U.S. Cities and Population Change

USATODAY.com - Big-city booms now look like blips: "If trends from 2000-04 continue through 2010, nearly three-fourths of cities that have populations above 100,000 would fare worse this decade than in the 1990s, says demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C."

Click through to the table of cities shrinking and growing. It's pretty interesting. The idea that population gain is always good and loss is bad seems to be an implicit assumption of the articles. It's probably generally true, although in the case of San Francisco, with a large decline from 2000-4, I don't know that people would necessarily find that a negative thing. Similarly, I don't know that San Jose's growth in population, making it the 10th biggest city, is a particularly beneficial phenomenon.