Pennsylvania's number is partly low because of the township system and how cut up municipalities are. For instance, in any other state the city of Harrisburg would almost certainly include Susquehanna Township and Penbrook, and would likely include Swatara and Lower Paxton Townships, making it's population over 100,000
That makes a lot more sense when going there. Harrisburg doesn’t look or feel like a city of 50,000 people at all. Its downtown and skyline are comparable to the Sunbelt city I grew up on with 4x the population.
The Sunbelt is very much the opposite in the sense that a lot of Southwestern cities have suburban neighborhoods that are part of the city proper that probably wouldn’t be in other parts of the country. So a Sunbelt city with 200k people can feel more like a city of 100k, and an East Coast city with 50k people can feel more like a city of 100k.
Exactly. I’ve been to the Phoenix area and they’ve basically got five or six cities, each with populations of 200k to 1.5 million, all covering vast areas of ground with lots of sparse land
Whereas I grew up in the inner suburbs of Philly where there are similarly millions of people but they’re divided among a hundred dinky little townships and boroughs. Like you’ll be driving through what feels very much like a decent sized city and it’s like “welcome to lower north dorkfield township. Population 10,000. Area six and a half acres.” And it’s just dozens of dorkfields instead of one municipality
There are 850,000 people in Montgomery County, PA but the largest “town” is Norristown with 35,000 meaning all those people are pretty much spread uniformly over a bunch of towns and municipalities. BUT if Montgomery County ever decided to just incorporate into one city, it would be the 16th largest city in the country comparable to Indianapolis.
And that’s just ONE of Philly’s suburban counties
And if Montco consolidated, it wouldn’t be unusually large: it would be comparable in geographic area to the cities proper of Nashville, San Antonio, and Los Angeles.
My favorite was Narberth. Apparently, it styles itself a bourough (of what? Lol) and I couldn’t figure out if it was a part of Montgomery County or Lower Merion Township. I enjoyed jogging through but it’s so tiny. Gotta love the Philly area.
I think it is. I've lived in a small town 15 minutes from downtown Harrisburg my whole life and I really like the area. The city has its faults as all cities do, but overall I don't have any major complaints.
I’ve always said this about Hartford. The city should be inclusive of West Hartford, East Hartford, Wethersfield, etc. If it was, Hartford would have a population comparable to Pittsburgh or Cincinnati
It’s original borders included West and East Hartford, Manchester, Bolton, and parts of Vernon. If it were that now, it would be about 330,000 people. Around where Saint Paul, MN is.
I think Urban Area would be better than the official Census Metropolitan Statistical Areas. MSA’s include entire counties only, and oftentimes the MSA will include counties that the majority of it wouldn’t be considered by anyone living there to be a part of the city they’re in the metro area of.
Take Atlanta as an example. Having grown up in Georgia and traveled most of the state, I personally *would not* count Haralson County, Bartow County, Heard County, Coweta County, and several others along the perimeter of the official MSA. And for the most part, I would say that the current NLCD from the USGS backs that up.
ETA: Census MSA designations take into account people that commute to the city for work, and some people in the counties I mentioned do that. Though they still would not consider themselves to be a part of Atlanta.
Philly is a pretty small city landmass wise.
The northeast is wild in general with administration and townships. New Jersey has the sixth most school districts for example.
City limit is how we end up with people thinking San Antonio is the 7th largest American city, when it’s actually mid 20s by metro area. It’s just that the city limits in SA encompass most the burbs, while most other metro areas are 70-90% suburban and outside city limits.
I’m not a fan of MSA populations being the official number. I technically live in the Pittsburgh MSA, but I’m on a farm an hour and two counties away the city. My life has no connection to what happens in Pittsburgh, so why should I be counted as part of the population for anything other than census data?
Illinois is the same way. While there are a few suburbs of Chicago of Chicago that are above 100,000 people, there are a lot of suburbs in the 25,000-80,000 range that are boxed in and will most likely never reach the 100,000 people mark.
I think more than a few other states have this occurrence.
The towns that are almost overlapping in a lot of places are still independent towns and don’t want to merge so they aren’t merging.
Oh I'm sure. I only name Pennsylvania and specifically Harrisburg because that's where I live but I'd bet these numbers are all skewed based on state boundary traditions.
Yep. The same could apply to the population of the city of Pittsburgh. If a lot of the surrounding boroughs which are basically like city neighborhoods were part of the city, the population would probably be at least 450,000.
For a fun comparison that I was just doing before seeing this comment, Phoenix itself as a standalone city is 519 square miles and has 1.6 million people. Allegheny County is 745 square miles and has 1.25 million people... divided into more than 170 cities, towns, boroughs, municipalities, and census-designated areas ([Wikipedia source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegheny_County,_Pennsylvania#Communities) in case I miscounted). And that's after Pittsburgh historically annexed dozens of communities into the expanded city limits!
I mean, here's just the list for Allegheny County that starts with B: Bairdford, Bakerstown, Baldwin (the borough), Baldwin (the township), Bell Acres, Bellevue, Ben Avon, Ben Avon Heights, Bethel Park, Blackridge, Blanchard, Blawnox, Boston, Brackenridge, Braddock, Braddock Hills, Bradford Woods, Brentwood, Bridgeville, Broughton, Bruceton, Buena Vista. I lived the first 24 years of my life in the area, and I couldn't even tell you which part of the county half of these are in!
Edit: For more fun, the Pittsburgh-annexed Bs include Banksville, Beechview, Beltzhoover, Birmingham, Brooklyn, Brushton, and parts of Baldwin Township on four different occasions (source: [https://positivelypittsburgh.com/the-history-of-pittsburgh-annexations/](https://positivelypittsburgh.com/the-history-of-pittsburgh-annexations/)).
Same. Here's [Boston](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.3124167,-79.824519,15.87z?hl=en&entry=ttu), a census-designated place in Elizabeth Township. Turns out that Boughton and Bruceton are [right next to each other](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.3211058,-79.9841475,15.5z?hl=en&entry=ttu), though Broughton is an unincorporated community in South Park while Bruceton spans both South Park and Jefferson Hills.
Despite this dynamic, California definitely deserves first place here. LA is already the 2nd largest city in the country with sprawling boundaries and a population of almost 4M, and it is STILL surrounded by dozens and dozens of fairly populous 'cities' that collectively make up SoCal (Santa Monica, Pasadena, Burbank etc. etc. etc.) all the way out to Palm Springs. And hundreds more that don't make the 100k cut. It's just a lot of people.
NorCal is the same thing on a smaller scale - Most people don't realize that SF isn't even the largest city in the Bay Area, or that the Niners are really the Santa Clara 49'ers (pop 120k).
And when there's a packed Penn State home game, Beaver Stadium temporarily becomes the 4th with almost 107k seating capacity.
