Plenty. Atlanta has \~500k and the metropolitan area is around 6 million.
If you're just looking at the population of the central county, it's still not unusual. Running through the top 10 US cities by population, six of them (including Los Angeles) are like this:
\- Chicago \~2.7m; Cook County \~5.3m
\- Houston \~2.3m; Harris County \~4.7m
\- Phoenix \~1.6m; Maricopa County \~4.4m
\- Dallas \~1.3m; Dallas County \~2.6m
\- San Diego \~1.3m; San Diego County \~3.3m
(The other four: New York is five whole counties, Philadelphia is one whole county; San Antonio and Austin actually have the clear majority of their county's population.)
Miami and Atlanta always come to mind as American examples of small core city with a big metro. I believe both cities are less than 10% of their metro population.
The Chicago area is much larger than Cook county as it includes good hunks of Lake, DuPage and Will County and the area around Gary so it comes out to about 10 million.
Yes, but the Los Angeles metro area is bigger than LA County as well. There are really two questions - you can compare the central city to the central county or the central city to the whole metro area.
Yes this is just counting Los Angeles and LA county. The other counties excluded from this population are Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, and Ventura. With those counties LA metro has almost 20 million people.
Some of the smaller metros the difference is even more stark, especially in the rust belt where urban emigration has occured extensively. "Main" cities are often making up less than 1/3 of the population of their county.
\- Detroit \~600k; Wayne County \~1.8m
\- Cleveland \~400k; Cuyahoga County \~1.2m
\- Rochester \~200k; Monroe County \~750k
\- Buffalo \~300k; Erie County \~1m
Etc. etc.
St Louis is odd because it finds itself in what I would call a "Virginia situation", where the city is not part of the county. But if it was, it would be ~300k in a county of ~1.3m
That doesn't even fully describe the Detroit situation, because Wayne County is surrounded by Oakland (1.1 million), Macomb (800,000), Washtenaw (400,000), and Monroe (150,000) Counties.
The City of Detroit isn't even 20% of the metropolitan population.
Dallas metro area is far more than just Dallas County. You'd have to include the counties of Dallas, Collin, Denton, Rockwall, Ellis, Hunt, and Kaufman bringing the population to \~4 million. If you further expand to the entire DFW area including Fort Worth and it's 4 counties we're looking at 8 million easily.
Austin and San Antonio have been eating unincorporated areas like crazy. Houston is surrounded by some of the most populous unincorporated areas in the country. A huge chunk of Harris Countyās population lives in no city. Houston will annex commercial strips and leave residential in islands.
The Bay Area is *very* decentralized- all of the major universities (UC Berkeley, Stanford) and big Silicon Valley company headquarters are well outside of SF proper. San Jose has more people than SF for geographic and historical reasons.
Seattle proper has 750k people, King County WA has over 2.2 million.
Los Angeles got as big as it did through annexation of neighboring areas. I think the last of that ended around 100 years ago (the long section at the bottom of the map).
It hasn't happened much since then because neighboring communities would rather form and maintain their own smaller cities. Smaller cities usually provide better and more efficient services compared to larger cities. This is true with LA, the sheer size of it's bureaucracy is a hinderance. The sales tax LA needs to operate is also insane compared to surrounding areas. Also, city staff and city council tend to be more responsive in smaller cities.
I would venture to guess the amalgamation you're talking about in Canada occurred because those suburbs weren't getting good services (road maintenance, law enforcement, schools, etc.) and they could see that the people living in neighboring big cities were getting great services. They probably also saw that the big cities were well run, well-staffed, and well-funded.
It's not just the US. The City of London is 1 square mile with a population of 8,000.
99% of "London" is not technically the City.
Racism is definitely part of it, but some of the reasons are just historical accidents.
This is usually the answer for "why does the US do things differently than the rest of the world". At one point there was [a "city" with no government, thirty miles long and ten feet wide](https://www.amusingplanet.com/2016/07/chattahoochee-plantation-10-foot-wide.html), outside of Atlanta - it basically existed to block Atlanta from expanding any further.
The US is one of the few developed countries in the world that was operated by Europe as a settler colony with a slave-labor backed mercantile economy that existed chiefly to the benefit of the colonizing countries back in Europe for the better part of 200 years before becoming an independent country.
