This good news – as well as the bad news of the 1990s – is not quite accurate. The reality is more nuanced.

First, the demographers are correct: cities have gained in population. The 2000 census shows more people live in cities today than did a decade ago. That influx of urban-dwellers, though, did not mark suburbanites’ return to gentrified neighborhoods. Cities are growing because immigrants, with higher fertility rates than older white households, have made cities the first stop on their American success stories. For example, during the past decade Providence gained 37,000 minority residents, but lost 24,000 whites. As for the new urban businesses, bodegas, not Starbucks, mark the economic vitality of cities.

Second, suburbanization continues to reign. Fifty years ago, fewer than one in four Americans lived in the suburbs; today more than one in two do. It is not just the middle class, but the almost-middle class, who are flocking to the suburbs. The children of today’s immigrants will most likely buy homes in suburban tracts. The trek to suburbia precedes beltways, precedes Levittown, precedes the federally-subsidized mortgage programs. Even Chaucer wrote of “suburbs” in The Canterbury Tales. We look for a bogey behind people’s desires for a plot of land, away from congestion, in neighborhoods of good schools.

IN fact, the configuration of people muddies the distinctions between city, suburb, and rural. Is the East Side of Providence more urban than Edgewood? Is Warwick a city or a suburb? How rural is North Kingstown? We have within metropolitan areas varying degrees of population density. Cities have been growing less dense over the past forty years, while contiguous communities have grown more dense. And rural areas (due in some measure to “anti-growth” land use restrictions in suburbs) have grown most dramatically, as people leapfrog over growth-restricted suburbs to find their plot of land farther and farther out.

Cities, in short, have not been reborn – they were never dead. They fill the same role they have since the early 20th century: they nurture new citizens, new businesses. The immigration waves of the 1990s have reaffirmed this critical role. Look at the Lower East Side of Manhattan: the names have changed, but the exuberant energy of newcomers eager to succeed evokes a century-long string of newcomers.

And in metropolitan areas – the patchwork quilt of city-suburb-rural communities – the government can nurture these newcomers. Homeownership strengthens neighborhoods: The federal government should enact a homeownership tax credit to make it easier for first-time homebuyers to buy homes (90 percent of the current mortgage interest deduction goes to households earning more than $40,000 a year). The residential and commercial stock of older neighborhoods is outdated: Tax credits spur rehabilitation of old buildings. The surging population (32 million more people in the past decade) is undergirding housing demand: “Suburban” governments should make room for affordable housing, including both “density” and “open space” on the same ballot initiative. Families typically flee cities for “better” schools: Switching school funding from local property taxes to state income taxes would reduce the disparities.

For too long urban planners have focused on an image of the city redux: condos with newly-sanded floors, trendy restaurants, artists’ lofts, and coffee bars. And the occasional much-publicized gentrified pockets (usually limited to downtowns) have spurred planners to woo the middle class, seeing cappuccino-sippers as the strength and salvation of cities.

Planners’ zeal to woo the middle class, however, is doomed: Although some baby boomer empty nesters will return to cities, many more will remain in the suburbs – even buying second homes farther out.