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New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the three biggest U.S. cities, saw an increase in population as falling housing prices slowed growth in the Florida and California suburbs that were leaders earlier in the decade, the U.S. Census Bureau said today.

“The housing bubble caused a migration bubble and it has burst,” said William Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer in Washington. “Big cities survived the housing meltdown better than most of the rest of the country.”

The Census figures, covering the year through June 2008, show how the worst U.S. real-estate slump since the Great Depression, and the deepest recession in half a century, is changing the nation’s population trends. Among the worst hit are Florida’s cities: the state had three of the 10 fastest-growing urban centers five years ago, and none in the most recent year.

That’s a boon to the nation’s historical population centers of the last century. New York, the largest American city, led with a gain of 53,000 residents in the year to July 1, 2008. Los Angeles added about 27,000, the fourth-largest gain, and Chicago lured about 21,000 for the eighth-biggest rise among U.S. cities.

Population growth in Port St. Lucie, Florida, tumbled to about 2 percent in the most recent year, from a rate of 12 percent during a construction boom in 2003-2004.

‘Inability to Sell’

“Inability to sell” depreciated homes has hit migration, said James Diffley, a regional economist with IHS Global Insight, a forecasting firm based in Lexington, Massachusetts.

Frey of Brookings calculated that the share of the U payday loan online.S. population moving in the year that ended in April 2008 was less than 12 percent, the lowest on record.

Housing prices have fallen by the largest amounts in Florida, California, Nevada and Arizona. Prices fell more than 50 percent in Las Vegas and Phoenix, and 47 percent in Miami, in the past two years, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller home-price indexes reported June 30.

“Cities in the older urban core, such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, didn’t lose anywhere near as many people and therefore they grew more” in the most recent year, said Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.

Growth in Chicago comes after a loss of population during most of the decade, Johnson said. By contrast, suburban cities in markets that have fueled the housing boom were hurt by lack of migration, plus a shrinking in jobs that had been part of the boom, he said.

Retirements Postponed

In addition, cities that have been retirement magnets such as Florida’s suburbs were hurt by declining stock prices, which discouraged people from leaving the workforce and moving, Johnson said.

New Orleans was the single fastest-growing city last year, continuing its rebound from the hurricane devastation of four years ago. The city, which lost more than half its population after Katrina in 2005, has been bolstered by billions in federal spending as well as an increase in tourism.

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