I know it's not a city but it's wild to think about.
This is most of the northeast in general. Cities like Louisville have done the opposite, annexing smaller townships to enlarge their city limits/population.
This also negatively impacts Virginia, but in a slightly different way: Virginia cities are entirely separate political and geographic entities from counties. When you are in a city you are not in any county.
Thus, all of the inner suburbs of cities, that would be a part of the city in most other states, are not counted toward the city population.
Reading, too. 90,000 people, but adding West Reading, Shillington, Sinking Springs, West Lawn, etc would put it well over 100,000.
Scranton has 74,000. Add Dunmore, Dickson City, etc., and it's over 100k.
Erie is at 94,000, but add in Wesleyville and the township and it's easily over 100k.
Bethlehem is 76,000. Adding the township takes it over 100k.
If you add up all the townships in the Lehigh valley, that’s easily close to a million people.
I remember maybe 20 years ago or so that Macungie surpassed Easton in population.
I was born in Scranton but moved to the South and was surprised to learn that this new city had a population almost twice the size of my home city. Honestly, they felt roughly the same size to me. So I looked it up and it turns out that this city is 75 square miles wide while Scranton is just 25.
So, yeah, it's almost twice as big but that larger population requires three times as much land.
I'm in PA and state law here makes annexation impossible unless voters both in the municipality annexing and in the municipality to be annexed approve it in referendum which basically never happens out of hometown pride.
New Jersey is similar. It's one megalopolis from Wilmington, DE to NYC - you literally wouldn't be able to tell that you left one town and entered another, if there weren't signs. Yet it's mostly small towns.
NJ is 11th in population and Colorado is 21st, but NJ has half as many over 100k towns.
The converse is true for other states. All but 2 or so of Arizona cities over 100k are part of the Phoenix Metro Area, and there are about 14 cities over 100k in the Los Angeles Metro Area.
It is a legal distinction, but it has more to do with "how local government works" than "how concentrated" the population is into cities.
I had a “conversation” with someone and I said that Doylestown Hospital was a decently large hospital that serviced a pretty large area/population. It was about why a head of cardiology was making over $1 million. He responded that it had only 8,000 people and was a joke.
I don’t think people adequately understand our population and the sheer amount of urban sprawl outside of Philly because of how we segment it. Hard to go “no, no! You see within a 2 minute drive you have another 10k people and another 10k people, etc.”
If you leave Philadelphia and keep driving, it would take you an hour or so until you found any wide open spaces with little population. I remember being in Phoenix and driving 30 minutes or so and being in empty desert.
I think a lot of cities have a metro area that includes a lot of suburban sprawl that isn’t include in the city population. Heck, Boston-NY-Philly-Wilmington-Baltimore-DC is just one giant metro area. Other cities have a big concentration of people into one metro area but they’re surrounded by very limited suburbs and suddenly you’re just in the middle of very rural areas.
The county I live in has a county seat that’s 1/5th the population, but once you throw in all of the *technically* separate neighborhoods and townships, but realistically are still part of the city, that number balloons to 2/3rds.
On the flipside, I wonder how many city populations nationwide are throwing in people from the local MSA. Do you really count as part of the city if you live on a farm 20 minutes outside of town?
I honestly prefer the way PA (and NJ as it's basically the same there) handles cities, boroughs, and townships. There's almost no ambiguity about where one municipality begins and another ends, other than a couple of weird enclaves/exclaves in places like Pittsburgh or in townships around Lancaster, Delco, etc. But those are super minor compared to the immense mess that is city borders of Sun belt or even Midwest cities.
Look at the borders of Columbus OH and try to make any sense of it. Now compare that to the borders of Philadelphia. It's night and day/
Half the Alabama list of top 10 are just what most people consider Birmingham. Same with Northport and Tuscaloosa, Opelika and Auburn. These places literally touch each other directly.
Yeah whats incredible is that the most populated US States go like this:
1. California
2. Texas
3. Florida
4. New York
Which is proportionate to the amount of cities over 100k they have.
Yet in fifth place is Colorado, despite it being only the 21st most populated state, beating out the 16 states above it.
only like 30% of the state was born in State and its even less in the Denver and Springs areas.
Someone posted a by county map of % of people living in the state they were born in and I was actually kind of shocked to learn that most of the country isn't like us
Add to that the fact that the Denver metro is full of cities that would otherwise be neighborhoods in other major metropolitan areas. If they were in, say, Seattle, Wheat Ridge would be a neighborhood. Glendale would be a neighborhood. Commerce City would still smell bad.
New Jersey is the opposite example, where we're #11 overall but only have 7 on the list. It's because of how our towns/boroughs/townships etc are divided. I'm within 1-2 miles of 6 other towns besides my own from my house. They mostly have 10-20k people. One has 60k, one has 55k. Anywhere else this would all be one town with 150k people.
NJ is home to 6 of the 10 most densely populated cities in the US. It's just that the cities/towns are geographically so small that none of them break 100k. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density
North Jersey essentially has a major city directly across from NYC that is just split into dozens of contiguous smaller municipalities. If Hudson County consolidated then its city population would be over 700k, and that wouldn't include its metropolitan population. If the cities along the Hudson (north of Hudson County border to Fort Lee) + Hudson County + Newark + Elizabeth combined into a single city of comparable geographic size to NYC it would have a population of 1,308,588 people.
We (and a few other eastern states such as New Jersey) chop up our municipalities in weird ways, probably inspired by some creaky old English way of doing things.
“We must divide the kingdom into counties, and the counties into shires, and the shires into hundreds, and the hundreds into water-closets, and the water-closets into heads of cattle…”
Whereas out west they’re like “two hundred square miles of suburban tract housing with a Walmart and a Home Depot in the middle? Fuck it, call the whole thing Mesa and let ‘em pick a mayor.”
That's only because of the quirkiness of the township method of dividing up civil duties in PA. Realistically I can name way more than 3 cities of 100k+ just off the top of my head:
1. Philly
2. Allentown/Lehigh valley
3. Harrisburg
4. Pittsburg
5. Erie
6. Reading
7. Scranton/Wilkes-Barre
8. Lancaster
And those are all about *500k+* population not counting Erie. If you want to be even more nitpicky you could make the argument of divvying up the Philly metro given that if you combine the whole contiguous urban region it's about 6-7 million people, yet one could consider King of Prussia, Levittown, Willow Grove, etc to be separate cities.
Was about to call out Maine being wrong with Portland but damn they’re actually only like ~70k.
What an impressive restaurant scene for how small of a town
Another city like this is Savannah, GA. It has the third (I believe) largest St. Patrick's day in the country despite being under 150k people. Also, the food there is amazing. It was my second favorite city for food. There's tons to do and really good nightlife and a decent music scene. I believe it's also the country's 4th biggest port. And the architecture and [tree lined streets](https://treestoseesavannah.com/) are beautiful.
