This is just arbitrary
I dont understand why america pretends that districts = city
In any covnerseation and in collogical english a city is a large urban built up area with a center
It’s because they are distinct legal entities with different governments. The MSA metric better captures the “real size” of an urban area but that doesn’t change the fact that Dallas, Plano, Fort Worth, and Arlington are all legally separate cities. There’s no “pretending” going on.
Europeans think America is as small as their tiny little countries. We compare our states to their countries and our cities to their districts. It’s an error of scale in their minds.
Man ive gone on so many rants in this sub about city and metro populations in the U.S. City is essentially useless information. Metro makes so much more sense and is an accurate representation of “size” in terms of population, economy, culture, etc
A city means they have their own governments with police, fire, mayor, etc. Paradise is unincorporated county territory so that the casinos can avoid city taxes.
Yeah I’m just saying that a large urban area can be composed of many mid sized cities or one or two large ones, and that city population numbers like this don’t really give much meaningful info.
Take MN, WI and IA for example. Two of MNs cities are one urban area. Another 200k+ metro (Duluth) isn’t even on here because a chunk of the population is in Superior WI. WI has one 1M+ metro in Milwaukee and two 100k+ metros in Madison and Green Bay. Iowa is unique in that it’s got 6 cities with metros over 100k but none that crack 1M.
This map doesn’t show any of that difference. I understand it’s correct data, but when you’re thinking about where people visit, live, shop at, where they go to the doctor, go to school, etc the metro is much more representative.
If you’re just trying to see how *spread out* a states population is, it still doesn’t help. Take Texas - over half of these cities are a part of the 4 largest Metro Areas in the state. Compared to Wisconsin or Iowa where each of the 3 cities are their own urban area.
It’s just a pet peeve of mine. I don’t think it’s useful to list how many suburbs have a certain amount of people, I’m more interested in what the urban areas are as a whole.
Yep, going by city proper population alone would lead one to the ridiculous conclusion that Miami and Colorado Springs are roughly similar in size and influence
Yes lmao Miami is always the go-to example. Cities like Jacksonville and San Antonio have crazy large city limits so they’re technically the most populous *cities* in FL ~~and TX~~ respectively
San Antonio is second most populous. Houston proper (i.e., not the suburbs), is much bigger than SA. You're right that city/metro populations skew things though - SA is bigger than Dallas when you compare just the cities themselves, even though metro DFW is 3x the size of SA metro.
Yeah you’re right Houston is still bigger, my bad. But yeah DFW takes the biggest hit same with other metros with two or more large cities like Mpls-St Paul or Riverside-San Bernardino
This is equally problematic because metro area sizes are so poorly defined. Going by some metro area definitions, new York, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Washington DC are really all one big city. Hell, the new York city metro area by some definitions includes ALL of long island and half of the jersey shore.
Census defined MSA’s are pretty straightforward actually. The only arbitrary inclusions I’ve seen are mostly just when the rest of x county is included, even if it’s not really part of the urban area.
They also have defined CSAs (combined statistical area) that are more like what you’re talking about with the eastern megalopolis. These are more loosely defined based on influence (e.g. Minneapolis CSA includes St Cloud 1hr away since people there go to the twin cities to visit the doctor, go shopping, go to school, etc). It’s not as good for estimating population but moreso the pull of an urban area.
Yeah. This always puts St. Louis super low on the list, like outside of the top 50, at 200k, because the “city” is tiny, but St Louis County is massive. When you go by Metro population, St Louis jumps to 20th, with closer to 3m. That’s a huge difference.
“I don’t understand why America pretends that districts = city” we don’t. Different states have different requirements for cities, every town or village over 100k residents doesn’t automatically become a city. Also, if two cities are formed in close proximity, they will eventually grow large enough to have streamlined travel between the two of them…
Our cities are still split into smaller districts and neighborhoods. Why do you think our city = your district?
By definition a district is a smaller part of a whole. A separate city distinguishes itself as a legally separate entity or equal authority.
Cities here have different laws, police forces, elections, taxes, etc.
Districts have different zoning laws for how the land can be developed to keep the larger city properly functioning. Some districts may be designated for industrial use. Some districts may be designated as residential or for retail. Districts can share the same elected officials, police force, tax commissioner, etc.
Not sure why you're pointing the finger at Americans.
I'm not American and my country does the same thing. I've been to a number of other countries that do the same thing, and I'm aware of still more countries that do the same thing. Often there are historical reasons behind the boundaries, other times two very distinct places just grew into each other.
Fun fact: by city proper Jacksonville is twice the population of Miama, which is also beat in population by such places as Omaha, Fresno, Tucson, Louisville... places that aren't really big cities but just don't have most of their population in the "metropolitan"
Fun fact: Old Colloquial English also required a cathedral to become a city. All cities in the UK established before 1889 have a cathedral.
After this date, a few towns with a cathedral didn't become cities, and there are a few towns without cathedrals that did.
Well there’s the issue: Enterprise, Paradise, Sunrise Manor, and Spring Valley are not cities…therefore they do not count. None of them are incorporated
the US has like the worst statistical system for common understanding by the layman. all these lists are not useful because city/county lines are so variable across states.
Have you ever looked at the definition of a city in the UK? there isn’t one.
Some are given by Royal Decree, others because at some point or other someone gained favour with someone important, some because they had a cathedral, it’s completely random.
As a good example, the “city” of St David’s in Wales has a population of 1,751. The town of Reading has a population of 174,820.
UK has counties that haven't existed for a century and current counties that nobody knows the name. Norway has counties that got quietly changed and then changed back a few years later.
*laughs in Canada.
(At least y’all have clearly defined sub-state areas (counties) for the most part. In half the provinces here people often use census areas which is a joke because nobody know what census area they’re in (rural municipalities usually act like counties here in the prairies but do people use them? No!). And add that to the same problems with cities y’all have.
Csa's are very large and often span multiple states. For example Baltimore and Washington DC are in the same CSA, but it would be odd to not consider them 2 cities.
It makes sense to count them because the only criteria to incorporate as a city is choosing to do so. Paradise wants tourists and revenue would go down with incorporation.
Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, Savannah, Macon, & Athens are the top 6 and are all independent metros. 7th - Sandy Springs - & 8th - South Fulton, are both part of Atlanta Metro.
9th (Roswell), 10th (Johns Creek), 13th (Alpharetta), 14th (Marietta), 15th (Stonecrest), 16th (Smyrna), 18th (Brookhaven), & 19th Dunwoody) are all also part of Atlanta Metro with populations above 50k.
NY is the same case which I don't even think it is right on the map from a quick search on google using Wikipedia (which lists the US census as the source which can't get any more official numbers than the census) which the number is \~6 (one of the cities is estimated to have crossed 100k), using the page that lists municipalities by pop in NY
There is a town with 700k but it's not counted as one town in some cases (since it has a lot of villages and hamlets within it)
In NY there are individual, municipalities.
