"Mistake By the Lake" or "Comeback City"?

I'm back in Oberlin, Ohio, my childhood home, and still the home of my parents.
At this evening's annual King street Christmas party, which I haven't attended in years, my junior high school music teacher,
(who's lived down the street since we moved here 20 years ago), was saying that, according to a recent census, the population of Oberlin has increased by only about 200 people since sometime in the 1960s, and is now at about 8200. Cute town or not, this area just can't hold people.
Indeed, the area more broadly, in which I'll include Cleveland and northeast Ohio in general, has had a significant decline in population since the 50s. Cleveland now has about 480,000, half of its population of the 50s. Much of this decline in population was due to the decline in manufacturing jobs, which was the problem in other communities in this area. Any significant attempt at regenerating the city must take the economy into account, which is being addressed through the major growth of the biomedical industry and hospital/medical economy. However, fixing up the space will help to improve the experience here. There have been significant attempts to do so, in the past 10 years or so, and many of the projects have been really successful at creating interesting urban spaces. I plan to re-visit Cleveland while I'm back at home, to see how it's doing with its rejeuvenation effort, all with a new perspective, even if if may still be blurry.
I once had an argument with a coworker (surprise!), in which he complained that city/urban planners seem to want to make people live in cities, and don't want people to live in suburbs. This is simply not true, firstly. But, economically (in the long-term, at least) and ecologically, it does seem to make sense to me to try to rejeuvenate failing areas than to simply give up and move out. (Also, I also refuse to believe that everyone, or a huge segment of the population, wants to live in the suburbs, and wants to drive everywhere.) If much of the space already provides for the opportunity to move people back into the city, we should do it. Otherwise, it just looks like a creepy ghost town that no one wants to be in. I don't think anyone wants that, and it doesn't seem to be in anyone's best interest or good for anyone's economy.