However, each city struggles with its own challenges and has to design unique strategies to overcome them. Some, like Detroit, have seen heavy damage to a key industry. Others, especially secondary markets such as Kansas City and Nashville, were hit by the recession like everywhere else, but unlike the New Yorks and San Franciscos, have had to work harder to make sure investors understand the true strengths of their markets. And the revival of US housing has even started helping Sunbelt cities like Las Vegas and Miami climb out of the hole. “Even Phoenix is seeing a lot of growth lately,” Sikaitis adds.

Defining a “comeback city,” however, remains difficult. Detroit, for example, usually appears at the bottom of any list that measures economic vitality. But Sikaitis says such lists sometimes can't truly capture a transformation. “Detroit has seen hefty growth, at least from a regional perspective.” Healthcare, tech and creative companies, among others, have all set up shop in the CBD to attract the millennials that want to live Downtown. Similar transformations have occurred across the US, but “there is no better example of that turnaround than Detroit.”

Furthermore, all of southeast Michigan has turned around along with the recovery of the auto industry, says William Harvey, EVP in Transwestern's Detroit office. “Skip the philosophical debate about the auto bailout and whether it was the right move.” The entire metro area is filled with expanding companies that provide top-end services to the auto industry, he points out. Transwestern handles leasing for 150 West Jefferson, a 25-story class A tower in the heart of the Financial District, for example, and in the past two years, occupancy has increased from 70% to 85%. “Many see the municipal bankruptcy and think the city is withering. But if you come Downtown you'll see the streets filled with people.”

Quicken Loans has in many ways led the resurgence of Downtown. Led by Dan Gilbert, the online lender has renovated many buildings in the CBD and filled them with thousands of its own employees. In 2011, Quicken, along with Blue Cross Blue Shield and DTE Energy, took over a combined 750,000 square feet. And in 2012, as Title Source Inc., Chrysler and others leased almost 500,000 feet.

JLL recently released its Spring 2014 Detroit Skyline Review, a study of the top Downtown office properties, and the firm's researchers say an influx of new tenants has in the past three years cut in half the total vacancy within these buildings. Furthermore, office rents have recovered to pre-recession levels. Since 2011, the vacancy rate in these spaces declined from 26% to 11.5%.

However, while always ready to praise his hometown, Harvey advises people to keep the city's revival in perspective. The overall vacancy remains elevated, and future absorption will most likely come from gritty warehouse structures “off the beaten path.” But though much of the city outside CBD and adjacent neighborhoods remains afflicted by disinvestment and poverty, Harvey “has not been this optimistic about Detroit in a long time.”

Many other cities across the Midwest have revived, as young people who reject the suburban lifestyle flock to the region's downtowns. Companies that want to tap into this new and growing concentration of potential employees have also followed, filling up old, underused structures and even developing new towers.

“There is a stunning difference between Downtown Kansas City 10 years ago and today,” Bob Marcusse, president and CEO of the Kansas City Area Development Council.

Although many of the biggest office users in the Kansas City area have historically settled in the suburbs, Marcusse adds “a lot of the recent office successes have been in the urban core. There is the growing sense that they need to be in an urban environment because that's where the young and the restless are likely to live.”

In the past decade, companies invested about $6 billion in Downtown KC, Marcusse says. In 2006, for example, Hines Interests finished the 18-story, 531,168-square-foot H&R Block World Headquarters. And adjacent to this glass-walled tower, the Baltimore-based Cordish Co. has built the nine-block Power & Light District, an $850-million project that now provides a host of live music venues, theaters, bars, restaurants and nightclubs.

The downtown revival has also started to attract tech jobs. Omaha-based MindMixer, for example, recently selected the city's Crossroads Art+Design District for its new national headquarters. “In order to sustain growth we needed to be in a location with a skilled workforce that meets the needs of our high-tech business,” says Nick Bowden, CEO and co-founder of MindMixer. “This community already has an abundance of experienced workers and the talent pool only seems to be getting bigger.”

But like Detroit, heavy industry has also played a part in the city's comeback. Ford recently made a $1.1-billion investment here, including upgrades at its Kansas City plant. And in January 2013, General Motors announced that it would spend $600 million to upgrade its Fairfax Plant.

The impact on the many smaller auto supply companies here has been profound, Marcusse says. “Making a $600-million investment is a tremendous commitment and the suppliers have decided that this is for real.” Martinrea International, for example, one of the largest global Tier 1 auto-parts suppliers, recently signed a long-term for a 275,560-square-foot building in suburban Riverside.

And even though industrial vacancy recently increased, the boost was primarily due to the large amount of speculative construction. “Second-quarter deliveries totaled 945,000 square feet,” Cassidy Turley found. “This included three speculative buildings that added 729,000-square-feet to the market.”

Nashville did not need to recover from anything like the depression that afflicted southeast Michigan, but interest in the city has recently skyrocketed, and it has gotten past its own recession and ascended into the top tier of US real estate markets.

“We've always been a conservative market,” says Doug Brandon, the Nashville-based regional managing principal of Cassidy Turley. “Unlike many cities, we did not overbuild during boom times, so people did not have to resort to fire sales five years ago when things were tough. Therefore, with a real recovery under way, “people are now realizing that Nashville is not a tier-two city.”