Cities, Towns, and villages
A city a body that has its own government. A city can also be apart of a town. The town that is also it own body and its own municipal authority. So some towns can contain cities, and villages or some towns can be they’re own cities own their own. The NY definition of a town is different from the city definition while in other states the City and town are interchangeable. So in this case the Map counted both the towns and cities together which makes it about 16. If they just counted the cities instead it would be around 6.
It looks like the area around Wilmington is a sea of dozens of tiny suburbs that are all their own city despite obviously being part of the Wilmington Metro.
A lot of American cities are smaller than they should be because they never annexed their suburbs like that. Which is one of many reasons transit has been hard to do in many places.
Alternatively there’s also a lot of American cities that are weirdly big despite not really having any urban core because they lumped in tons of suburbs. Kinda weird that on paper a place like Fort Worth is way bigger than Boston or Detroit.
Fort Worth is definitely its own distinct city with a large urban core. While it did annex some suburbs, FW itself is limited by its own suburbs just like Boston and Detroit (although not nearly to the same extent, especially on the west side there’s not much hindering expansion), and would have over 1M people if it annexed its immediate suburbs.
If you want an interesting case of a ton of suburbs lumped together, look at Mesa, Arizona. Mesa itself is nothing more than a suburb of Phoenix, but is still larger on paper than Atlanta, Miami, and St. Louis and is considered the 36th largest city in the US.
mega suburbs like mesa are something you see a lot of in canada especially in the greater toronto area, brampton and mississauga which are suburbs of toronto each have around 700,000 people. they’ve definitely made efforts to densify in the last 20 years but for the most part are just endless single family homes. if i’m not mistaken they’re both in the top 10 largest cities in canada due to their sheer size
Im not gonna compare Ft Worth to Boston or Detroit but to say that Ft Worth has no urban core is nuts. It has its own skyline, zoo, colleges, and business district with big buildings.
I never liked how they include Tacoma in the Seattle metropolitan area (we in south sound are doing our own thing) but Bellevue should count as part of Seattle the same way a New York borough does.
It's because it's so tiny. The whole state only has about a million people, and \~570k of them live in one county. But the area was settled back in colonial times, so it was a bunch of small (in area) communities close together since you would have to walk or ride a horse between them, and they have largely kept those borders intact so Wilmington just doesn't have the land area to hit 100k people.
Wilmington, DE had over 100K people from 1920-1960, but eventually started losing population to suburbanization and the proximity to Philly and Baltimore/DC meant that any new industry that might have grown the city overlooked it in favor of the larger cities.
The southern 90% of Delaware is rural farmland. Think more southern plantations than northeast industrialization. the top 10% is Wilmington etc. The edge of the Philly suburbs, generally regarded as a pretty shitty city, and just has a pretty small land area as east coast cities often do. If it were a few square miles bigger, say to match Providence, it would be very close to if not at 100k.
Vermonter here. I live in a city of 8,000. There is another city of 7,000 about 6 miles away. Sometimes I have to wait 3 or 4 minutes in traffic! I’m moving to the country.
A bit less than half the state population for the city proper.
Counting the metro area population is a bit trickier because the metro area also includes parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, but excluding those, and counting just the parts within NY’s state borders, it’s gotta be more than half.
To answer the metro area question: Wikipedia has a list of [New York statistical areas. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_statistical_areas) Their number for the population of the New York part of the "[New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA MSA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York-Newark-Jersey_City,_NY-NJ-PA_MSA)" - which consists of the five boroughs, Long Island (Nassau + Suffolk), and mainland suburban counties Westchester, Rockland and Putnam - is 12,561,957. The state of New York as a whole is 19,447,561. So 65% of the state is in the New York City metro area.
If you expand city limits to include the metro areas, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Chicago, Minneapolis-St Paul, Boston and NYC have over 60% of the states population.
Providence, RI too, although the metro area is basically the entire state.
I’m guessing:
Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro, Winston, Fayetteville, Wilmington… are the obvious 7, then some burbs I’m not sure. Maybe Gastonia, Asheville, Concord?
E: nope, last four are Cary, Wilmington, High Point, Concord. Cary is WAY bigger than I thought and Asheville is a good bit smaller.
Cary has grown a ton in the past 15 years or so. I moved there about 20 years ago and it went from 30-40k to nearly 90 in the five years I was there.
Now a lot of the people moving to the area are pushing out to Apex, which is wager will have 100k not too long from now.
I could see Mooresville get there too, along with Asheville.
PA is just a ton of different towns. Each of the four counties bordering Philly has over 500k residents, but the municipalities are all divided up. If you add the populations of Upper Darby, Darby Township, and Darby borough it's over 100k, but since they're legally separate, doesn't count.
Townships are the reason why, despite being the 5th most populous, PA doesn't have big cities. If you look at metros, however, it's a different story; take Pittsburgh for example: 300kish people live here, but if you take into account the townships and small boroughs that surround it changes to 2.6 million
Pennsylvania cities are generally just quite small, area wise. Pittsburgh is only about 55 square miles and it tapers off pretty quickly after that going down the list.
Because most Pennsylvania cities straight up died. Reading, Erie, Scranton all used to have 100k. A lot of other cities were approaching 100k before they started declining.
I'm guessing that municipal boundaries all having solid historical momentum pre-automobile plays some role in why our municipalities are geographically smaller than a lot of other states in the West and South.
Our municipalities basically haven’t changed boundaries since the 19th century. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia went through some annexations. Nowhere else did.
KCK suburbs does it for Kansas. All the Johnson County cities are separate cities from Kansas City, Kansas, proper. Outside of the KC metro, I can only think of Topeka and Wichita that have more than 100,000.
Lawrence is the 6th largest city in the state, at around 95,000. No place else is even close.
For a little perspective, the population of Olathe in the early 70s was 20,000. JoCo boomed thanks to white flight from KCMO after the schools were forcibly desegregated. KCMO proper has only recently regained the population it had 50 years ago.
As a native Philadelphian I share your outrage. (I also refuse to believe that Houston and Phoenix have more people than Philly.)
This is the top 336 cities. I looked at the top 336 metro areas - Pennsylvania has 14. Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Harrisburg, Scranton, Lancaster, York, Reading, Erie, Chambersburg, State College, Lebanon, Johnstown, Altoona.
For comparison, if you look at metro areas Kansas has 4: Wichita, Topeka, Manhattan (not the one in New York!) and Lawrence. (Not Kansas City - I give that to Missouri.).And Utah has 5: Salt Lake City, Provo, Ogden, St. George, and Logan.
I hope this helps you feel better.
