
How Suburban Are Big American Cities? - ryan_j_naughton
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-suburban-are-big-american-cities/
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scythe
The sampling is wrong. Picking the largest municipalities isn't picking the
largest cities; it's picking the regions with the best political organization.
Jacksonville proper has about twice as many people as Miami proper, but you'd
be insane to say Jacksonville is a "larger city": Miami's core is way denser
and the metro area is four times as populated. Similarly, putting San Jose on
the list instead of San Francisco doesn't make any sense. You could include
northern San Mateo county and Oakland (which adds up to 1.5M) as "San
Francisco" and you'd still get a higher ratio than in San Jose. Cities whose
boundaries sprawl are concurrently more suburban and more populous: that's
confounding.

A better list would be: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, San
Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Houston, Miami, Dallas.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Yeah, no one (at least here) thinks SF is a bigger and more important city
than San Jose. And for all its wanna be bragging as a big city, San Jose is
not the capital of Silicon Valley-at a minimum SV is diffuse and spread out
throughout Santa Clara County, spilling out into the surrounding counties.

~~~
mercutio2
Hmm. Certainly no one should think San Francisco is bigger than San Jose. But
more important? Certainly all my friends who live on the peninsula think SF is
more important! SJ is not exactly renowned for its urban features.

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akgerber
The methodology here doesn't seem particularly useful— they say Seattle is
seen as 90% urban, but apparently 40% of streets in city limits don't have
proper sidewalks: [http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/giving-everyone-
a-s...](http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/giving-everyone-a-sidewalk-
is-no-walk-in-the-park/)

Probably because most people define 'urban' and 'suburban' in relative terms,
and a neighborhood that might well be 'suburban' by NYC terms is 'urban' by
the Seattle definition. Or a 3000sqft. house on an acre lot in Orlando can be
'downtown'.

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com2kid
I am astonished at how much sidewalks cost per mile. We have engineered a
system so complex that cities literally cannot afford to do much of anything.

I live in a rather nice area that has sidewalks only where new homes have been
developed. There are huge stretches of roadway (some at 40mph) where riding on
a bike equates to having a death wish. (Yeah I know bikes are supposed to be
on the road, but at speeds above 20mph or so that is also complete bull!)

~~~
brohoolio
Sidewalks are cheaper than roads by a ton.

We have a mileage here where the city does all the sidewalk work. It's pretty
awesome, no more tripping on cracks. I think it's like $15 a year for my
$200,000 home.

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ulfw
That's one of those typical statistical fallacies. Depending on how you define
'urban' even Los Angeles (one huge blob of suburbia) suddenly becomes "Los
Angeles — despite its reputation for sprawl — is 87 percent urban."

Seriously now?

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natrius
Your understanding of Los Angeles is incorrect. The average Angeleno lives in
a denser neighborhood than in all U.S. cities except New York and San
Francisco.

[http://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2012/09/the...](http://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2012/09/the-50-densest-
american-metropolitan-areas-by-weighted-density.html)

~~~
mercutio2
You can't just casually link to that page and claim it's talking about San
Franciso. It's comparing the LA mega sprawl to SF-Oakland-Fremont. Fremont!
The very definition of suburbia.

So yeah, if you head off from urban areas and include their low density
suburban outliers, LA looks kind of sort of urban. But now I'm just repeating
the grandparent's point: people who care about urban-ness are likely to
consider both Fremont and LA suburban hell holes.

~~~
natrius
My point is that it's wrong to think of Los Angeles as the epitome of sprawl.
It is not. It is an outlier of density compared to most American cities.

"So yeah, if you head off from urban areas and include their low density
suburban outliers, LA looks kind of sort of urban."

This is explicitly the thinking I dispute. Look at the data. It is _weighted
density_ for each metropolitan area. It is a statistic used to eliminate the
problem of arbitrary borders making data noisy.

~~~
bradleyjg
After chasing a few pointers you end up at this post which defines weighted
density:
[http://austinzoning.typepad.com/austincontrarian/2008/03/per...](http://austinzoning.typepad.com/austincontrarian/2008/03/perceived-
densi.html)

I agree that it looks like a much more useful statistic than ordinary density,
and is relatively insensitive to arbitrary inclusion / exclusion decisions of
outlying areas like the grandparent complains about. Thanks for linking that
site.

~~~
natrius
Glad you found it useful. The census bureau itself shifted to tract weighted
density with the 2010 census, but I couldn't find a good city ranking on their
site.

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mbollier
Seemed cool until you look into the details - they gathered the data by asking
residents if they lived in a "urban, suburban or rural" area.

How many people who live within a city's limits are really going to say they
live in the suburbs?