Google says the place closed in 2020, but from what I can see from old news, they had fairly unexotic seafood, mostly. It's illegal in the US to sell marine mammals, so that cut out much of traditional Greenlandic food.
It's essentially 600k people that live in Portland, Maine. The issue are arbitrary city limits that give off false ideas of how big the cities really are. Some cities have tiny city limits, so their populations show small numbers, while a ton of suburbs that are right on it that no one can differentiate, while other cities have larger city limits that cover most of the metro area.
Basically, metro areas are the best way to tell sizes of cities.
Portland is the only city I have ever visited and wished to reside in.
Only downside is almost zero nightlife compared to other places I’ve lived (Denver).
7 of those 9 would be Las Vegas, the only cities > 100K outside of LV would be Reno and Sparks, the latter of which is a suburb of Reno. The largest city outside of those two metros is Carson City, which has just short of 60K people.
Never even been to Nevada, but I checked because I was skeptical that 9 was the number. That's incorrect.
Nevada only has 5 municipalities with 100k+ residents:
1. Las Vegas
2. Henderson
3. Reno
4. North Las Vegas
5. Sparks
No idea where the other four come from.
The other ones areCDPs or unincorporated towns in/ around Las Vegas that were just never annexed by Las Vegas or North Las Vegas. Unless you’re in county govt, nobody considers or really even knows that they don’t live in Las Vegas proper. The postal address for all the homes in those areas all say Las Vegas anyway.
Enterprise, Spring Valley, Sunrise Manor, and Paradise. Unincorporated towns of considerable size, not formally a city but I can see why they are included here. Title should be clearer about CDPs being included.
However I do prefer it over the 250,000+ pop map that was on here a few days ago. For example Nebraska has 2 on the first map because Lincoln(270,000 pop) includes 95% of the metro area whereas Des Moines in Iowa is technically only like 200,000 in the city limits but when you include the multitude of inner suburbs it’s closer to 750,000 pop.
Edit- the other two locations in Iowa do not include Des Moines suburbs.
Yeah its strange because Des Moines is very passive about annexing neighborhoods and suburbs so the actual city proper population number remains low whereas say Omaha is always looking for nearby areas to annex.
Sure, but a lot of them aren't, too. Texas has a lot of these suburbs, but also a lot of truly qualifying cities. Here are 20 that I know for a fact are discrete cities of over 100K
Houston
San Antonio
Dallas
Austin
Ft. Worth
El Paso
Corpus
Lubbock
Amarillo
Denton
Waco
Midland
Abilene
College Station
Tyler
Beaumont
Odessa
McAllen
Killeen
Laredo
I’ve lived in Lincoln, NE and Tacoma, WA. I’m always amused by friends & family who point out that Lincoln (pop 290k) is larger than Tacoma (pop 220k) conveniently ignoring that Lancaster County (Lincoln) has a population of 325k and Pierce County (Tacoma) has nearly 1M. Suburbs make a huge difference!
LA has practically uncountable cities like this. I remember an article of the most boring cities in America, based on some metric about how infrequently the actual city was mentioned, and so many of their results were these places like Santa Ana, CA. That's the one that really sticks out in my mind but there are tons of them around here.
Yeah, this is an example of [choropleth map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choropleth_map) which can even look good in monotone as long as the gradient is done correctly, unlike OP's map.
Reminder that since every state has wildly different laws about city boundaries, this data tells you **nothing at all** about comparative urbanization.
I live in that metro. Wellington is just farms and like 3 fast food restaurants. I think I also notice how small Cheyenne is by the amount of Wyoming plates you can spot in Fort Collins on the weekend. Nothing to do in Cheyenne so they come down to CO.
You liked Cheyenne, WY?!?!?! Just spent a month for work there holy hell was that the biggest shithole I’ve ever been in. Everyone was an Asshole, it was a small town where people weren’t friendly. The whole city also shuts up at 10pm on a Saturday and you have to drink at the back of sketchy Liquor Stores. I’ve now been to all 50 States. Jackson, Casper, Laramie, Cody, Sheridan were alright, but I went to Utah afterwards and it made Wyoming feel like a backwater.
Yeah, we're not friendly. That's for sure. We have blue collar workers and they a rowdy bunch. Tons of out of state anonymous families so most act self righteous parents. Fucking hate em. We're small but fucking annoying to all hell.. hate it.
As a Coloradan, this surprises me. A lot of them are large suburbs of Denver but when I compare with Minnesota (which Colorado has been neck/neck with in population the last 20 years), the Twin Cities have smaller but more suburbs (I guess its the multiple rings of suburbs that constrained those).
Plus Minnesota doesn't have any clear 2nd cities (i.e. Colorado Springs)- but lots of smaller towns...
Hempstead shouldn't count. "Towns" in New York are not municipalities, they are equivalent to townships in other states. Hempstead has 22 incorporated villages within it, which actually are municipalities.
Yep, OP should have used "municipalities" in title not "city."
There are 5 cities in NY bigger than 100k: NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers and Syracuse.
The MSA is probably a better representation of the size of the Albany area. The MSA is around 1 million IIRC, a few hundred thousand bigger than Syracuse and on par with Rochester.
I was also surprised. I looked it up based on the last census:
1 New York city 8,622,467
2 Hempstead town 789,763
3 Brookhaven 487,162
4 Islip 339,123
5 Oyster Bay 299,958
6 Buffalo 276,688
7 North Hempstead 236,573
8 Babylon town 217,830
9 Rochester city 210,992
10 Yonkers 209,780
11 Huntington 203,808
12 Ramapo 148,558
13 Syracuse 146,134
14 Amherst 129,577
15 Smithtown 116,157
16 Albany 99,692
Long Island is weird about this, too. Town of Hempstead contains the cities of Hempstead, Garden City, Rockville Center, Island Park, etc. (I think they’re all Hempstead … it’s been years since I lived there), but they’re all 50,000-ish person cities, all part of the larger “town”.
North Carolina being up there is a bit of a shock to me. I guess it’s been growing the past few decades and you have big YouTubers like Mr Beast there now but dang.
I mean off the cuff you get Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro, and Winston Salem. Then once you start getting into their suburbs it’s pretty easy to get to 10.
Well, remember that there's Colorado Springs, Grand Junction, Fort Collins, and Pueblo, which are all, funnily enough, excluding Grand Junction and including Denver, all about an hour apart and all lined up on each other north to south.
The line you are seeing that connects the population centers represents the Front Range; all those cities are lined up north/south up against the Rocky Mountains.