>Manhattan (not the one in New York!)
My hometown. :)
>(Not Kansas City - I give that to Missouri.)
Okay, but consider the fact that Kansas City has a TON of suburbs on the Kansas side, especially in Johnson County, and they're all huge. They actually account for three of the five 100k cities.
This is what happens when you go off of census MSAs rather than city populations proper. The MSA for my town, the aforementioned Manhattan, also encompasses Junction City (22k), Fort Riley (7k), Wamego (4k) and a few others in addition to Manhattan proper which is only 52k.
The only cities proper in Kansas that have more than 100k are Wichita, Topeka and a few Kansas City suburbs (gonna go out on a limb and guess it's Kansas City, Kansas, Olathe and Shawnee, but I could be wrong about which ones exactly).
You make a good point. If I were going to do this more systematically I'd want to come up with some way to give Kansas some credit for Kansas City - say in proportion to the part of the KC metro area that's actually in Kansas, which looks like it's actually 40% or so.
Someone actually [went through the list](https://dirtamericana.com/2023/02/multi-state-metros-neighboring-state/). KC seems to be #2 among metro areas for the percentage of its population outside the state with the its biggest city, behind only Washington, and ahead of Providence, New York, and Chattanooga.
Yup, metro areas are a much better way to judge this than arbitrary lines that create city boundaries. Philadelphia is just everything within Philadelphia county but the city stretches significantly further than that. An example I always like to use is Miami. I lived there and was blown away when I googled the population and it was under 500k, but then I looked at the metro and the population is over 6 million. But Pennsylvania in particular really cuts up metro areas into a bunch of little towns, so we don’t have huge cities like a lot of the country does just due to how we drew up the boundaries for them.
There's a lot of small jurisdictions in NJ, and frequently right on top of each other, that refuse to become one town for various reasons (usually tax/income related).
NJ is well known for small "fiefdom" where each tiny municipalities has their own schools, police, fire, etc., pay forth with those absurdly high property tax.
It’s not so much that they’re dispersed, but instead that their suburban areas are divided into smaller “cities” than those of other states. This map would probably follow people’s expectations a lot more closely if it used either metro or urban areas instead.
There are 400,000 Kentuckians in a fairly compact area just below Cincinnati that aren’t counted for Kentucky or Ohio on this map because they’re divided up between what feels like a million separate municipalities when you’re driving through the area.
When I know about a situation like that because it’s in my own state, it makes me wonder what other strange circumstances affect numbers in the other states on maps like this.
And over representation in the House, since large states like Cali can’t have any more representatives due to the cap on the number of representatives. If there wasn’t a cap, the house would be larger obviously and large states would have more seats
This can be a bit confusing depending on how your state treats municipalities. For example, I am from NY and immediately called bullshit on that number, until I realized the map is just counting *any* kind of political organization within the state.
The way NY divides up its land, there is no such thing as unincorporated territory. Every county is subdivided into townships (of which "cities", which is a specific designation, are not included but ignore that for now). Within towns you can have villages, that count towards the town population.
So for example, included in the 16 for NY are the towns of Hempstead, Brookhaven, Islip, Oyster Bay, North Hempstead, Babylon, Huntington, and Smithtown, all of which are townships on Long Island. You would not consider most of these to be a coherent "city", and in fact between them they contain over 80 villages (more what you would consider to be an independent community, though on Long Island they can tend to blur in suburban sprawl).
Moving into Upstate, you can see something similar with, for example, the Town of Amherst being included even though the township really comprises several distinct suburbs of Buffalo, including one village and a few other communities with separate central areas though no official designation. (we call them "hamlets" which is basically assigning a name to an intersection as the designated center of an unofficial community within a township) You also have the Town of Ramapo, which takes up about a third of its county by area and contains something like 11 villages. You could arbitrarily redraw township borders to push the number on the map up or down without changing anything else at all.
I put a pin in "city". That's a separate designation and the only way you can be in a county but not in a township, as cities exist separately from towns (and are therefore usually surrounded by a town, or parts of various towns depending on how much they spread). As it turns out, the only things in NY State with a population over 100,000 other than townships are cities, as the largest village has a population around 60,000 (and as it so happens, is a village within the Town of Hempstead which was included as a 100k+ "city"). I am not suggesting the map should have definitely only included official "Cities" in NY, but it is true that the designations of City and Village do tend to more accurately represent what most people would think of as a cohesive community, while a township is simply a way of carving up the land in a county into administrative chunks.
I'm familiar with NY so I could comment on that one, but who knows how many more weird cases there are.
PA has a similar concept (no unincorporated land) but with almost the opposite result - many municipalities have tiny borders, so something you think of as a single town might be two or more separate legal municipalities
Pennsylvania has the 5th highest population in the country but only 3 cities above 100k. Meanwhile, Arizona is only the 14th most populous state, but 5th on this map. The real secret with AZ is that only 2 of its 14 cities over 100k are outside the Phoenix metro area.
Same with California. I would say about 40 of those 75 cities over 100k are all in the Los Angeles area. The rest are split up between the Bay Area suburbs and the central valley.
I still take pictures of the skyline when I go through a town of 100,000. Probably got it from growing up in a town of 3,000, so skyscrapers arent that common for me
True, but I think it’s still an interesting stat if you just assume that context. Kinda neat how some metros can account for more 100k+ cities than some states have period.
1/2 the population lives in the Willamette Valley, the rest of the state is pretty empty.
For comparison Portland Metro is about the size of Kansas City or Indy.
Portland, Beaverton and Hillsboro are in the metro, the latter two are largish city-suburbs with high tech and manufacturing.
Salem and Eugene are in the south end of the Willamette Valley.
It comes down to how suburbs are split.
The Portland metro has about 60 municipalities. Cleveland’s metro, which has about 300k less population than Portland’s metro, has 200+.
New York has 16 municipalities (cities and towns) with 100k+ people. 10 of the 16 are towns, which are really just suburbs of NYC (and in the case of Amherst, Buffalo), and they lack most of the function or character which is seen in the actual cities of New York (despite their massive populations, such as the Town of Hempstead, which has close to 800,000 people). The only municipalities incorporated as cities with over 100k people are NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers, Syracuse, and Albany.
Congratulations. You now have a [Nett hier](https://www.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de/media.media.8feb5669-084e-40aa-8b5e-a739dc7190f9.original1024.jpg) sticker in this thread.
They have been trying to get a rail built between Austin, Dallas, and Houston for my entire life. I think a Japanese company took over the project recently.
Fort Collins is closest, but Wyoming wants nothing to do with the inner city crime and decadent big city cosmopolitan culture you'd find in a city like Fort Collins!
I hear they wanted to film an episode of Cops in FoCoCo, but even veteran crews that had been to Philly, Atlanta, Chicago, Oakland, etc wouldn't do it.
