Doomers thought cities would collapse post-pandemic. The numbers tell a much different story.

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Last year was a banner year for big-city population growth. According to new Census estimates released on Thursday, large U.S. cities added residents at a rapid clip between July 2023 and July 2024 -- cutting into post-pandemic declines and in some cases surpassing even the urban growth rate of the 2010s.

Leading the way was New York City, which added 87,000 new residents, followed by Houston with 43,000, and Los Angeles with 31,000. San Antonio, Charlotte, and Chicago were not far behind. Sun Belt cities recorded the fastest percentage growth, but post-industrial cities like Philly, Detroit, and Newark also added thousands of people.

At first glance, the numbers seem to confirm that pandemic-era population loss has bottomed out, and U.S. cities are on the upswing again. The masking era is in the rearview mirror, the economy is humming, and violent crime is dropping to levels that most Americans have never experienced.

The stakes are high. The hardcore doomers of the early pandemic, with their predictions of imminent urban collapse, have long since been proven wrong. But cities are still in a fragile state, reckoning with how to support depopulating school systems, wounded public transit systems, and landed cultural institutions as federal funding evaporates and declining office values drain the tax base. A revival of urban population growth would signal that in spite of the headwinds -- the lure of a homebound, digital-first life in the 'burbs -- cities still offer a product that Americans want.

But there are a few confounding factors. For one thing: This period of growth overlaps somewhat with the post-pandemic surge in immigrants crossing the Mexican border, which caused a humanitarian crisis at shelters in cities like New York and Boston. Last year, New York City complained that the Census did not do a good job accounting for that change, which brought more than 200,000 new arrivals to town and may have contributed to a double-digit spike in the national homeless count.

This year, the Census tried to correct for that oversight with new immigration data from the Department of Homeland Security -- one reason the urban population numbers leaped up. But that would signal a one-time influx to cities, rather than an enduring growth pattern.

Economist Jed Kolko, writing about an earlier set of Census estimates from this spring, thinks the bureau may be over-assigning those new arrivals as urban residents, based on historic migration patterns. Moreover, he wrote to me in an email, while urban growth statistics may be useful to city planners and budget chiefs, they don't offer many clues to whether American tastes are shifting from bigger, more isolated homes to a denser urban fabric. After all, some cities have very dense suburbs (Boston, Washington) while other cities have suburban cores (Jacksonville, Phoenix). Kolko's view is that the suburban model remains ascendant.

Then again, last cycle, the annual estimates were wrong in the other direction. In New York City, low annual estimates from the 2010s shaped the city's politics and sense of self, before the 2020 Census revealed that they had underestimated the population by 550,000 people!

In any event, the Trump administration could quickly put a stop to urban growth, which has always been heavily dependent on new immigrants (legal and otherwise). Killing the funding for urban transit, housing aid, arts organizations, and laboratory research probably won't help, and the loss of federal jobs could hurt some cities badly: D.C.'s 2 percent growth is not going to hold up in the years to come.

A data release is like looking at the night sky: You're always going back in time -- in this case, to the final year of the Biden administration, before tariffs, imprisoned Fulbright scholars, the end of refugee programs, and the Department of Government Efficiency. If it was a good year for cities, it was last year.