The Manhattan Institute published on June 16 another one of those “What’s-Wrong-With-New-York” surveys, called “New York City’s Housing Gap: The Road to Recovery.”

“The city’s housing market still has a way to go before it can be said to offer most New Yorkers access to affordable, high quality apartments or houses,” writes senior fellow Peter Salins. “The city’s regulatory environment is not yet hospitable to residential development at the scale and affordability needed to close the housing gap.”

Sure, we’ve heard this all before. New York has a “housing gap” – as does the rest of the world, for that matter. Rent regulations have discouraged construction and created a permanent population of screaming Mimi tenants who get themselves on television every year complaining how their 1970s rents are going to be raised $27 next time they have to sign a lease.

But buried in the report was the real news. “New York is among the few large cities east of the Mississippi that has experienced any population increase in recent years,” wrote Mr. Salins, who also serves as provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the State University of New York. “That it has done so in the shadow of 9/11 and a national recession is truly remarkable.”

Let’s pause a moment to take note of this. New Yorkers have gotten used to the idea that we’ve become the safest large city in America and a place where the civilities of urban life are returning. But how many of us realize we are now embarking on a completely different course that is separating us from the rest of America’s cities? We’re a city where people actually want to live and where growth is occurring at the core rather than fleeing to the suburbs.

“I went back and checked the statistics after I wrote that, just to make sure,” Mr. Salins said, talking on his cell phone as he made his once-a-week commute from New York to Albany.

“I found there are actually four other cities east of the Mississippi that grew slightly – Indianapolis, only because it incorporated a suburban county, and Atlanta, Columbus, Ohio, and Jacksonville, Fla., all three of which are state capitals. Even major cities like Boston and Washington, which are healthy economically, are losing population.”

This is a remarkable thing. The average American city is becoming a thriving ring of suburbs surrounding a decaying core of boarded-up stores, pawnshops, and X-rated video stores.

The former Boston Patriots now play in suburban Foxboro. The Detroit Pistons won their National Basketball Association championship last week playing in Auburn, 40 miles from the downtown Renaissance Center. Yet in New York, the traffic is moving the other way. The Nets are coming to Brooklyn (perhaps); the Jets want the West Side, and the Yankees are safely ensconced in the Bronx, where they now draw the highest attendance in the major leagues.

“New York’s ‘housing gap’ is the fault of zoning, the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, construction codes, rent regulations, and all the other impediments the city government puts in the way of private-housing construction,” Mr. Salins said. “But there’s a perverse upside. To say we have a housing gap also means people want to live here. Utica, Syracuse, and Rochester don’t have a housing gap. Their problem is housing abandonment.”

Since the 1960s, the problem of most cities has been “urban blight”- the decay and depopulation of core areas because no one wants to live there anymore. Philadelphia and Baltimore have lost huge urban neighborhoods as a result. New York certainly had its abandonment era, when the South Bronx became a national symbol of urban decay. But somewhere around 1990, we turned a corner.

One landmark was the decision by the Orwellian-named Department of Housing Preservation and Development to stop sitting on thousands of residential properties confiscated for taxes and recycle them back into the private sector. The process produced rampant nepotism, but at least it got the job done. You don’t see any more of those window decals with the stenciledin lace curtains prettying up abandoned buildings.

Equally critical has been the heroic efforts of several private organizations that harnessed the resources of the business community to save declining neighborhoods. Most prominent are the Community Preservation Corporation, founded in 1974,and the New York City Housing Partnership, started in 1983,both under the initiative of David Rockefeller.

Together, the CPC and the partnership have persuaded banks and insurance companies to reinvest in New York’s marginal neighborhoods. The result has been spectacular. The CPC has steered $3.5 billion into building and rehabilitating 92,000 housing units, while the partnership has garnered a similar amount for the construction of 20,000 new units of housing. “Together, we’ve been involved in the construction of about 30% of the new housing in the city over the last 10 years,” said the president of the CPC, Michael Lappin.

“Before the two organizations came on the scene these neighborhoods hadn’t seen significant private investment in 50 years,” the executive director of the Partnership for the City of New York, Kathryn Wylde, said. “All the new development had been federal housing projects or state-sponsored Mitchell-Lamas. I remember when we dedicated the Towers on the Park on 110th Street in 1987, David Rockefeller pointed out that the last private housing built in Harlem had been the Dunbar Apartments, financed by his grandfather in 1926.”

These efforts – combined with the underlying dynamism of New York’s economy – have created a modern anomaly: a “city without slums.”

“I drive through some of the supposedly worst parts of the city – East New York, Brownsville, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy – and frankly I’m constantly amazed at how good they look,” Mr. Salins said. “There’s a vitality, there’s street life, there are lots of businesses – you don’t see the boarded-up stores or vacant apartment houses. You have to go to upstate cities like Utica or Schenectady these days to see real slums.”

Of course, the plight of upstate cities is due to the same tax-and-regulate regimen in Albany that regularly threatens New York City’s well-being. But the immigrant energies and “animal spirits” of New Yorkers have kept Gotham alive.

“We’re on a different trajectory than other American cities,” Ms. Wylde said. “Our peers are really London, Tokyo, Rome, Paris, and Hong Kong, not Boston and Chicago. We’re a world city – a magnet for businesses and professionals around the globe. If we have a ‘housing gap,’ it’s only because everybody in the world wants to live here.”