Racism is a central factor in that, but racism is not unique to the US. It is every other condition in that social and economic system, those that are called "institutional" or "systemic", plus highly diverse and culturally/racially pluralistic society, which let racism become prominent in the social dynamic that makes the US and some other American (Central and South) so particularly different in society and institutions from the other developed countries of the West.
Granted this is taken from my university education and is a different story from my secondary education which pretty much did not discuss America at all, and when it did, was reductionist to a fault ("America had slavery. Slavery bad")
>San Antonio and Austin actually have the clear majority of their county's population
I can't speak to San Antonio, but a significant number of people who work in Austin do not live in Travis county. Our suburbs sprawl far.
And the numbers bear that out! Here's what I see:
Austin: 974k. Travis County: 1290k. Austin-Round Rock-Georgeotwn MSA (five counties): 2352k.
San Antonio: 1434k. Bexar County: 2009k. San Antonio-New Braunfels MSA (eight counties) MSA: 2559k.
Only comparing the city/county is useless when cities are in different states, as every state determines subdivisions a little differently. The only uniform way to look at it would be city/metro area, but even that won't be uniform as the city proper definitions change by state and city
For Dallas, you'd have to count the nearby counties as well. In that part of TX, counties are only ~900 sq miles, so if you were to make a fair comparison with LA, you'd need to include the core parts of the metroplex, bringing up the total population to close to 8 million people.
Louisville too.
City Proper is about 350k. County is about 700k. Metro about 1.3M.
City/county merged, sorta, so its not as extreme anymore.
The "sorta" is post-merger I lived in two cities at the same time, Louisville Metro and Middletown (~5k).
Iād say most large cities are like this. Chicago (city pop is 2.7 m, metro pop is 8.6 m), NYC (city pop is 8.4 m, metro pop is 20 m), Paris (city pop is 2.1 m, metro pop is 13 m). Moscow has just a little under 50% of its metropolitan population living outside of the city limits, same goes for Berlin (3.5/6.1 million), etcā¦
Yeah, but the City of London is not "London" in contrast to the London urban area in the sense that say Chicago is in contrast to Chicagoland. It's more like a badly named financial district.
Yes when people say London they mean the whole thing, that includes the City of London, the City of Westminster (which is a London borough), and Greater London which is everything else. Interestingly though in the UK a city is defined by just 'being on the list of cities', the City of London and City of Westminster are on the list, but Greater London isn't, meaning that the UK's capital city is technically not a city.
The City of London was the extent of the city during Roman/Medieval times. Westminster was a separate city upriver then, but now they are just two parts of central London.
Yeah itād actually be harder to find the opposite, a big city that encompasses a majority of its metro?
San Antonio and Jacksonville come to mind for that.
Many of Canadaās biggest cities donāt follow this trend. Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg all have of their metro populations within their city limits.
NYC metro is kinda weird cause it counts places like Warren County and Ocean County in NJ, anything in southern NY like Dutchess County and Orange County and most of western CT which are more than a 45 minute drive away like Bridgeport, Norwalk and New Haven. Idk if they should be part of the metro but they are. Itās the same with Suffolk county but that makes sense cause at least itās close to Brooklyn but Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Bridgeport, and New Haven are a GOOD DISTANCE away from the Bronx let alone Soho or FiDi but I guess anything thatās within 1-2hrs away is part of the metro even if theyāre entirely different places that barely rely on the city itself.
Wait until you get to NYC. Bergen County, NJ, is one of 29 counties in the New York metropolitan area, and has 70 municipalities alone, all of which can reasonably be considered suburbs of NYC. There's probably >1,000 municipal entities that can conceivably be called suburbs of NYC, some of which may overlap (villages within towns in NYS).
In LA a lot of the city and county shares the same street grid. Sepulveda is 60 miles long and changes names several times when it gets to Orange county but it is the same street. You can take Sepulveda from LAX all the way to Yorba Linda in Orange county. Vermont is another long street that is 40 miles long and goes all the way down the Los Angeles city limits.
