Try here.

The national population growth rate won't tell you anything about the growth rate of any particular city. Some cities are growing, while others are shrinking.

Also, average city growth is greater than the national average because of ongoing rural flight.

Most decent sized cities will have their own forecasts to help them plan things. Check out your town's city hall website to see if they publish it. My town's smart growth website even projects population growth by zip code.

A basic trend that has continued from the 1980s is population movement away from the Northeast toward the South and West. Texas has already overtaken New York as the second most populous state, and Florida is projected to move ahead of NY in another dozen years or so.

Also, taken in aggregate, 100% of America's pop growth over the next 50 years is estimated to come from immigration. The birth rate per couple is projected to be about 1.9 - not enough to replace the parents.

So it really depends on whether or not your target town is one that immigrants tend to move to.

There was yet another thread on MeFi recently about how Detroit is slowly turning into a wasteland -- that's a classic example of a shrinking Nawthun city.

There was an article in our weekly paper about how Asheville is forecast to basically double in size by 2025. It's so depressing - maybe I'll move up to Detroit then.

Nitsuj, I'm not sure what this is for, but all of the comments above are worth considering.

What our city does (and probably many others) is a "peer city" analysis from either the state or the region, depending on what they're looking at. If you're a city of 50K, then look at the cities in your state that are between 40K and 60K (or 30K and 70K, if you need a bigger sample, or 40K and 60K in nearby states). Include cities that have similar growth patterns: are you a standalone industrial city? a bedroom community? an urban "edge city" with jobs and shopping?

That will tell you much more about what to expect than a national average.

You can get the Census Bureau's data for your city right off the population finder at www.census.gov My city is Janesville, Wisconsin. We grew about 4% from 2000 to 2005, or around 0.8% annually. In the 90s, we grew a little closer to 1.5% annually. Employment is pretty good, housing is pretty active, and the 2005-2010 growth is probably closer to the 90s growth rate.

Can you be more specific about what you're trying to find out?

mygothlaundry, you made me smile with the thought of deserted stretches of Six Mile being converted over to artists' communes with huge kitchen gardens and nanny goats for milk....

I realize that cities differ as a whole, but I just wanted to try to figure out what the population of a fictional city (The Simpson's Springfield) was today, when it was 30,000 according to a 2002 episode.

thanks!