Melbourne, in Australia, is a counter example. It started in 1835, it was the centre of the fastest land grab in history, then the population doubled in ten years during the 1850s gold rush. And today the city centre is world famous.
The local wisdom tends to support the conclusion of the article. The Premier in the early 1990s (who would be called the Governor in the US) committed to making the city a place for people to live, and started changing the laws about planning, business hours and so on that were preventing that. He quickly lost office, because the rural parts of the state viewed him as "the Premier of Melbourne", but the city kept improving.
The OP I assume would refer to NYC as a 'fast growing city' (around 400 years old) compared to somewhere like London or Madrid which have both been there for over 2,000 years.
Liveable downtowns are definitely a matter of policy, not history.
It used to be a dangerous dump 20 years ago, and now it is awesome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_and_tunnel
I'm perpetually amazed at what people can be condescending about.
The Union Squarea?
Well, the same is true in NA in lots of places, but I think the difference is something else: historic buildings imply that you can't just tear them down and build something nicer, and the oldest buildings in cities I've lived in, here in the US, are not the nicest ones; rather the reverse.
As someone who spent most of my formative years in the southern US, my expectation is that the nicest part of town is the one that was just built, and older streets and buildings are literally the ones where people have to be if they don't have the money to scrub that away and build shiny new things, or just move to newer places. This is quite a difference even from the northeastern US, so I can only imagine how stark the difference must be from the US to Europe. Oddly, while I spent a few days in Dublin a few years back for an interview, I don't remember noticing everything looking old and run down there.
The most desirable houses are typically Georgian / Victorian town houses.
Many Western European countries like the Netherlands we have seen the same pattern of the white middle classes fleeing to new suburbs whilst the old city neighborhoods got taken over by newcomers.
And it is still how things are in many cities. Whilst the city center may have been revived and gentrified and looking all lovely and touristy, the surrounding neighborhoods are often dominated by poor immigrants, whilst the original lower middle class and working class lives in the suburbs.
The only options in the city for the ordinary "white" families are neighborhoods they can't afford and neighborhoods they don't want to live in. Sounds familiar?
I personally live in a nice picturesque gentrified part of the center of Amsterdam. The building I live in still has the front they added to the original porch to keep out the junkies and homeless in the 80s...
Taking back the city center is a process of the last few decades. The main difference is that there was something worth taking back.
I guess it stems from the relative ages of cities in North America vs Europe. A typical city centre in Europe would have been the entirety of the city at some point and is therefore where the most historic buildings, oldest businesses etc. are located. Whereas in NA, cities are a lot younger and grew much faster meaning that is not so much the case.