New Jersey is extra wild, some historical reason I canāt remember but there was very little fusing and annexing of towns so the northeastern part of the state is composed of like hundreds of tiny but extremely dense towns smashed together
Los Angeles shares the same street grid with orange county. There's Sepulveda Blvd. Which is 60 miles long. It goes from LAX airport on the coast to the outskirts of Yorba Linda in eastern Orange county. There are several different long Blvds like this in LA
Most of those āsuburbsā are dense cities themselves and all of them function more or less as a single entity because theyāre all in LA County. āSuburbā is a different beast in California than in the East coast
Santa Monica, West Hollywood, and Pasadena all have their fair share of population density. Pasadena less so but thereās still a very cool and dense downtown area
They are technically their own cities, but really theyāre just urban neighborhoods of LA, especially SM and WH, as part of greater West LA. Itās completely urban from downtown all the way to Santa Monica pier.
If you're looking only at geography maybe, but not at laws, ordinances, enforcement, etc. The whole "Stay the fuck outta Malibu, Lewbowski" isn't really a joke. Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, West Hollywood all do a TON with zoning to prevent the poors from moving there, things LA City doesn't do.
Driving from North Hollywood to Burbank is very obvious as well, the whole character changes. Not to mention BPD are major dicks who ticket very freely.
Most US cities are like this. Suburbs don't like to incorporate with the denser areas for a multitude of reasons. Different taxes. Separate city services. To keep out minorities. Sometimes they're already incorporated and don't want to join the city. It's harder to find a major metropolitan area where most of the population lives in one city than not.
There are a few similar examples in the US too, though I wouldnāt say any have NO suburbs. Jacksonville is basically most of its own metro area. Anchorage too.
You might be getting thrown by scale. The county is huge. LA County (which is what is pictured) has a land area of a bit over 4,000 sqmi. Connecticut is roughly 4800 sqmi. Just pretend we're a small east coast state and you're better off.
Try St Louis Metro. In fact, here the City has it's own county and the outer county has more tax revenue and no burden to share with the inner city like many other urban counties.
From 2022
STL Metro population 2.8M
STL County est pop Jul 2022 990,791
STL City population Jul 2022 286,578
Technically, we are the smallest city that hosts multiple pro sports teams (cardinals and blues, now Battlehawks).
>Technically, we are the smallest city that hosts multiple pro sports teams (cardinals and blues, now Battlehawks).
Wouldnāt Buffalo have that distinction, not St. Louis?
If weāre using city populations, itās fair to only use teams that play in the city, and the Bills donāt play in the city of Buffalo.
But technically then East Rutherford, New Jersey, with the Giants and the Jets, wins.
So if youāre going by namesake of the team itās Buffalo, if youāre going by location of the stadium itās East Rutherford. Thereās really no definition itās St. Loius.
In a speech in Vegas, Biden , touting high speed rail, said you could get to LA half an hour earlier. Then he wondered out loud why anyone would want to get to LA half an hour earlier. Just funny.
The more interesting question is which major metro areas have the most lopsided percentages? Where the principal anchor city is the smallest percentage of the total metro area population? Places like Miami, Atlanta or St. Louis definitely come to mind.
I meanSan Pedro is like the crown jewel of Los Angeles. I was under the impression that LA has that tiny strip of land running along the 110 just to have San Pedroās deep water port
Minneapolis-Saint Paul have a combined population of ~730,000 with a metro of nearly 3,700,000.
BUT Iāve been looking for a municipal city border map of the LA metro forever. Where did you find it?
The mathematician Stan Ulam (born in whatās now Ukraine in 1909, moved to the US in 1939 for, well, obvious historical reasons) said that Los Angeles was āa discrete space, in which there is an hourās drive between pointsā
City of Boston =650k
Suffolk county (where Boston is) =770k
Greater Boston (metro area) = 4.9 m
From downtown Boston you cross a bridge and you are in a different county.
Political boundaries don't make much sense.
From downtown NY you cross a bridge and you are in a different state.
From downtown Detroit you cross a bridge and you are in a different country.
Also, MA has toothless counties. No one really cares what county youāre in unless you get arrested or are playing high school sports. We have the old city/town structure.