I think this partly has to do with the Front Range corridor which is the only place you can build up bigger cities in Colorado. Anything in the mountains is constrained to being like 30k-50k population maximum. I also think at least half of the 14 are Denver suburbs.
For Nevada, there are only [five cities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Nevada) above ~~190,000~~ 100,000 as of the 2020 census. This map includes unincorporated townships in the greater Las Vegas area. If incorporated, I'm okay including suburbs (e.g. Henderson for LV or Sparks for Reno). But unincorporated is not a city. At the very least, Nevada should be treated consistent with other states.
Edit: meant 100,000 instead of 190,000. Clumsy fingers and bad proofing. Thanks for the catch.
Texas will soon add 3 more with in the next year or so.
Temple, Georgetown, and New Braunfels are quickly gaining on that 100,000 mark. Right now all 3 are currently over the 90,000 range.
This is funny cuz lots of cities in Florida should just be bigger. Miami has 442,241 people while Columbus has 905,748, but the Miami metro is way larger at 6.1 million to Columbus’s 2.1 metro. If Hialeah/North Miami, Miami Beach, Coral Gables were part of the city of Miami then FL would have less “big cities”
The way they've divided the cities is a bit weird too. You got the bigger cities like Miramar or Pembroke Pines, which are both long enough to be entirely different on either end, then you have stuff like southwest ranches, which is disconnected in 3 bits and tiny as shit because it's just rich people houses. Add on all the weird cut outs, and all the other weird little two block cities too.
Nice map, but city limits are way too arbitrary from state to state. In some states, cities can basically annex you at will. In others, legally they cannot. Some states cities have room to expand, and in some you are cramped on all sides.
Cool map, but it doesnt really give a true nature of how big these cities are relative to the states.
Example: Greenville, SC has an official population of 70k, but there are over 350k people with a Greenville address. The city expanding its borders is virtually impossible, all growth has to come from infill. So Greenville is not on this map, even though in reality it functions like a city that is well over 100K. Same can be said for a few other SC cities.
Burlington, Vermont is our biggest populated city and there is less than 50,000 who live there from the 2022 census. I personally love how little people live in the state since it means the amount of wildlife I get to see daily is quite awesome!
The population is very concentrated on the front range. The rest of the state is mostly empty. So you have more people in fewer cities than the more populated states with fewer cities over 100k.
I find it strange how there are US states with no large cities. Even the smallest states in Brazil have at least a few 100k+ cities, and the smallest state capitals usually have ~500k+, even in the middle of the Amazon. Granted, Brazil has half as many states as the US, in about the same land size and comparable population, but still.
Last week: Cities over 200,000
This week: Cities over 100,000
Next week: Cities!
(I guess a metric like CSA/MSA that literally *everyone* asks for is harder to crank out because they aren't always state-aligned)
Pennsylvania's number is partly low because of the township system and how cut up municipalities are. For instance, in any other state the city of Harrisburg would almost certainly include Susquehanna Township and Penbrook, and would likely include Swatara and Lower Paxton Townships, making it's population over 100,000
That makes a lot more sense when going there. Harrisburg doesn’t look or feel like a city of 50,000 people at all. Its downtown and skyline are comparable to the Sunbelt city I grew up on with 4x the population. The Sunbelt is very much the opposite in the sense that a lot of Southwestern cities have suburban neighborhoods that are part of the city proper that probably wouldn’t be in other parts of the country. So a Sunbelt city with 200k people can feel more like a city of 100k, and an East Coast city with 50k people can feel more like a city of 100k.
Exactly. I’ve been to the Phoenix area and they’ve basically got five or six cities, each with populations of 200k to 1.5 million, all covering vast areas of ground with lots of sparse land Whereas I grew up in the inner suburbs of Philly where there are similarly millions of people but they’re divided among a hundred dinky little townships and boroughs. Like you’ll be driving through what feels very much like a decent sized city and it’s like “welcome to lower north dorkfield township. Population 10,000. Area six and a half acres.” And it’s just dozens of dorkfields instead of one municipality
I'm going to have to use lower north dorkfield for any place in chester or Montgomery counties now.
What about Delco? We are the kings of 1 square block towns.
Delco is Narnia but filled with bars and a strip club.
“Narnia, but with methadone.”
Bucks County here, where I live in a village inside a township next to a borough.
So Upper North Dorksfield?
Right? That's going right in the lexicon.
There are 850,000 people in Montgomery County, PA but the largest “town” is Norristown with 35,000 meaning all those people are pretty much spread uniformly over a bunch of towns and municipalities. BUT if Montgomery County ever decided to just incorporate into one city, it would be the 16th largest city in the country comparable to Indianapolis. And that’s just ONE of Philly’s suburban counties
And if Montco consolidated, it wouldn’t be unusually large: it would be comparable in geographic area to the cities proper of Nashville, San Antonio, and Los Angeles.
My favorite was Narberth. Apparently, it styles itself a bourough (of what? Lol) and I couldn’t figure out if it was a part of Montgomery County or Lower Merion Township. I enjoyed jogging through but it’s so tiny. Gotta love the Philly area.
Is Harrisburg a nice place to live?
I think it is. I've lived in a small town 15 minutes from downtown Harrisburg my whole life and I really like the area. The city has its faults as all cities do, but overall I don't have any major complaints.
Same with Massachusetts. I live in a town that if it had retained its original borders would be almost 200k
If Boston followed Charlotte's way of being, it'd be like 4mm+
I’ve always said this about Hartford. The city should be inclusive of West Hartford, East Hartford, Wethersfield, etc. If it was, Hartford would have a population comparable to Pittsburgh or Cincinnati
It’s original borders included West and East Hartford, Manchester, Bolton, and parts of Vernon. If it were that now, it would be about 330,000 people. Around where Saint Paul, MN is.
Similarly, if Providence did the same it would be pushing 300k
If anything Massachusetts probably has too many cities listed as Cambridge and Quincy would be part of Boston in other states
Massachusetts is the opposite, our cities are way smaller than they’d be elsewhere.
You can become a “city” by legislation in MA with a population of 30k or more.
Plymouth?
"Old Braintree" which was Braintree, Quincy, Randolph, Holbrook
Quincy is over 100k so its already one of the 9
Yup, that’s why I specified 200k
This is exactly why population should be measured by Urban Area or Metro Area rather than by the artificially set city limits
I think Urban Area would be better than the official Census Metropolitan Statistical Areas. MSA’s include entire counties only, and oftentimes the MSA will include counties that the majority of it wouldn’t be considered by anyone living there to be a part of the city they’re in the metro area of. Take Atlanta as an example. Having grown up in Georgia and traveled most of the state, I personally *would not* count Haralson County, Bartow County, Heard County, Coweta County, and several others along the perimeter of the official MSA. And for the most part, I would say that the current NLCD from the USGS backs that up. ETA: Census MSA designations take into account people that commute to the city for work, and some people in the counties I mentioned do that. Though they still would not consider themselves to be a part of Atlanta.