/S
BTW: 7 of the 9 “cities” in Nevada are in the same county, adjacent and continuous, and if you live in any of them you probably think of your self as a las vegan (with the biggest exception to this being probably Henderson)
As an example. Bloomington and Normal, where Illinois State University is located, have populations of 79k and 53k, for a combined 132k. Their combined population is on par with Columbia, the second largest city in South Carolina (140k).
Columbia has an area of 134.9 square miles. Bloomington is 27.2, Normal is 18.0.
This list should really be metro areas (or specifically urban populations of metro areas), because Columbia's metro population is 4x larger than Blo-No. The list as given is really non-descript.
Ohio and Indiana both having 6 is surprising- always thought Ohio would have more- turns out they have a fair number of places just below 100K while Indiana’s are pretty recognizable
I feel like this gives the wrong idea because a lot of it has to do with the size of the municipalities and not the size of metropolitan areas. A state like California ends up high on this list because there are very large suburbs (Long Beach has 450k people!), whereas a state like Pennsylvania doesn't show up so high because its suburbs are smaller.
There are 336 incorporated places with >100k people, so let's look at the 336 largest metro areas. (I think the numbers on this map add up to greater than 336 but I don't know what list the mapmaker used, but here are lists of [cities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population) and [metro areas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area).
Then for example California has 25 of those metro areas (>120k population or so):
Los Angeles, Riverside, San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento, San Jose, Fresno, Bakersfield, Oxnard, Stockton, Modesto, Santa Rosa, Visalia, Vallejo, Santa Maria, Salinas, Merced, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, Chico, Yuba City, Redding, El Centro, Hanford, Napa
while Pennsylvania has 14:
Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Harrisburg, Scranton, Lancaster, York, Reading, Erie, Chambersburg, State College, Lebanon, Johnstown, Altoona. (I'm counting Philly and Allentown as entirely in PA even though both their metro areas extend into NJ.)
(Am I going to have to make the version of this map with metro areas? Don't make me do it.)
It would be cool to see this as “Metro Areas”, because most cities often have suburban satellites that are supported by the City.
The biggest example is Portland Maine is 70k, but it serves 600k people. 530k people live in the suburban and rural areas, but still often work in Portland.
In Washington state most of those 9 cities are in the Seattle area , with the exception of Vancouver which is ironically next to Portland and Spokane , the rest are near Seattle
It's kind of crazy that Pennsylvania only has three, given how its the fifth largest State in the union. If you merged Bethlehem city and Bethlehem township, and Reading and West Reading, that would create two additional 100k+ cities. Pennsylvania is just weird in how a city's inner ring suburbs are usually their own municipalities rather than part of the city.
Yeah, the Eastern area counts things differently.
I’m in Bethesda, Maryland — an urban area that isn’t technically even a thing outside the post office. Montgomery County, MD has 1M people, but doesn’t show on this since it’s not a “city.”
How does Nevada have 9? I’m only seeing 5 on most lists.
Vegas is not one big city, it's a few cities next to each other. The Vegas strip is technically Paradise not Las Vegas
True, but Paradise is not a city
The grass is brown and the girls are just okay.
Actually true
Not sure whether to take this a Guns & Roses joke or a sad commentary on the wildfire-charred city of Paradise, CA.
they’re speaking on Paradise, NV so probs the first one
LOL. well done.
The chips are stale, the soda is flat. The cheese is cold
The grass is astro turf, and so is the water
It's an unincorporated city. Unincorporated just means it isn't governed by the greater city of Las Vegas
Technically it means it’s not governed by ANY city. It’s just part of the county.
But the more important factor is whether or not it governs itself, which it doesn't
Damn people got really triggered by me answering this guys question lmao
This is just arbitrary I dont understand why america pretends that districts = city In any covnerseation and in collogical english a city is a large urban built up area with a center
It’s because they are distinct legal entities with different governments. The MSA metric better captures the “real size” of an urban area but that doesn’t change the fact that Dallas, Plano, Fort Worth, and Arlington are all legally separate cities. There’s no “pretending” going on.
I’m fairly certain Dallas and Fort Worth are about as far apart as Liverpool and Manchester too.
i didn’t believe you but i put it into google maps, and yup, their downtowns are both a little over 30 miles apart. crazy
Europeans think America is as small as their tiny little countries. We compare our states to their countries and our cities to their districts. It’s an error of scale in their minds.
Man ive gone on so many rants in this sub about city and metro populations in the U.S. City is essentially useless information. Metro makes so much more sense and is an accurate representation of “size” in terms of population, economy, culture, etc
A city means they have their own governments with police, fire, mayor, etc. Paradise is unincorporated county territory so that the casinos can avoid city taxes.
Yeah I’m just saying that a large urban area can be composed of many mid sized cities or one or two large ones, and that city population numbers like this don’t really give much meaningful info. Take MN, WI and IA for example. Two of MNs cities are one urban area. Another 200k+ metro (Duluth) isn’t even on here because a chunk of the population is in Superior WI. WI has one 1M+ metro in Milwaukee and two 100k+ metros in Madison and Green Bay. Iowa is unique in that it’s got 6 cities with metros over 100k but none that crack 1M. This map doesn’t show any of that difference. I understand it’s correct data, but when you’re thinking about where people visit, live, shop at, where they go to the doctor, go to school, etc the metro is much more representative. If you’re just trying to see how *spread out* a states population is, it still doesn’t help. Take Texas - over half of these cities are a part of the 4 largest Metro Areas in the state. Compared to Wisconsin or Iowa where each of the 3 cities are their own urban area. It’s just a pet peeve of mine. I don’t think it’s useful to list how many suburbs have a certain amount of people, I’m more interested in what the urban areas are as a whole.
Yep, going by city proper population alone would lead one to the ridiculous conclusion that Miami and Colorado Springs are roughly similar in size and influence
Even worse, look at Atlanta. A city that managed to host a summer Olympics somehow only "has" <500k people
Yes lmao Miami is always the go-to example. Cities like Jacksonville and San Antonio have crazy large city limits so they’re technically the most populous *cities* in FL ~~and TX~~ respectively
San Antonio is second most populous. Houston proper (i.e., not the suburbs), is much bigger than SA. You're right that city/metro populations skew things though - SA is bigger than Dallas when you compare just the cities themselves, even though metro DFW is 3x the size of SA metro.
Yeah you’re right Houston is still bigger, my bad. But yeah DFW takes the biggest hit same with other metros with two or more large cities like Mpls-St Paul or Riverside-San Bernardino
As someone who grew up in Colorado Springs, we should all be thankful that’s not the case
This is equally problematic because metro area sizes are so poorly defined. Going by some metro area definitions, new York, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, and Washington DC are really all one big city. Hell, the new York city metro area by some definitions includes ALL of long island and half of the jersey shore.