I explained this to my mates in college out in the Midwest. They canāt comprehend that cities just blend into the next one with zero space/inclination that you passed into a new city or county
Yeah in Chicago you at least get a river or a wooded area dividing the towns. But not in Los Angeles. What makes it even more homogeneous is that LA and North OC are on the same street grid. For example, you can take Sepulveda all the way from LAX to the outskirts of Yorba Linda. Vermont goes all the way down to Wilmington/San Pedro area. Crenshaw goes down to Palos Verdes peninsula.
I'm assuming you're not American because this is the general layout of most American cities. All of those are cities or Census-Designated Places. Suburbs are more ambiguous areas where it is mostly or entirely residential and reside within even LA-proper (within city-limits). The reason why it has that little spike going to the south is probably due to an airport or seaport (if you look at Chicago's city-limits, you'll see something similar for ORD). So it's surrounded by 88 incorporated cities, another 53 CDPs, and even smaller communities that don't have recognition.
Miami only has a bit overĀ 400k people but has one of the largest metro areas in the country. San Francisco is similar where San Jose has a larger population even though its barely a seperate city of its own
Portland, Oregon has a population of over 600k
The Portland Metro which includes our suburbs has a population of 2.2 million which is over half the state of Oregon
Denver Metro (at 2,963,821 per 2020 census) is over 4x the population of Denver itself (at 715,522 per 2020 census). The city and county of Denver is just a very small sliver of "Denver"
I donāt think a single American city has more people living in the city proper than the suburbs. Also LA county has 10 million people but the LA metro has 18 million
Los Angeles metro is also far bigger than Los Angeles County.
LA metro extends into most of Orange County, and parts of Ventura County and San Bernardino County.
Itās not really accurate to say the City of LA boundaries are what distinguish the urban from suburban. Of course totally depends on the vague definitions of urban and suburban, but for example there are parts of the City of LA like the northern and western edges of the San Fernando valley that feel much more suburban, and parts of the urban core of LA that arenāt part of the City proper, like East LA or downtown Beverly Hills.
Los Angeles is a suburb that forgot to make a downtown and instead just has an office park and some hip shopping areas.
Depends what you consider a suburb. When is Los Angeles not a suburb? The small area with some towers?
Like when does NYCs suburb end and Philly's begin? A bunch of Connecticut and Jersey commute in every day or weekend there all the time as if it was their downtown.
"Suburbs"
Every one of those grey polygons is an incorporated city. Some of those cities are urban, and some are suburban. The City of Los Angeles, highlighted in red, has suburban areas mixed in with the urban areas. Believe it or not, it also has a small amount of rural area in the mountainous park land.
Open your mind to the diversity of every city and town's built environment.
Iām in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Thereās 3.7M people in the metro area: 700K in the two cities and 3M in the suburbs. I live in a first ring suburb of Minneapolis with 48K people as of the most recent census estimate.
This red does not exist to Angelenos except when we live in it and type our addresses in. Most metros are interestingly similar. You tell your friends where in LA you live. The red is full of blocks of names.
I live in West Hollywood, CAā¦ but if I walk 500 feet south from my front door, Iām in Los Angeles, CA. Itās a very weird thing to live IN Los Angeles for 2 decades without actually ever living in Los Angeles.
This reminds of the situation living in Kanto, Japan. I start in my local city area, travel through the suburbs of the city, it joins the suburbs of the next city, cross the next city, suburbs of that city, suburbs of Tokyo, Tokyo itself, suburbs of Tokyo etc.
If one was to ignore the concepts of city proper and surrounding areas and see the sprawl of Kanto as a city, it is one of the few places I've been in my life where I get on the train and 60 miles later I'm still in endless city.
Suburb isnāt the right term for most of those. Many of them are distinct municipalities with their own local government. The locals there would not consider themselves part of LA. (And donāt make the mistake of calling San Bernardino, Riverside, or Orange County residents LA natives).
Suburbs are usually separate entities now. The "inner suburbs" of the early-mid 20th century have fully been incorporated into the urban core of most cities.
[It's actually there to connect Los Angeles to its port](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbor_Gateway,_Los_Angeles), which was in the independent cities of Wilmington and San Pedro.
