America’s large cities are now retaining residents who previously would have moved to the suburbs, reports the Wall Street Journal.

U.S. cities that for years lost residents to the suburbs are holding onto their populations with a mix of people trapped in homes they can’t sell and those who prefer urban digs over more distant McMansions, according to Census data released Wednesday.

Growing cities are growing faster and shrinking cities are losing fewer people, reflecting a blend of choice and circumstance.

[...] The central-city population in U.S. metropolitan areas with more than one million people (excluding New Orleans, where recent growth rates reflect residents returning to the city following Hurricane Katrina) grew at an annual rate of 0.97% between July 2007 and July 2008, according to Mr. Frey’s analysis. That compared with a growth rate of 0.90% in 2006-2007, and growth rates around 0.5% in the years between 2002 and 2005, when the robust real-estate market led to new jobs and new housing developments outside the cities, where open land is more plentiful.

This trend should have conservatives who cling to the conventional GOP strategy worried. Some growth will eventually return to the outer edges of metropolitan areas, which for the last decade have been the bastions of GOP support. But demographics that now favor growth in cities show that an approach that targets primarily rural and exurban voters is a losing strategy, at least in the medium term.

If it is to return to electoral success, the Right must craft a message that appeals to more urban and inner suburban voters. Large scale federal “urban renewal” policy has typically produced disastrous results, especially in the federal city itself. Conservatives should speak out against more federal spending as the solution to urban problems, but must also present alternatives.

While making the case that federal bureaucrats aren’t to be trusted in shaping urban policy, conservatives must become involved in grassroots city politics. Perhaps new leaders might emerge in the mold of one-time-candidate for Mayor of New York Norman Mailer, who recognized that city authorities have a role to play in solving social problems while simultaneously insisting on neighborhood and community self-determination, free from domination by large-scale bureaucracies and corporate interests. (Free-market conservatives may charge that Mailer’s vision has an unacceptable socialist tinge; he did, after all, describe himself as a Left-Conservative. But at least part of Mailer’s vision, which advocated an American city-state of New York, seems in accord with research on the most market-friendly political systems; Hong Kong and Singapore are consistently at the top of rankings of economic freedom.)

A political coalition of the Right that can win in cities as well as exurbs must return to Russell Kirk’s politics of prudence and ordered liberty, an approach that can be embraced by the farmer, urban truck driver, and suburban physician. The good news, as has been widely reported around the blogosphere as of late, is that a plurality of Americans still self-identify as having “conservative” political views. Presumably not all of these folks live among the cornfields and McMansions. If the Right can craft policy—especially locally—that resonates with this conservative sensibility in urban areas, it will return to electoral success. If not, demographics suggest a long winter.