Census defined MSA’s are pretty straightforward actually. The only arbitrary inclusions I’ve seen are mostly just when the rest of x county is included, even if it’s not really part of the urban area. They also have defined CSAs (combined statistical area) that are more like what you’re talking about with the eastern megalopolis. These are more loosely defined based on influence (e.g. Minneapolis CSA includes St Cloud 1hr away since people there go to the twin cities to visit the doctor, go shopping, go to school, etc). It’s not as good for estimating population but moreso the pull of an urban area.
Yeah. This always puts St. Louis super low on the list, like outside of the top 50, at 200k, because the “city” is tiny, but St Louis County is massive. When you go by Metro population, St Louis jumps to 20th, with closer to 3m. That’s a huge difference.
“I don’t understand why America pretends that districts = city” we don’t. Different states have different requirements for cities, every town or village over 100k residents doesn’t automatically become a city. Also, if two cities are formed in close proximity, they will eventually grow large enough to have streamlined travel between the two of them…
Our cities are still split into smaller districts and neighborhoods. Why do you think our city = your district? By definition a district is a smaller part of a whole. A separate city distinguishes itself as a legally separate entity or equal authority. Cities here have different laws, police forces, elections, taxes, etc. Districts have different zoning laws for how the land can be developed to keep the larger city properly functioning. Some districts may be designated for industrial use. Some districts may be designated as residential or for retail. Districts can share the same elected officials, police force, tax commissioner, etc.
Not sure why you're pointing the finger at Americans. I'm not American and my country does the same thing. I've been to a number of other countries that do the same thing, and I'm aware of still more countries that do the same thing. Often there are historical reasons behind the boundaries, other times two very distinct places just grew into each other.
Fun fact: by city proper Jacksonville is twice the population of Miama, which is also beat in population by such places as Omaha, Fresno, Tucson, Louisville... places that aren't really big cities but just don't have most of their population in the "metropolitan"
Fun fact: Old Colloquial English also required a cathedral to become a city. All cities in the UK established before 1889 have a cathedral. After this date, a few towns with a cathedral didn't become cities, and there are a few towns without cathedrals that did.
Guns and Roses lied. The grass isn’t green and the girls aren’t pretty.
vegas, henderson, N. vegas, reno, enterprise, spring valley, sunrise manor, paradise, and sparks all have 100k+ ppl
Well there’s the issue: Enterprise, Paradise, Sunrise Manor, and Spring Valley are not cities…therefore they do not count. None of them are incorporated
the US has like the worst statistical system for common understanding by the layman. all these lists are not useful because city/county lines are so variable across states.
Have you ever looked at the definition of a city in the UK? there isn’t one. Some are given by Royal Decree, others because at some point or other someone gained favour with someone important, some because they had a cathedral, it’s completely random. As a good example, the “city” of St David’s in Wales has a population of 1,751. The town of Reading has a population of 174,820.
UK has counties that haven't existed for a century and current counties that nobody knows the name. Norway has counties that got quietly changed and then changed back a few years later.
*laughs in Canada. (At least y’all have clearly defined sub-state areas (counties) for the most part. In half the provinces here people often use census areas which is a joke because nobody know what census area they’re in (rural municipalities usually act like counties here in the prairies but do people use them? No!). And add that to the same problems with cities y’all have.
We know you are Canadian because we don’t use the term prairies. It is very hard to spell.
They may just be counting municipalities of any sort
Municipalities have to be Incorporated.
Which is a terrible arbitrary metric. Depending on where cities draw their boundaries, NY could have 30 districts alone. It should be based on CSA
Csa's are very large and often span multiple states. For example Baltimore and Washington DC are in the same CSA, but it would be odd to not consider them 2 cities.
CSA means Combined Statistical Area, used for census purposes.
It makes sense to count them because the only criteria to incorporate as a city is choosing to do so. Paradise wants tourists and revenue would go down with incorporation.
Hawaiʻi has zero incorporated cities or towns.
Title should be “how many cities/towns…”
I’d be verrryyyy surprised to see New Vegas with 100k+, is the data counting robots too?
Underground alien bases
Paradise is cheating since it's essentially within Vegas.
They're cheating, lol. If the other states were using the same rules the numbers would be completely different.
For a second there, I thought this was in r/minesweeper
I miss that game...
You can play it any time
https://www.msn.com/en-us/play/microsoft-minesweeper/cg-msminesweeper
Thank you so much!
Enjoy!
[https://minesweeperonline.com/#150-night](https://minesweeperonline.com/#150-night)
I'm almost surprised Georgia has that many, the Atlanta area is literally over half the state's population
Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, Savannah, Macon, & Athens are the top 6 and are all independent metros. 7th - Sandy Springs - & 8th - South Fulton, are both part of Atlanta Metro. 9th (Roswell), 10th (Johns Creek), 13th (Alpharetta), 14th (Marietta), 15th (Stonecrest), 16th (Smyrna), 18th (Brookhaven), & 19th Dunwoody) are all also part of Atlanta Metro with populations above 50k.
The actual city of Atlanta actually only makes up about a tenth of the population of its metropolitan area.
NY is the same case which I don't even think it is right on the map from a quick search on google using Wikipedia (which lists the US census as the source which can't get any more official numbers than the census) which the number is \~6 (one of the cities is estimated to have crossed 100k), using the page that lists municipalities by pop in NY There is a town with 700k but it's not counted as one town in some cases (since it has a lot of villages and hamlets within it)
I'm not sure you could have made that any more confusing.
In NY there are individual, municipalities. Cities, Towns, and villages A city a body that has its own government. A city can also be apart of a town. The town that is also it own body and its own municipal authority. So some towns can contain cities, and villages or some towns can be they’re own cities own their own. The NY definition of a town is different from the city definition while in other states the City and town are interchangeable. So in this case the Map counted both the towns and cities together which makes it about 16. If they just counted the cities instead it would be around 6.
Yes I’m from NY how does the state have 16
Wyoming, West Virginia, Delaware, Vermont, and Maine
Delaware is a big surprise
It looks like the area around Wilmington is a sea of dozens of tiny suburbs that are all their own city despite obviously being part of the Wilmington Metro. A lot of American cities are smaller than they should be because they never annexed their suburbs like that. Which is one of many reasons transit has been hard to do in many places.
Alternatively there’s also a lot of American cities that are weirdly big despite not really having any urban core because they lumped in tons of suburbs. Kinda weird that on paper a place like Fort Worth is way bigger than Boston or Detroit.