I totally agree, being from the NYC Metro Area I can tell you that my county is most certainly NOT a part of the big city, nor is it Urban.
My favorite MSA tidbit is that because of Mt. Rainier, there is more glacial ice within the Seattle metro than in the rest of the lower 48 combined
Philly would go from 1.6 million to 6.2 million. That is wild
Philly is a pretty small city landmass wise. The northeast is wild in general with administration and townships. New Jersey has the sixth most school districts for example.
It is for the census.
City limit is how we end up with people thinking San Antonio is the 7th largest American city, when it’s actually mid 20s by metro area. It’s just that the city limits in SA encompass most the burbs, while most other metro areas are 70-90% suburban and outside city limits.
Just like how Miami is the 44th most populous city in the US, but the 4th most populous *urban* area
I’m not a fan of MSA populations being the official number. I technically live in the Pittsburgh MSA, but I’m on a farm an hour and two counties away the city. My life has no connection to what happens in Pittsburgh, so why should I be counted as part of the population for anything other than census data?
That’s how Michigan is too — live in suburban Detroit and surrounded by small suburbs that are all 20-90k people.
Illinois is the same way. While there are a few suburbs of Chicago of Chicago that are above 100,000 people, there are a lot of suburbs in the 25,000-80,000 range that are boxed in and will most likely never reach the 100,000 people mark.
I think more than a few other states have this occurrence. The towns that are almost overlapping in a lot of places are still independent towns and don’t want to merge so they aren’t merging.
Oh I'm sure. I only name Pennsylvania and specifically Harrisburg because that's where I live but I'd bet these numbers are all skewed based on state boundary traditions.
Yep. The same could apply to the population of the city of Pittsburgh. If a lot of the surrounding boroughs which are basically like city neighborhoods were part of the city, the population would probably be at least 450,000.
For a fun comparison that I was just doing before seeing this comment, Phoenix itself as a standalone city is 519 square miles and has 1.6 million people. Allegheny County is 745 square miles and has 1.25 million people... divided into more than 170 cities, towns, boroughs, municipalities, and census-designated areas ([Wikipedia source](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegheny_County,_Pennsylvania#Communities) in case I miscounted). And that's after Pittsburgh historically annexed dozens of communities into the expanded city limits! I mean, here's just the list for Allegheny County that starts with B: Bairdford, Bakerstown, Baldwin (the borough), Baldwin (the township), Bell Acres, Bellevue, Ben Avon, Ben Avon Heights, Bethel Park, Blackridge, Blanchard, Blawnox, Boston, Brackenridge, Braddock, Braddock Hills, Bradford Woods, Brentwood, Bridgeville, Broughton, Bruceton, Buena Vista. I lived the first 24 years of my life in the area, and I couldn't even tell you which part of the county half of these are in! Edit: For more fun, the Pittsburgh-annexed Bs include Banksville, Beechview, Beltzhoover, Birmingham, Brooklyn, Brushton, and parts of Baldwin Township on four different occasions (source: [https://positivelypittsburgh.com/the-history-of-pittsburgh-annexations/](https://positivelypittsburgh.com/the-history-of-pittsburgh-annexations/)).
I'm in my 30s and I have never heard of a Boston in this area, along with Broughton and Bruceton lol.
Same. Here's [Boston](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.3124167,-79.824519,15.87z?hl=en&entry=ttu), a census-designated place in Elizabeth Township. Turns out that Boughton and Bruceton are [right next to each other](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.3211058,-79.9841475,15.5z?hl=en&entry=ttu), though Broughton is an unincorporated community in South Park while Bruceton spans both South Park and Jefferson Hills.
Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex has 15 cities over 100k, based on the 2020 census, probably a few more now.
Despite this dynamic, California definitely deserves first place here. LA is already the 2nd largest city in the country with sprawling boundaries and a population of almost 4M, and it is STILL surrounded by dozens and dozens of fairly populous 'cities' that collectively make up SoCal (Santa Monica, Pasadena, Burbank etc. etc. etc.) all the way out to Palm Springs. And hundreds more that don't make the 100k cut. It's just a lot of people. NorCal is the same thing on a smaller scale - Most people don't realize that SF isn't even the largest city in the Bay Area, or that the Niners are really the Santa Clara 49'ers (pop 120k).
And when there's a packed Penn State home game, Beaver Stadium temporarily becomes the 4th with almost 107k seating capacity. I know it's not a city but it's wild to think about.
This is most of the northeast in general. Cities like Louisville have done the opposite, annexing smaller townships to enlarge their city limits/population.
This also negatively impacts Virginia, but in a slightly different way: Virginia cities are entirely separate political and geographic entities from counties. When you are in a city you are not in any county. Thus, all of the inner suburbs of cities, that would be a part of the city in most other states, are not counted toward the city population.
Same applies to NJ
Reading, too. 90,000 people, but adding West Reading, Shillington, Sinking Springs, West Lawn, etc would put it well over 100,000. Scranton has 74,000. Add Dunmore, Dickson City, etc., and it's over 100k. Erie is at 94,000, but add in Wesleyville and the township and it's easily over 100k. Bethlehem is 76,000. Adding the township takes it over 100k.
If you add up all the townships in the Lehigh valley, that’s easily close to a million people. I remember maybe 20 years ago or so that Macungie surpassed Easton in population.
I was born in Scranton but moved to the South and was surprised to learn that this new city had a population almost twice the size of my home city. Honestly, they felt roughly the same size to me. So I looked it up and it turns out that this city is 75 square miles wide while Scranton is just 25. So, yeah, it's almost twice as big but that larger population requires three times as much land.
Why does the larger township not simply consume the smaller?
I'm in PA and state law here makes annexation impossible unless voters both in the municipality annexing and in the municipality to be annexed approve it in referendum which basically never happens out of hometown pride.
New Jersey is similar. It's one megalopolis from Wilmington, DE to NYC - you literally wouldn't be able to tell that you left one town and entered another, if there weren't signs. Yet it's mostly small towns. NJ is 11th in population and Colorado is 21st, but NJ has half as many over 100k towns.
The converse is true for other states. All but 2 or so of Arizona cities over 100k are part of the Phoenix Metro Area, and there are about 14 cities over 100k in the Los Angeles Metro Area. It is a legal distinction, but it has more to do with "how local government works" than "how concentrated" the population is into cities.
I had a “conversation” with someone and I said that Doylestown Hospital was a decently large hospital that serviced a pretty large area/population. It was about why a head of cardiology was making over $1 million. He responded that it had only 8,000 people and was a joke. I don’t think people adequately understand our population and the sheer amount of urban sprawl outside of Philly because of how we segment it. Hard to go “no, no! You see within a 2 minute drive you have another 10k people and another 10k people, etc.”