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wtallis
> _" How many people who live within a city's limits are really going to say
> they live in the suburbs?"_

Tons:

> _" Looking only at respondents in the larger principal cities (those with a
> population greater than 100,000) of larger metropolitan areas (those with a
> population greater than 500,000), the breakdown was 56 percent urban, 42
> percent suburban and 2 percent rural. That means close to half of people who
> live within city limits describe where they live as suburban."_

"City limits" is a _really_ poor indicator of "urban".

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geebee
This was an interesting visualization. Nothing wrong with it as long as you
understand what is being measured, but I think it does leave out degrees of
density in very urban areas. Chicago and New York are both 100% urban, and
that does indeed tell you something, but there's still an interesting
measurement to take above the threshold used here for what qualifies as
"urban".

I actually find this review more revealing:

[http://beyonddc.com/?p=4808](http://beyonddc.com/?p=4808)

These maps show distinctions at very high density levels, so you'd see not
only how Chicago differs from New York, but distinctions within these cities
at a very high level of density.

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santaclaus
I dunno, Staten Island is pretty suburban. Same with parts of Queens. Hell,
parts of Brooklyn have streets upon streets of single family homes with large
yards that wouldn't look out of place in quaint Connecticut towns.

~~~
cbd1984
> Hell, parts of Brooklyn have streets upon streets of single family homes
> with large yards that wouldn't look out of place in quaint Connecticut
> towns.

I hear a tree even grows there!

No, that's really interesting. It would be amusing, more than anything, to try
to define some kind of "absolute urban" by which all other locales can be
measured for their urban-ness (or lack thereof... sub-urban-ness, I suppose)
and, if found wanting, decorated with big-box stores and strip malls.

So... how urban is Midtown Manhattan compared to Calcutta or Dubai?

~~~
rayiner
Dubai isn't dense, and Calcutta or Dhaka. Given Manhattan's extreme
residential versus commuter population ratio (almost 2x), during the day
Manhattan (if it were a city), may well be the densest in the world.

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bdcravens
The Houston graphic is interesting. Conroe is actually quite rural. The
Woodlands, however, is shown as being a smaller area, but it's very densely
populated, being one of the prime places for Houstonians to move to.

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sgnelson
As others (and the article itself) note, first define a "city." Is it the
arbitrary, and very political boundaries (of which each state, at least in the
US has various and different rules how cities come to be, annexation, etc.)

For fun go google "world's largest cities". I guarantee you will get a
different answer depending on the source, because each source defines a city
differently. Of course there will be some overlap (Tokyo will be up there,
along with a few other cities, but there is a rather large amount of
variation). How can we not come to a consensus over something that seems so
relatively easy to figure out? How difficult is it to count people in a city?

Again, what is a city? The political boundary? Is it the metro area? What type
of metro area? The parts in which people commute to the center of "the" city
for work? The surrounding counties that have economic ties to the "central"
county? (This is roughly how the Census Bureau defines Metropolitan
Statistical Areas, even though parts of the counties will have connections,
but other parts of the counties will not). The urban area only? Pick whatever
you want to call the city, just be consistent.

Let's say we go with a metro area, because it's more true of what a "city" is
than the rather simple political boundaries. Which is most likely going to
include if not other towns and cities, at least exurban areas that
(economically if nothing else) act like an independent towns, and all manner
of other interesting urban/non-urban forms of land use with people that all
surround some sort of central place.

Let's say that you've defined your geographic area that constitutes a city.

Now let's get to the very difficult problem of defining the differences
between urban, suburban and rural.

One of the more common answers to define "urban" is "population density," but
then of course you must create a threshold for what constitutes high
population and urban and what isn't. Are we talking about daytime population
(workers) or nighttime population (residents)? Because there are still a major
number of cities who's downtown will cease to exist after 5pm.

But defining what is center city/urban is actually not too terribly difficult,
it's defining the edge cases that it becomes a difficult question. Where does
the urban end and suburban begin? In most cities that are quickly growing, the
old inner ring suburbs are now becoming quite urban in character. Old rural
lands are now suburban. But where does one end and the other begin?

It's one of those things, like porn, you know it when you see it. You can
probably point to one area and say "that's urban." "That's rural." But you
(and me, and others) will all have slightly different definitions that while
most will overlap, we will always disagree on the cases that could be both
urban/suburban, suburban/rural or even (like parts of Detroit now)
urban/rural.

If you can do all that, please give me a call, because congratulations, you're
probably going to get nominated for a nobel prize in economics for precisely
defining a city as well as coming up with a generalizable and replicable form
of defining urban/suburban and rural.

(I could go on and on, but I won't but for extra fun, go read up on the
Spersopolis.
[https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sgo/summary/v035/35.2.hart.htm...](https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sgo/summary/v035/35.2.hart.html)
)