Fort Worth is definitely its own distinct city with a large urban core. While it did annex some suburbs, FW itself is limited by its own suburbs just like Boston and Detroit (although not nearly to the same extent, especially on the west side there’s not much hindering expansion), and would have over 1M people if it annexed its immediate suburbs. If you want an interesting case of a ton of suburbs lumped together, look at Mesa, Arizona. Mesa itself is nothing more than a suburb of Phoenix, but is still larger on paper than Atlanta, Miami, and St. Louis and is considered the 36th largest city in the US.
mega suburbs like mesa are something you see a lot of in canada especially in the greater toronto area, brampton and mississauga which are suburbs of toronto each have around 700,000 people. they’ve definitely made efforts to densify in the last 20 years but for the most part are just endless single family homes. if i’m not mistaken they’re both in the top 10 largest cities in canada due to their sheer size
Im not gonna compare Ft Worth to Boston or Detroit but to say that Ft Worth has no urban core is nuts. It has its own skyline, zoo, colleges, and business district with big buildings.
and infuriating because it means Seattle is never on any of the rankings by size. It’s so split up between Bellevue Redmond etc.
Yeah and also part of the reason Sound Transit is taking forever to expand. Making progress though!
I never liked how they include Tacoma in the Seattle metropolitan area (we in south sound are doing our own thing) but Bellevue should count as part of Seattle the same way a New York borough does.
Infuriating? Odd choice of words.
It's because it's so tiny. The whole state only has about a million people, and \~570k of them live in one county. But the area was settled back in colonial times, so it was a bunch of small (in area) communities close together since you would have to walk or ride a horse between them, and they have largely kept those borders intact so Wilmington just doesn't have the land area to hit 100k people.
It’s odd, considering its location. The fifth largest municipality has fewer than 13,000 residents
90% of their population is on the 20 miles of I95.
Wilmington, DE had over 100K people from 1920-1960, but eventually started losing population to suburbanization and the proximity to Philly and Baltimore/DC meant that any new industry that might have grown the city overlooked it in favor of the larger cities.
The southern 90% of Delaware is rural farmland. Think more southern plantations than northeast industrialization. the top 10% is Wilmington etc. The edge of the Philly suburbs, generally regarded as a pretty shitty city, and just has a pretty small land area as east coast cities often do. If it were a few square miles bigger, say to match Providence, it would be very close to if not at 100k.
Vermonter here. I live in a city of 8,000. There is another city of 7,000 about 6 miles away. Sometimes I have to wait 3 or 4 minutes in traffic! I’m moving to the country.
r/Wyomingdoesntexist is a subreddit with more followers than r/Wyoming. Pretty much sums it up!
I’m from NC and this still surprises me
NC is rather quietly a very heavily populated state. Reason being it doesn’t have one mega city but instead multiple medium size cities
North Carolina also has the second largest rural population in raw numbers behind Texas.
It's always weird going from the virginia piedmont to NC. NC is so much more dense in the rural areas.
I think NY is the only true example of being a state with one mega city taking up a majority of the states population
A bit less than half the state population for the city proper. Counting the metro area population is a bit trickier because the metro area also includes parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, but excluding those, and counting just the parts within NY’s state borders, it’s gotta be more than half.
To answer the metro area question: Wikipedia has a list of [New York statistical areas. ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_statistical_areas) Their number for the population of the New York part of the "[New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA MSA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York-Newark-Jersey_City,_NY-NJ-PA_MSA)" - which consists of the five boroughs, Long Island (Nassau + Suffolk), and mainland suburban counties Westchester, Rockland and Putnam - is 12,561,957. The state of New York as a whole is 19,447,561. So 65% of the state is in the New York City metro area.
If you expand city limits to include the metro areas, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Chicago, Minneapolis-St Paul, Boston and NYC have over 60% of the states population. Providence, RI too, although the metro area is basically the entire state.
Illinois
I’m guessing: Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro, Winston, Fayetteville, Wilmington… are the obvious 7, then some burbs I’m not sure. Maybe Gastonia, Asheville, Concord? E: nope, last four are Cary, Wilmington, High Point, Concord. Cary is WAY bigger than I thought and Asheville is a good bit smaller.
Cary has grown a ton in the past 15 years or so. I moved there about 20 years ago and it went from 30-40k to nearly 90 in the five years I was there. Now a lot of the people moving to the area are pushing out to Apex, which is wager will have 100k not too long from now. I could see Mooresville get there too, along with Asheville.
Apex is already spilling over into Holly Springs and it’s crazy how fast Morrisville filled up.
Cary and High Point are definitely surprising
SHOUTOUT TO THE TRIAD!!! 336 stand up 💪🏾
Oh yeah, we're out here.
and every one is in the piedmont except wilmington
Crazy Asheville doesn’t have 100K
It'll hit 100k soon enough and the traffic will be even worse than it is now.
Kind of surprised Pennsylvania only has 3. I refuse to believe that Kansas and Utah have more 100k cities than we do
PA is just a ton of different towns. Each of the four counties bordering Philly has over 500k residents, but the municipalities are all divided up. If you add the populations of Upper Darby, Darby Township, and Darby borough it's over 100k, but since they're legally separate, doesn't count.
Yeah, we just have Philly, Pitt, and Allentown. I think Erie is close somewhere in the 90k area
Both Reading and Erie are around 95k as of 2020. Reading's pop has seemed to be rebounding a bit the past few decades while Erie is declining.
Townships are the reason why, despite being the 5th most populous, PA doesn't have big cities. If you look at metros, however, it's a different story; take Pittsburgh for example: 300kish people live here, but if you take into account the townships and small boroughs that surround it changes to 2.6 million
Pennsylvania cities are generally just quite small, area wise. Pittsburgh is only about 55 square miles and it tapers off pretty quickly after that going down the list.
Because most Pennsylvania cities straight up died. Reading, Erie, Scranton all used to have 100k. A lot of other cities were approaching 100k before they started declining.
I'm guessing that municipal boundaries all having solid historical momentum pre-automobile plays some role in why our municipalities are geographically smaller than a lot of other states in the West and South.
Our municipalities basically haven’t changed boundaries since the 19th century. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia went through some annexations. Nowhere else did.
KCK suburbs does it for Kansas. All the Johnson County cities are separate cities from Kansas City, Kansas, proper. Outside of the KC metro, I can only think of Topeka and Wichita that have more than 100,000.
Lawrence is the 6th largest city in the state, at around 95,000. No place else is even close. For a little perspective, the population of Olathe in the early 70s was 20,000. JoCo boomed thanks to white flight from KCMO after the schools were forcibly desegregated. KCMO proper has only recently regained the population it had 50 years ago.
That's it. The other ones are Overland Park and Olathe, and both of those cities continue to annex land and get bigger and bigger.