In fact, late last year, the Urban Land Institute ranked Nashville 12th among US cities for overall real estate prospects, up six spots from the previous year. “Nashville is quickly moving onto the national investment radar,” according to the study. In addition to its status as a state capital, job-growth engines like universities, medical centers and the local auto industry ensures “the metro area will grow faster than the country as a whole over the long term.”

“The automotive industry is huge here,” says Brandon, and after a number of down years, in 2012 “we started seeing it move in the opposite direction.” Manufacturing employment has increased 6.7% in the past five years, and in the past year, the overall unemployment rate fell from 6.8% to 4.9%, according to Cassidy Turley. The region has seen 12 quarters of positive industrial absorption, “and we're just now seeing people come out of the ground with new spec space.”

The office market has also finally started to respond, Brandon adds. “We had not seen rental rates jump the way they did in other cities like Atlanta, Charlotte and Austin. Rates were flat until last year.” But in the past 12 months rental rates for class A space has increased by about $30 per-square-foot. This is not much of a surprise, considering that the vacancy rate for class A space just fell to 4.7%, a record low, Cassidy Turley found.

And this activity has definitely caught the attention of institutional investors. An affiliate of Dallas-based Lincoln Property Co., for example, has the city's Fifth Third Center, a 31-story, 490,281-foot office building, under contract for about $89 million, Brandon says. And in 2013, office investors poured about $100 million into the metro area, buying up properties like the AT&T Data Center.

Perhaps the best illustration of the changing times is the hot Gulch neighborhood, a former railyard. Eakin Partners has just decided to build a 275,000-square-foot class A office tower there, and next door, developer Ray Hensler has put the finishing touches on his Twelve Twelve residential project. Although he originally spoke about having 288 units of luxury rental in the new 23-story tower, this year he decided to take it condo, and some of the units have gone for $750 to $800 a foot, says Brandon. “That's unheard of here.”

Unlike some towns that have had to overcome underlying flaws, Miami seems like it fell into a trough through bad timing, and has now come back stronger than ever, all without changing a vision that has been in place for many years.

“We were caught with an oversupply of condos,” explains Alicia Cervera-Lamadrid, the managing partner of Miami-based Cervera Real Estate. When the recession began to bite, the expected buyers of these thousands of new, mostly downtown units, did not show up, leading many to worry that the city would become a ghost town.

And all these new condos were just one part of a strategy to revitalize a slumbering urban core. But although many US cities have attempted similar feats with their CBDs, Miami was eventually energized by its role as the nation's gateway city to the Western Hemisphere.

“Miami today is like New York one hundred years ago when immigrants from Europe were pouring into Ellis Island,” Cervera-Lamadrid says. The US economic crash and its impact on currency values made it easier for many Latin Americans to afford these sparkling new condos. So even though the recession caused “a heckuva speed bump,” the landlords were able to rent out these units.

“Eventually, we could see that this is not going to be a ghost town,” she says, “and we came out of this last cycle with a beautiful city.”

Condo construction has continued. Swire Properties, for example, has started building the $1-billion Brickell City Centre towers in the heart of Miami, and the 43-story buildings will have a total of 780 units on completion. Brokers report 50% have already been sold.

Commissioner Marc Sarnoff of Miami's 2nd District estimates that 31,000 people now live downtown, up from about 8,000 just ten years ago, and says the tremendous density will spark retail development. The city is set to approve plans for the $1.5 billion Miami Worldcenter, a 27-acre development that will help revive a moribund neighborhood just north of downtown. The project will include three massive residential towers with about 1,200 units and 765,000 square feet of retail. Organized around a series of public plazas, the development should help continue the vision of Miami as a city of neighborhoods, with walkable spaces where residents and visitors can shop without fighting traffic.

Amidst all this development activity, one sector that has been left out so far is office, and land values remain a barrier to Miami taking that next step, says Peter Mekras, senior vice president of Continental Real Estate Cos. Perhaps the most astonishing recent land transaction was Related's purchase of the last significant parcel on the Miami River. The company paid about $100 million for four acres and plans to build more than 1,200 units in three towers. Although the mixed-use project will include some office and retail, condos will bring in the real money. As a result, “I don't think anyone will do a spec office building around here.”

Miami does, however, have an overall strategy to kickstart development. “Miami is a brand that is appealing to C-suite executives and their workforces,” says Tere Blanca, the founder, president and chief executive officer of Blanca Commercial Real Estate Inc. Specifically, Blanca and others say that over the next few years they can entice financial services companies to a new center for offices away from the downtown and its exorbitant land prices.

“That will be the catalyst for some meaningful office development,” says Mekras. He expects developers will look to areas like the Wynwood Arts District where the land is cheaper but things like the arts scene will create an attractive atmosphere. “It's out of the hustle and bustle of downtown; it's the perfect place to work.”

“This was all a plan that was thought out years earlier,” Sarnoff says. And even after all of the recent construction, Sarnoff expects the pace to pick up. “We will have 56 cranes in the sky soon.”