WASHINGTON - The United States' largest cities grew nearly twice as fast in the 1990s as in the 1980s, with three out of every four urban centers gaining population, analysis of the latest census figures shows.

But the urban renaissance was uneven in the bigger cities, those with more than 100,000 people. Reversing a 50-year trend, Chicago grew by 112,000 people. New York exceeded 8 million people for the first time. But Philadelphia and Detroit lost population.

Western and Southern cities, like Las Vegas and Charlotte, N.C., grew the fastest, fueled by booming economies and an influx of immigrants. Urban industrial centers in the Rust Belt like Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and Middle Atlantic and Northeastern cities like Hartford, Conn., and Baltimore generally declined as jobs and people migrated elsewhere.

Demographers have noticed intriguing trends among the nation's urban population winners and losers. Cities with highly educated residents, like Madison, Wis., and Columbus, Ohio, two university towns, gained population. Cities with large numbers of poor people, like St. Louis, typically declined.

Cities with big public transit systems, like Philadelphia, generally shrank, while cities where residents rely more on their cars, like Phoenix, now the nation's sixth-largest city, typically grew.

With faster-growing suburbs siphoning people away from neighboring cities, these and other findings carry wide-ranging implications for civic leaders seeking to keep their residents from leaving and to lure others back. Even as whites fled cities, they were replaced in many instances by immigrants, mainly Hispanics, as well as by young professionals and older adults with grown children.

"What all this says is that consumer preferences are important," said Edward L. Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard University and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied urban demographics. "City officials need to worry about what makes their city an attractive place to live in. They need to make streets safe and schools solid."

In Cleveland, the trends that sink or save cities seem to collide. All of Ohio's largest 15 cities except Columbus shrank in the 1990s. The region's core economy, including steel, auto assembly and chemicals, has been battered. Cleveland's population dropped 5 percent, to 478,403 people, continuing a slide that started in 1950 when about 915,000 people lived in Cleveland.

But the drop-off in Cleveland, as in Midwestern cities like Milwaukee, was slighter compared with earlier decades. In the 1970s, 177,000 people, or nearly a quarter of Cleveland, left. Walk around downtown Cleveland today, with its two new stadiums, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and chic restaurants sprouting in converted warehouses, or drive through the city's diverse neighborhoods, where more than 300 new homes are springing up each year, and a spirit of revival fills the air.

Crime rates plummeted in the 1990s. A new management school building for Case Western Reserve University, designed by the architect Frank Gehry, is rising in the fashionable University Circle district.

On the edge of the Hough neighborhood, where riots broke out in 1966, two native Clevelanders, Mike Evarts, 31, a medical sales representative who is white, and Elaine Price-Harris, 56, a nurse who is black, have moved into Beacon Place, a 93-unit development of single-family homes and town houses. Both can walk to work at the Cleveland Clinic just down the street.

"The area is up-and-coming, and I like being near the city, as well as to the arts and theater," said Evarts, who like Price-Harris moved from the suburbs.

The days when the Cuyahoga River was so polluted that it caught fire and when Cleveland filed for bankruptcy under a mountain of debt seem ages ago to many longtime residents.

"People don't feel that Cleveland's a national joke anymore," said Eric Hodderson, president of Neighborhood Progress Inc., a citywide housing development and financing organization. "There's more hope than in the past, but it's still a fight."