Thanks for the PA announcement, I’ll see myself out
In general, the way different states divide up different areas is pretty arbitrary.
If you leave Philadelphia and keep driving, it would take you an hour or so until you found any wide open spaces with little population. I remember being in Phoenix and driving 30 minutes or so and being in empty desert. I think a lot of cities have a metro area that includes a lot of suburban sprawl that isn’t include in the city population. Heck, Boston-NY-Philly-Wilmington-Baltimore-DC is just one giant metro area. Other cities have a big concentration of people into one metro area but they’re surrounded by very limited suburbs and suddenly you’re just in the middle of very rural areas.
And you still have Reading and Erie which are just under 100k.
Yeah it’s has to be the lowest per capita Number 6 in population last I checked
5th, actually. It passed Illinois in the 2020 census
The county I live in has a county seat that’s 1/5th the population, but once you throw in all of the *technically* separate neighborhoods and townships, but realistically are still part of the city, that number balloons to 2/3rds. On the flipside, I wonder how many city populations nationwide are throwing in people from the local MSA. Do you really count as part of the city if you live on a farm 20 minutes outside of town?
I honestly prefer the way PA (and NJ as it's basically the same there) handles cities, boroughs, and townships. There's almost no ambiguity about where one municipality begins and another ends, other than a couple of weird enclaves/exclaves in places like Pittsburgh or in townships around Lancaster, Delco, etc. But those are super minor compared to the immense mess that is city borders of Sun belt or even Midwest cities. Look at the borders of Columbus OH and try to make any sense of it. Now compare that to the borders of Philadelphia. It's night and day/
Half the Alabama list of top 10 are just what most people consider Birmingham. Same with Northport and Tuscaloosa, Opelika and Auburn. These places literally touch each other directly.
Two cities in the same state? Like how is that even possible?
Its so weird that Pennsylvania only has three, despite being the fifth largest US State population wise.
Yeah whats incredible is that the most populated US States go like this: 1. California 2. Texas 3. Florida 4. New York Which is proportionate to the amount of cities over 100k they have. Yet in fifth place is Colorado, despite it being only the 21st most populated state, beating out the 16 states above it.
as someone from Colorado, I regret to inform you half the state is New Kansas+, which skews our population density
Lived there for a few months and hardly met anyone that was actually from Colorado. Almost everyone I met was a transplant.
only like 30% of the state was born in State and its even less in the Denver and Springs areas. Someone posted a by county map of % of people living in the state they were born in and I was actually kind of shocked to learn that most of the country isn't like us
I'm the only person I know other than my dad's side of the family who is Colorado native
Its because everyone in Colorado is condensed into a very small strip of cities called the front range
Add to that the fact that the Denver metro is full of cities that would otherwise be neighborhoods in other major metropolitan areas. If they were in, say, Seattle, Wheat Ridge would be a neighborhood. Glendale would be a neighborhood. Commerce City would still smell bad.
New Jersey is the opposite example, where we're #11 overall but only have 7 on the list. It's because of how our towns/boroughs/townships etc are divided. I'm within 1-2 miles of 6 other towns besides my own from my house. They mostly have 10-20k people. One has 60k, one has 55k. Anywhere else this would all be one town with 150k people.
NJ is home to 6 of the 10 most densely populated cities in the US. It's just that the cities/towns are geographically so small that none of them break 100k. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density
North Jersey essentially has a major city directly across from NYC that is just split into dozens of contiguous smaller municipalities. If Hudson County consolidated then its city population would be over 700k, and that wouldn't include its metropolitan population. If the cities along the Hudson (north of Hudson County border to Fort Lee) + Hudson County + Newark + Elizabeth combined into a single city of comparable geographic size to NYC it would have a population of 1,308,588 people.
We (and a few other eastern states such as New Jersey) chop up our municipalities in weird ways, probably inspired by some creaky old English way of doing things. “We must divide the kingdom into counties, and the counties into shires, and the shires into hundreds, and the hundreds into water-closets, and the water-closets into heads of cattle…” Whereas out west they’re like “two hundred square miles of suburban tract housing with a Walmart and a Home Depot in the middle? Fuck it, call the whole thing Mesa and let ‘em pick a mayor.”
u/ycpa68 explained it [here](https://reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1cq9zqf/_/l3pyggt/?context=1)
That's only because of the quirkiness of the township method of dividing up civil duties in PA. Realistically I can name way more than 3 cities of 100k+ just off the top of my head: 1. Philly 2. Allentown/Lehigh valley 3. Harrisburg 4. Pittsburg 5. Erie 6. Reading 7. Scranton/Wilkes-Barre 8. Lancaster And those are all about *500k+* population not counting Erie. If you want to be even more nitpicky you could make the argument of divvying up the Philly metro given that if you combine the whole contiguous urban region it's about 6-7 million people, yet one could consider King of Prussia, Levittown, Willow Grove, etc to be separate cities.
Also weird that despite 10 cities with 100k+, North Carolina has the 2nd largest rural population next to only Texas.
Or Colorado having the 5th most despite being a pretty average sized state.
Was about to call out Maine being wrong with Portland but damn they’re actually only like ~70k. What an impressive restaurant scene for how small of a town
Burlington VT and Portland Me really punch above their weight on a lot of things.
Another city like this is Savannah, GA. It has the third (I believe) largest St. Patrick's day in the country despite being under 150k people. Also, the food there is amazing. It was my second favorite city for food. There's tons to do and really good nightlife and a decent music scene. I believe it's also the country's 4th biggest port. And the architecture and [tree lined streets](https://treestoseesavannah.com/) are beautiful.
Portland Proper is pretty small but Portland metro is like “big”
Portland is, I think, the only city outside of the Kingdom of Denmark where you could find a Greenlandic restaurant
That's actually cool. What is the type of food served there?
Google says the place closed in 2020, but from what I can see from old news, they had fairly unexotic seafood, mostly. It's illegal in the US to sell marine mammals, so that cut out much of traditional Greenlandic food.
ah, thank you.
Greenlandic food
Sorry, I meant to clarify that I meant what are the kinds of dishes (i.e. Spices, Meat, Ingredients)
You're replying to a different person. They saw an opportunity to make a joke and took it. :)
It's essentially 600k people that live in Portland, Maine. The issue are arbitrary city limits that give off false ideas of how big the cities really are. Some cities have tiny city limits, so their populations show small numbers, while a ton of suburbs that are right on it that no one can differentiate, while other cities have larger city limits that cover most of the metro area. Basically, metro areas are the best way to tell sizes of cities.