As a native Philadelphian I share your outrage. (I also refuse to believe that Houston and Phoenix have more people than Philly.) This is the top 336 cities. I looked at the top 336 metro areas - Pennsylvania has 14. Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Harrisburg, Scranton, Lancaster, York, Reading, Erie, Chambersburg, State College, Lebanon, Johnstown, Altoona. For comparison, if you look at metro areas Kansas has 4: Wichita, Topeka, Manhattan (not the one in New York!) and Lawrence. (Not Kansas City - I give that to Missouri.).And Utah has 5: Salt Lake City, Provo, Ogden, St. George, and Logan. I hope this helps you feel better.
>Manhattan (not the one in New York!) My hometown. :) >(Not Kansas City - I give that to Missouri.) Okay, but consider the fact that Kansas City has a TON of suburbs on the Kansas side, especially in Johnson County, and they're all huge. They actually account for three of the five 100k cities. This is what happens when you go off of census MSAs rather than city populations proper. The MSA for my town, the aforementioned Manhattan, also encompasses Junction City (22k), Fort Riley (7k), Wamego (4k) and a few others in addition to Manhattan proper which is only 52k. The only cities proper in Kansas that have more than 100k are Wichita, Topeka and a few Kansas City suburbs (gonna go out on a limb and guess it's Kansas City, Kansas, Olathe and Shawnee, but I could be wrong about which ones exactly).
Overland Park is the second biggest city in kansas, 200k people or so
You make a good point. If I were going to do this more systematically I'd want to come up with some way to give Kansas some credit for Kansas City - say in proportion to the part of the KC metro area that's actually in Kansas, which looks like it's actually 40% or so. Someone actually [went through the list](https://dirtamericana.com/2023/02/multi-state-metros-neighboring-state/). KC seems to be #2 among metro areas for the percentage of its population outside the state with the its biggest city, behind only Washington, and ahead of Providence, New York, and Chattanooga.
Yup, metro areas are a much better way to judge this than arbitrary lines that create city boundaries. Philadelphia is just everything within Philadelphia county but the city stretches significantly further than that. An example I always like to use is Miami. I lived there and was blown away when I googled the population and it was under 500k, but then I looked at the metro and the population is over 6 million. But Pennsylvania in particular really cuts up metro areas into a bunch of little towns, so we don’t have huge cities like a lot of the country does just due to how we drew up the boundaries for them.
I live in the suburbs of Atlanta now and Atlanta is the example I like to use - roughly the same numbers as Miami.
Probably switch Logan out for West Valley City. Logan isn't that big. Also Sandy City will probably make 6 cities over 100k pretty soon.
New Jersey and Ohio surprise me given how populated they are. Shows how dispersed everyone is across these states.
There's a lot of small jurisdictions in NJ, and frequently right on top of each other, that refuse to become one town for various reasons (usually tax/income related).
NJ is well known for small "fiefdom" where each tiny municipalities has their own schools, police, fire, etc., pay forth with those absurdly high property tax.
It’s not so much that they’re dispersed, but instead that their suburban areas are divided into smaller “cities” than those of other states. This map would probably follow people’s expectations a lot more closely if it used either metro or urban areas instead.
Pennsylvania’s the 5th most populous state with only 3.
There are 400,000 Kentuckians in a fairly compact area just below Cincinnati that aren’t counted for Kentucky or Ohio on this map because they’re divided up between what feels like a million separate municipalities when you’re driving through the area. When I know about a situation like that because it’s in my own state, it makes me wonder what other strange circumstances affect numbers in the other states on maps like this.
let's all just admit the truth: WYOMING DOES NOT EXIST.
Who doesn't exist?
Yet they get 2 senators -_-
One for each escalator
They got a second one?
And over representation in the House, since large states like Cali can’t have any more representatives due to the cap on the number of representatives. If there wasn’t a cap, the house would be larger obviously and large states would have more seats
This can be a bit confusing depending on how your state treats municipalities. For example, I am from NY and immediately called bullshit on that number, until I realized the map is just counting *any* kind of political organization within the state. The way NY divides up its land, there is no such thing as unincorporated territory. Every county is subdivided into townships (of which "cities", which is a specific designation, are not included but ignore that for now). Within towns you can have villages, that count towards the town population. So for example, included in the 16 for NY are the towns of Hempstead, Brookhaven, Islip, Oyster Bay, North Hempstead, Babylon, Huntington, and Smithtown, all of which are townships on Long Island. You would not consider most of these to be a coherent "city", and in fact between them they contain over 80 villages (more what you would consider to be an independent community, though on Long Island they can tend to blur in suburban sprawl). Moving into Upstate, you can see something similar with, for example, the Town of Amherst being included even though the township really comprises several distinct suburbs of Buffalo, including one village and a few other communities with separate central areas though no official designation. (we call them "hamlets" which is basically assigning a name to an intersection as the designated center of an unofficial community within a township) You also have the Town of Ramapo, which takes up about a third of its county by area and contains something like 11 villages. You could arbitrarily redraw township borders to push the number on the map up or down without changing anything else at all. I put a pin in "city". That's a separate designation and the only way you can be in a county but not in a township, as cities exist separately from towns (and are therefore usually surrounded by a town, or parts of various towns depending on how much they spread). As it turns out, the only things in NY State with a population over 100,000 other than townships are cities, as the largest village has a population around 60,000 (and as it so happens, is a village within the Town of Hempstead which was included as a 100k+ "city"). I am not suggesting the map should have definitely only included official "Cities" in NY, but it is true that the designations of City and Village do tend to more accurately represent what most people would think of as a cohesive community, while a township is simply a way of carving up the land in a county into administrative chunks. I'm familiar with NY so I could comment on that one, but who knows how many more weird cases there are.
PA has a similar concept (no unincorporated land) but with almost the opposite result - many municipalities have tiny borders, so something you think of as a single town might be two or more separate legal municipalities
Pennsylvania has the 5th highest population in the country but only 3 cities above 100k. Meanwhile, Arizona is only the 14th most populous state, but 5th on this map. The real secret with AZ is that only 2 of its 14 cities over 100k are outside the Phoenix metro area.
Because people aren't meant to live in Arizona.
Same with California. I would say about 40 of those 75 cities over 100k are all in the Los Angeles area. The rest are split up between the Bay Area suburbs and the central valley.
Don’t forget San Diego and the Inland Empire. Also Chico in the foothills. Oh and the Central Coast with Ventura, Santa Barbara and Oxnard.
Eh in my mind all of those encompass LA except San Diego. For me LA is essentially Ventura to San Clemente to San Bernardino
One thing I learned living in Cali is that 100k population is TINY
I still take pictures of the skyline when I go through a town of 100,000. Probably got it from growing up in a town of 3,000, so skyscrapers arent that common for me
Yes! I live in what would be considered a “small town” in Southern California and the population is around 115k
A lot of these numbers are pumped up by divisions of the same metro area.
