.

Its neighborhoods have faded in appeal because Philadelphia, despite its top-tier health care and pharmaceutical industries, has not emerged as a technology center or corporate headquarters on a par with Boston or other major metropolitan cities, Penn professor Rothenberg Pack said.

“Jobs are not thick on the ground,” she said. “Philadelphia is a funny place in many ways, very inbred. We’re just not the place that industry or people look to for major employment opportunities.”

Still, the 1990s were kinder to Philadelphia and other older cities than previous decades. Population losses in places such as New Orleans; Newark, N.J.; and Cleveland slowed to the single digits in contrast to the great tide of suburban flight of the 1970s.

For some Clevelanders, the 5.4% loss in population was not necessarily a bad thing.

“People here talk about the freedom from traffic jams,” said Cleveland State professor Bier. And yet, the city retains many of its venerable cultural institutions. “If you want to get to the theater in half an hour, you can make it. And the cost of housing is low. We now have a lot of people saying we would rather have it this way.”

Affordable housing? No traffic? A vibrant cultural scene? Sounds like a recipe for a boom.

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Biggest U.S. Cities

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Top 20 cities in 2000, excluding suburbs, with population and percent change from 1990:

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

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Tobar reported from Columbus and Fields from Los Angeles.