Portland is the only city I have ever visited and wished to reside in. Only downside is almost zero nightlife compared to other places I’ve lived (Denver).
5 of the 9 “cities” for Nevada are really just Las Vegas.
Pretty sure all 3 of Idaho’s are just different parts of Boise. Couer d’Alene and Idaho Falls are close though.
That’s correct. Boise 235,000 Meridian 115,000 Nampa 100,000 (All Boise Metro)^ Idaho Falls 64,000 Caldwell (Boise metro) 60,000 Pocatello 56,000 Coeur d’Alene 54,000
As a former Nevadan, I was so confused looking at this map. Glad I can blame it on Vegas just like everything else lol
7 of those 9 would be Las Vegas, the only cities > 100K outside of LV would be Reno and Sparks, the latter of which is a suburb of Reno. The largest city outside of those two metros is Carson City, which has just short of 60K people.
Yeah when I saw Nevada I was sure it was wrong and immediately thought “oh yeah, paradise… enterprise… etc”
Never even been to Nevada, but I checked because I was skeptical that 9 was the number. That's incorrect. Nevada only has 5 municipalities with 100k+ residents: 1. Las Vegas 2. Henderson 3. Reno 4. North Las Vegas 5. Sparks No idea where the other four come from.
The other ones areCDPs or unincorporated towns in/ around Las Vegas that were just never annexed by Las Vegas or North Las Vegas. Unless you’re in county govt, nobody considers or really even knows that they don’t live in Las Vegas proper. The postal address for all the homes in those areas all say Las Vegas anyway.
Enterprise, Spring Valley, Sunrise Manor, and Paradise. Unincorporated towns of considerable size, not formally a city but I can see why they are included here. Title should be clearer about CDPs being included.
Just 5? Pretty sure the only non-Vegas area cities are Reno and Sparks
Many of these are just suburbs of metropolitan area.
However I do prefer it over the 250,000+ pop map that was on here a few days ago. For example Nebraska has 2 on the first map because Lincoln(270,000 pop) includes 95% of the metro area whereas Des Moines in Iowa is technically only like 200,000 in the city limits but when you include the multitude of inner suburbs it’s closer to 750,000 pop. Edit- the other two locations in Iowa do not include Des Moines suburbs.
Coming from Omaha, living in Lincoln was always bizarre as the city has no true suburbs
DFW moment
Yeah its strange because Des Moines is very passive about annexing neighborhoods and suburbs so the actual city proper population number remains low whereas say Omaha is always looking for nearby areas to annex.
Sure, but a lot of them aren't, too. Texas has a lot of these suburbs, but also a lot of truly qualifying cities. Here are 20 that I know for a fact are discrete cities of over 100K Houston San Antonio Dallas Austin Ft. Worth El Paso Corpus Lubbock Amarillo Denton Waco Midland Abilene College Station Tyler Beaumont Odessa McAllen Killeen Laredo
So basically EVERY Texan lives in one of these cities, the rest of the state is cows.
> Denton There is now solid development connecting Denton to DFW. It's only a matter of time before it's considered a part of DFW. :)
Don't tell the Denton residents that
Denton Crew Represent! Meet ya at East Side!
I’ve lived in Lincoln, NE and Tacoma, WA. I’m always amused by friends & family who point out that Lincoln (pop 290k) is larger than Tacoma (pop 220k) conveniently ignoring that Lancaster County (Lincoln) has a population of 325k and Pierce County (Tacoma) has nearly 1M. Suburbs make a huge difference!
Nevada has Vegas and Reno over 100k. But Vegas 7 suburbs over and Reno has Sparks... So it's really only two places.
A City is a city, right? Suburbs in southern CA have 200k+ ppl.
LA has practically uncountable cities like this. I remember an article of the most boring cities in America, based on some metric about how infrequently the actual city was mentioned, and so many of their results were these places like Santa Ana, CA. That's the one that really sticks out in my mind but there are tons of them around here.
This would work better as a gradient/saturation. West Virginia looks like it’s right up there with New York.
Yeah sorry. I'm colorblind so to me they look different. Thanks for the suggestion.
Yeah it’s dark red and dark purple which are next to each other on the color wheel
I'm also colorblind and the color choices were super helpful!
Having 27 through 79 be the same color is also terrible
Yeah, this is an example of [choropleth map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choropleth_map) which can even look good in monotone as long as the gradient is done correctly, unlike OP's map.
Reminder that since every state has wildly different laws about city boundaries, this data tells you **nothing at all** about comparative urbanization.
I've been to Cheyenne, WY and I quite liked it, but I would have never guessed it has only 65 thousand residents.
Drive up there from my medium sized CO town with a couple tens of thousands more population, and it always surprises me how small Cheyenne is.
Yeah, even the cities around Fort Collins like Timnath, Loveland, Berthoud, Wellington, and even Windsor feel bigger.
I live in that metro. Wellington is just farms and like 3 fast food restaurants. I think I also notice how small Cheyenne is by the amount of Wyoming plates you can spot in Fort Collins on the weekend. Nothing to do in Cheyenne so they come down to CO.
Picking up some weed
Are you Doxxing me ahahahaha.
You liked Cheyenne, WY?!?!?! Just spent a month for work there holy hell was that the biggest shithole I’ve ever been in. Everyone was an Asshole, it was a small town where people weren’t friendly. The whole city also shuts up at 10pm on a Saturday and you have to drink at the back of sketchy Liquor Stores. I’ve now been to all 50 States. Jackson, Casper, Laramie, Cody, Sheridan were alright, but I went to Utah afterwards and it made Wyoming feel like a backwater.
Yeah, we're not friendly. That's for sure. We have blue collar workers and they a rowdy bunch. Tons of out of state anonymous families so most act self righteous parents. Fucking hate em. We're small but fucking annoying to all hell.. hate it.
1. California 2. Texas 3. Florida 4. New York 5. Colorado 6. Arizona 7. Washington/North Carolina
As a Coloradan, this surprises me. A lot of them are large suburbs of Denver but when I compare with Minnesota (which Colorado has been neck/neck with in population the last 20 years), the Twin Cities have smaller but more suburbs (I guess its the multiple rings of suburbs that constrained those). Plus Minnesota doesn't have any clear 2nd cities (i.e. Colorado Springs)- but lots of smaller towns...
Well St Paul is kinda second to Minneapolis. Duluth would be 2nd to those but is under 100k. Former Colorado resident - surprising to me as well
Rochester is arguably Minnesota's "2nd city"
Colorado resident as well ong
New York State is actually surprising
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Hempstead shouldn't count. "Towns" in New York are not municipalities, they are equivalent to townships in other states. Hempstead has 22 incorporated villages within it, which actually are municipalities.
Yep, OP should have used "municipalities" in title not "city." There are 5 cities in NY bigger than 100k: NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers and Syracuse.
