The new census figures sounded as bleak as could be:

Pittsburgh was the only large metropolitan area in the nation to lose population over a four-year period. The city, county and region all showed "tremendous loss of jobs and population to other areas of the country," a Pittsburgh newspaper lamented.

It's a story that sounds familiar, but this bleak news came in 1964. Public officials and others have been wringing their hands for decades about Pittsburgh's population drain, which is why there was nothing shocking in recent weeks when census data estimated the region had lost more people since 2000 than anywhere but hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.

The more surprising thing is that analysts believe this negative trend has just about run its course and this relentless, pessimistic elephant of a downward population spiral is about to stop in the next decade -- and may have already halted, according to one projection.

Regional Population Forecast Click image for full version.

Most accounts see a turnaround sometime in 2010-20, spotlighted in a census gain one year that would rouse shouts of, "Hallelujah, it's over! The three rivers turn to wine today! We're growing again!!"

The overall shift, however, may be a tad more subtle.

"Our plan recognizes very slow population growth," said James Hassinger, executive director of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, which projects a population gain of 5 percent across its nine-county region by 2030. "It's a positive thing that we are showing an increase, but it's a modest increase."

And that's assuming the projections developed by demographers, economists, private consultants and university researchers are accurate. Such forecasts have not always been reliable in the past, but analysts today agree on key points:

The worst of the population drop came during the 1980s when the steel industry collapsed. Since then, the local economy has rebuilt itself in a more diversified way to survive downturns and prevent similarly high out-migration.

The area's unusual age ratio, which has created more dying senior citizens and fewer child-bearing couples than the norm, is gradually moving closer to the rest of the country even if it may never match it.

While international immigration to the region is lower than that of other urban areas and will remain so, it is expected to increase with new arrivals drawn to the region because of the vitality of the education and high-tech sectors.

The number of jobs in the region is near the peak level of 2001, and with more jobs come more people, and with more people come more jobs.

No other place of its size has dealt with a similar equation -- one in which so many workers and Sun Belt retirees departed without being replaced by newborns or international immigrants.

"The drags [on population] have been big, and they're anomalous, and they're not really taking place like this anywhere else," said Christopher Briem, a University of Pittsburgh regional economist who studies population trends locally. But he's among the leading proponents of the theory that Allegheny County and the region -- though not the city of Pittsburgh -- are on the cusp of a population turnaround.

Southwestern Pennsylvania's population peaked in sheer numbers in 1960, and as a proportion of the U.S. population 40 years before that. More young workers have been leaving than arriving since the 1920s. The one-time eighth-largest metropolitan area is now 22nd.

Mr. Briem bases his optimism on a computer forecasting model called REMI. from Regional Economic Models Inc. It uses past and present information related to jobs, births, deaths, migration and other data, and also accounts for how trends taking place locally and nationally will play out and interact.

There's no one positive factor that explains how population trends here are prepared to reverse, Mr. Briem said, but more "a decline in all of the factors that have driven down population in the past."

For instance, it took an unusually long time for the number of local women in the work force to reach a plateau; now that it's been reached, there's more room for in-migrants to fill any new openings. The number of retirement-age people in the region, in decline for years, starts increasing again after 2010, creating potential employment for outsiders and a need for more jobs catering to both them and to newcomers as consumers.

Work he did for Allegheny County planning officials in 2005 suggested the county's population, which once stood above 1.6 million, would sink to 1,239,868 by 2010, flatten out with a net gain of nearly 500 by 2015 and add about 25,000 more by 2020. The Census Bureau estimates the county population has already dipped to 1,223,411, but Mr. Briem suggested its estimates are prone to undercounting in urban areas.

The Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, a transportation planning agency, is updating a REMI model projection made in 2003 that predicted its nine counties would grow by more than 126,000 residents between 2000 and 2030, with the net gains starting between 2010 and 2015. The new numbers due out this spring will show another 16,000 more people in the same area by 2035.

Meanwhile, an independent consulting firm, Woods & Poole Economics Inc. of Washington, D.C., developed numbers a year ago suggesting 2006 would mark the first year of turnaround for both the county and region. It estimated the seven-county metro area would gain more than 10,000 residents between 2005 and 2006, while the census bureau estimates there was actually a loss of more than 10,000 in that time frame.

Woods & Poole projects a regional gain of 100,000 within 15 years. While a couple of years ago, it forecast only continuing population decline for Allegheny County, its predictions now reflect moderate growth similar to Mr. Briem's suggestions, but starting even earlier.

As a reminder of the dangers of such forecasting, it's worth noting that in the late 1960s, the Appalachian Regional Commission produced multiple reports of good times ahead for Pittsburgh. It saw a potential metropolitan population above 3 million by 1975, and for Allegheny County alone of 2.5 million by 1996. The latter projection was nearly twice as high as what census counts found to be reality.

Analysts believe the forecasting is more sophisticated now, but the guesswork still involved is reflected in how the various projections differ not only from one another, but also from the present census estimates. The Census Bureau does door-to-door head counts every 10 years, with the next in 2010. In the interim, it extrapolates from prior trends and new data from Internal Revenue Service addresses, birth and death records, and other sources.

Martin Holdrich, senior economist for Woods & Poole, had no single explanation for why population trends may be getting better for Southwestern Pennsylvania than seemed the case a couple of years ago. He cautioned not to make too much of differences between estimates or predictions that vary by a few thousand, when dealing with a county population base above 1 million or a regional population of more than 2 million.

"It's a small positive [in estimated growth for Allegheny County] and previously we had a small negative, but they're both in the ranges of steady or no growth, or no loss," he said. "They're wiggling around a zero rate of growth a little bit.

"The range basically means you've seen the worst of your decline. We don't know the future with certainty, and no one does ... but you would expect it to bottom out or turn around, and that's what we're anticipating. Maybe instead of 2006 it occurs in 2007, or maybe it already occurred and census estimates aren't picking it up yet."

Analysts are quick to point out that whatever population growth may occur will pale in comparison to the nation as a whole, or other regions of similar size. It's just that to some, anything positive will carry significance after such a long decline.

"We're not making grandiose predictions that this region is going to change tremendously overnight ... but we'd love to have that plus side" of population growth, said Bob Hurley, Allegheny County's deputy director of development.

"We don't think it's necessarily great to have enormous growth, because there are things both good and bad about that. You start to see issues with the length of your commute, the inability of starting families to afford a home and other kinds of factors you don't want."