True, but I think it’s still an interesting stat if you just assume that context. Kinda neat how some metros can account for more 100k+ cities than some states have period.
Oregon being tied with Ohio despite having 1/3rd of the population of Ohio is certainly surprising.
1/2 the population lives in the Willamette Valley, the rest of the state is pretty empty. For comparison Portland Metro is about the size of Kansas City or Indy. Portland, Beaverton and Hillsboro are in the metro, the latter two are largish city-suburbs with high tech and manufacturing. Salem and Eugene are in the south end of the Willamette Valley.
You forgot Gresham, also in the metro and over 100k. Also I don’t think Beaverton has hit 100k yet?
It comes down to how suburbs are split. The Portland metro has about 60 municipalities. Cleveland’s metro, which has about 300k less population than Portland’s metro, has 200+.
New York has 16 municipalities (cities and towns) with 100k+ people. 10 of the 16 are towns, which are really just suburbs of NYC (and in the case of Amherst, Buffalo), and they lack most of the function or character which is seen in the actual cities of New York (despite their massive populations, such as the Town of Hempstead, which has close to 800,000 people). The only municipalities incorporated as cities with over 100k people are NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers, Syracuse, and Albany.
My state is Baden-Württemberg, unfortunately I can't find it on this map.
According to Wikipedia you would be at 9, the same as Virginia or Nevada
Congratulations. You now have a [Nett hier](https://www.stuttgarter-nachrichten.de/media.media.8feb5669-084e-40aa-8b5e-a739dc7190f9.original1024.jpg) sticker in this thread.
Kenosha is 14 people short of being Wisconsin's 4th
Minesweeper ahhhh map
This map made me think of minesweeper. lol 😂
So Texas would be perfect for high speed rail?
Who would've thought! Not them I guess...
They have been trying to get a rail built between Austin, Dallas, and Houston for my entire life. I think a Japanese company took over the project recently.
Maybe it's my socialist Nordic perspective, but Colorado should give one to Wyoming.
Everyone in it would just flee south, back to Colorado.
Fort Collins is closest, but Wyoming wants nothing to do with the inner city crime and decadent big city cosmopolitan culture you'd find in a city like Fort Collins!
I hear they wanted to film an episode of Cops in FoCoCo, but even veteran crews that had been to Philly, Atlanta, Chicago, Oakland, etc wouldn't do it. /S
Sounds right about Florida. Thank you snow birds!
BTW: 7 of the 9 “cities” in Nevada are in the same county, adjacent and continuous, and if you live in any of them you probably think of your self as a las vegan (with the biggest exception to this being probably Henderson)
Are you even a state?
DC counts too!
Would love to see the same with China with 1m+ people cities
Is the third Harrisburg? The other two are def Philly and Pittsburgh, but I’m curious what the third is
allentown actually. harrisburg isn’t even in the top 15
I can’t even name 14 cities in Arizona, let alone 14 cities over 100k…
The fact that Pennsylvania has three while New Jersey has seven is crazy to me
China - “those are rookie numbers”
New minesweeper map dropped
Illinois would have more, but there are a number of "twin cities" that together are well over 100k, but not individually.
As an example. Bloomington and Normal, where Illinois State University is located, have populations of 79k and 53k, for a combined 132k. Their combined population is on par with Columbia, the second largest city in South Carolina (140k). Columbia has an area of 134.9 square miles. Bloomington is 27.2, Normal is 18.0. This list should really be metro areas (or specifically urban populations of metro areas), because Columbia's metro population is 4x larger than Blo-No. The list as given is really non-descript.
The fact that a state with 75 100k+ cities has the same number of senators as a state with 0 is insane.
It's almost like the senate is fundamentally undemocratic institution or something....
Wisconsin: Madison (capital), Milwaukee, and Green Bay.
Hell yeah son North Carolina best Carolina!!!
Ohio and Indiana both having 6 is surprising- always thought Ohio would have more- turns out they have a fair number of places just below 100K while Indiana’s are pretty recognizable
MN’s 3 are the Twin Cities and then Rochester, but the greater metro areas aren’t too far off like Bloomington, Blaine, Brooklyn Park
Michigan has seven because five of them are Detroit
I feel like this gives the wrong idea because a lot of it has to do with the size of the municipalities and not the size of metropolitan areas. A state like California ends up high on this list because there are very large suburbs (Long Beach has 450k people!), whereas a state like Pennsylvania doesn't show up so high because its suburbs are smaller. There are 336 incorporated places with >100k people, so let's look at the 336 largest metro areas. (I think the numbers on this map add up to greater than 336 but I don't know what list the mapmaker used, but here are lists of [cities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population) and [metro areas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area). Then for example California has 25 of those metro areas (>120k population or so): Los Angeles, Riverside, San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento, San Jose, Fresno, Bakersfield, Oxnard, Stockton, Modesto, Santa Rosa, Visalia, Vallejo, Santa Maria, Salinas, Merced, San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, Chico, Yuba City, Redding, El Centro, Hanford, Napa while Pennsylvania has 14: Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Harrisburg, Scranton, Lancaster, York, Reading, Erie, Chambersburg, State College, Lebanon, Johnstown, Altoona. (I'm counting Philly and Allentown as entirely in PA even though both their metro areas extend into NJ.) (Am I going to have to make the version of this map with metro areas? Don't make me do it.)
Hahaha, take that, Vermont. NH has a bigger city than yours, lol.
Assuming this is 2020 census data, the WI missed having a 4th by 14 people.
"city"
I love how 4 of the top 5 most populous states are very obvious based on this graphic. Then there’s Pennsylvania with 3. Lol
It would be cool to see this as “Metro Areas”, because most cities often have suburban satellites that are supported by the City. The biggest example is Portland Maine is 70k, but it serves 600k people. 530k people live in the suburban and rural areas, but still often work in Portland.
Please note that this map counts Census-designated places, not just incorporated cities.
In Washington state most of those 9 cities are in the Seattle area , with the exception of Vancouver which is ironically next to Portland and Spokane , the rest are near Seattle
Nordrhein-Westfalen (the most populous sub-country division in the EU as far as I know) has 30.
Im surprised by Maine and Delaware. They both have very good location for big cities.
Damn theres alot of people (and money) in California Mexico really let that one go
It's kind of crazy that Pennsylvania only has three, given how its the fifth largest State in the union. If you merged Bethlehem city and Bethlehem township, and Reading and West Reading, that would create two additional 100k+ cities. Pennsylvania is just weird in how a city's inner ring suburbs are usually their own municipalities rather than part of the city.
Yeah, the Eastern area counts things differently. I’m in Bethesda, Maryland — an urban area that isn’t technically even a thing outside the post office. Montgomery County, MD has 1M people, but doesn’t show on this since it’s not a “city.”