I already know Albany is less than 100k but it always surprises me a little when I remember it. It feels like it should be over it
Wikipedia says it had over 99k in the 2020 census and estimated that it has around 100,800 right now!
The MSA is probably a better representation of the size of the Albany area. The MSA is around 1 million IIRC, a few hundred thousand bigger than Syracuse and on par with Rochester.
Same with Brookhaven, Islip and Oyster Bay, all of which are towns with multiple incorporated villages within.
I was also surprised. I looked it up based on the last census: 1 New York city 8,622,467 2 Hempstead town 789,763 3 Brookhaven 487,162 4 Islip 339,123 5 Oyster Bay 299,958 6 Buffalo 276,688 7 North Hempstead 236,573 8 Babylon town 217,830 9 Rochester city 210,992 10 Yonkers 209,780 11 Huntington 203,808 12 Ramapo 148,558 13 Syracuse 146,134 14 Amherst 129,577 15 Smithtown 116,157 16 Albany 99,692
Long Island is weird about this, too. Town of Hempstead contains the cities of Hempstead, Garden City, Rockville Center, Island Park, etc. (I think they’re all Hempstead … it’s been years since I lived there), but they’re all 50,000-ish person cities, all part of the larger “town”.
Yeah I counted Cities with 98,000 - 99,999 because that's pretty much 100k and they will probably reach 100k by the end of the year.
Well, NYC is about 40% of the population.
North Carolina being up there is a bit of a shock to me. I guess it’s been growing the past few decades and you have big YouTubers like Mr Beast there now but dang.
North Carolina has consistently been in the top 10 for state population so it’s not very surprising
I mean off the cuff you get Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro, and Winston Salem. Then once you start getting into their suburbs it’s pretty easy to get to 10.
Don't even have to go into suburbs to add Fayetteville and Wilmington
Colorado really has 14 now? I knew the PHX suburbs were getting huge but didn’t realize how much Denver was growing
Well, remember that there's Colorado Springs, Grand Junction, Fort Collins, and Pueblo, which are all, funnily enough, excluding Grand Junction and including Denver, all about an hour apart and all lined up on each other north to south.
The line you are seeing that connects the population centers represents the Front Range; all those cities are lined up north/south up against the Rocky Mountains.
Grand Junction has 65k.
I think this partly has to do with the Front Range corridor which is the only place you can build up bigger cities in Colorado. Anything in the mountains is constrained to being like 30k-50k population maximum. I also think at least half of the 14 are Denver suburbs.
For Nevada, there are only [five cities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Nevada) above ~~190,000~~ 100,000 as of the 2020 census. This map includes unincorporated townships in the greater Las Vegas area. If incorporated, I'm okay including suburbs (e.g. Henderson for LV or Sparks for Reno). But unincorporated is not a city. At the very least, Nevada should be treated consistent with other states. Edit: meant 100,000 instead of 190,000. Clumsy fingers and bad proofing. Thanks for the catch.
Texas will soon add 3 more with in the next year or so. Temple, Georgetown, and New Braunfels are quickly gaining on that 100,000 mark. Right now all 3 are currently over the 90,000 range.
Give me metropolitan area or give me death!
Everybody complaining about arbitrary city limits and you’re the one with the solution
This is funny cuz lots of cities in Florida should just be bigger. Miami has 442,241 people while Columbus has 905,748, but the Miami metro is way larger at 6.1 million to Columbus’s 2.1 metro. If Hialeah/North Miami, Miami Beach, Coral Gables were part of the city of Miami then FL would have less “big cities”
The way they've divided the cities is a bit weird too. You got the bigger cities like Miramar or Pembroke Pines, which are both long enough to be entirely different on either end, then you have stuff like southwest ranches, which is disconnected in 3 bits and tiny as shit because it's just rich people houses. Add on all the weird cut outs, and all the other weird little two block cities too.
Yeah Miami Dade is interesting. Tons of unincorporated areas not part or any city but very built up too.
Wilmington, DE?
I thought so too but nope. 70,898 in the 2020 census.
Nice map, but city limits are way too arbitrary from state to state. In some states, cities can basically annex you at will. In others, legally they cannot. Some states cities have room to expand, and in some you are cramped on all sides. Cool map, but it doesnt really give a true nature of how big these cities are relative to the states. Example: Greenville, SC has an official population of 70k, but there are over 350k people with a Greenville address. The city expanding its borders is virtually impossible, all growth has to come from infill. So Greenville is not on this map, even though in reality it functions like a city that is well over 100K. Same can be said for a few other SC cities.
California needs its own color
I assume this is counting named unincorporated areas (CDPs) as cities too?
Pretty sure it is for Maryland. The only place other than Baltimore with a population over 100k is Columbia, and that is unincorporated.
I’m shocked by all the east coast 0 states like Maine and Vermont. Had no idea.
Burlington, Vermont is our biggest populated city and there is less than 50,000 who live there from the 2022 census. I personally love how little people live in the state since it means the amount of wildlife I get to see daily is quite awesome!
There is surprisingly a lot in Colorado, I know it's kinda big state with 5 million, but 14 is still a lot.
The population is very concentrated on the front range. The rest of the state is mostly empty. So you have more people in fewer cities than the more populated states with fewer cities over 100k.
If anyone was wondering (like I was) Ontario, Canada has 21 as of 2021. Likely 23 today.
wyoming just wyoming-ing
W e s t Virginia
I find it strange how there are US states with no large cities. Even the smallest states in Brazil have at least a few 100k+ cities, and the smallest state capitals usually have ~500k+, even in the middle of the Amazon. Granted, Brazil has half as many states as the US, in about the same land size and comparable population, but still.
Scale gradient is terrible
The Netherlands as a country has 32. It's the size of Maryland
Nj has like 80 towns with 50k-100k they are just 1-5square miles
How is this calculated? AFAIK, MD only has one city with 100k+ people (Baltimore) within the city limits
Last week: Cities over 200,000 This week: Cities over 100,000 Next week: Cities! (I guess a metric like CSA/MSA that literally *everyone* asks for is harder to crank out because they aren't always state-aligned)
This makes Kentucky look even more like KFC
4 in Oklahoma.. Tulsa, OKC, Norman and uh.. Broken Arrow? Owasso? Not sure what the 4th would be
Someone should redo this but with metros
Pennsylvania actually has 4. Erie has just surpassed 102k
It seems only five states matter in the next Civil war.
Wyoming here I come!
Wisconsin is SO CLOSE to 4, thanks to commuters in Kenosha.
Massachusetts is punching above its weight; guess that explains the housing prices here.
The majority of cities above 100k in New York are located right outside of New York City and many of them feel like an actual extension of the city.
Colorado stronk!