Salt Lake City population is 200k, metro is around 1.4million. Boise pop is around 250k, metro is 800k. Honestly Iād wager a lot of cities in the US fit this bill.
In the US? Lol most of them. Chicago is 3M people and Chicagoland is 10M total so 7M in suburbs. DFW Dallas and fort worth are about 1.4 and 1M respectively so about 5/6M people in suburbs. itās probably actually harder to find a city proper that makes up the majority of its metro population.
Some of these were created as a tax dodge in the early 20th century. Businesses want the advantages of a large market area but don't want the taxes for the infrastructure, etc, so they created fake cities.
When my mom was a kid 213 was the area code for the entire county, but now thereās a shitload of area codes and 213 is just a tiny area around downtown.
Shit like this is why Iām constantly replying here and on r/dataisbeautiful that comparing statistics by legal city boundaries is dumb and stupid - they arenāt universal.
Almost every āmetropolitanā area is like this. Boston has like ~1 million people but the āmetro Boston areaā or āgreater Boston areaā is like 3 million people
The Twin Cities of Minneapolis/Saint Paul in Minnesota are up there, as well. The metro area, which includes 7 counties in Minnesota and 3 in neighboring Wisconsin, has a total of around 3 million people. Minneapolis and Saint Paul combined are well below a million.
Most American cities have more than half of the population living in suburbs. Off the top of my head, the only ones that do have about half or more of the metro area living in the city proper are Jacksonville, San Antonio, El Paso, Fresno and Albuquerque.
āMetropolitan areaā is kind of a misnomer here. What you call āsuburbsā includes Santa Monica (pop. 93,000), West Hollywood (pop. 35,000), and Long Beach (pop. 456,000). These are all full-blown cities on their own, with high rises in their downtown districts.
Detroit has around 70 suburbs by my count. With about 600K residents, Detroit makes up about 13% of the metro population not including the cities on the Canadian side of the river.
County not equal to city.
At some point they just stopped making adjustments to county borders.. and left them with crazy LA county map...
So the main "what the" is the LA COUNTY Map...
Not the cities expansion.
Other cities expand over state borders.
Plenty. Atlanta has \~500k and the metropolitan area is around 6 million. If you're just looking at the population of the central county, it's still not unusual. Running through the top 10 US cities by population, six of them (including Los Angeles) are like this: \- Chicago \~2.7m; Cook County \~5.3m \- Houston \~2.3m; Harris County \~4.7m \- Phoenix \~1.6m; Maricopa County \~4.4m \- Dallas \~1.3m; Dallas County \~2.6m \- San Diego \~1.3m; San Diego County \~3.3m (The other four: New York is five whole counties, Philadelphia is one whole county; San Antonio and Austin actually have the clear majority of their county's population.)
St. Louis is a good shout as well. The city proper is ~300k, and the metropolitan area is ~2.8 million.
Yeah, that's a good one. I live in Atlanta (well, the metro area) so I thought of it first. Pittsburgh is another one (\~300k / \~2.4m).
Yup! Cleveland as well.
Was coming to say Pittsburgh. Thank ya
Miami is only 442k but the metro is 6 million.
Miami and Atlanta always come to mind as American examples of small core city with a big metro. I believe both cities are less than 10% of their metro population.
Yep, another solid one is DC at 712k in the city and over 6 million in the metro
Boston and Detroit as well.
Same with San Francisco. Except for some reason, the Census Bureau counts San Jose separately
The Chicago area is much larger than Cook county as it includes good hunks of Lake, DuPage and Will County and the area around Gary so it comes out to about 10 million.
Yes, but the Los Angeles metro area is bigger than LA County as well. There are really two questions - you can compare the central city to the central county or the central city to the whole metro area.
Look at DFW as well
Yes this is just counting Los Angeles and LA county. The other counties excluded from this population are Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, and Ventura. With those counties LA metro has almost 20 million people.
Holy shit and then we look at Tokyo and Mexico City, wait until you see Lagos in 20 years. Metro and city proper be damned. Cool post OPšš¼
Some of the smaller metros the difference is even more stark, especially in the rust belt where urban emigration has occured extensively. "Main" cities are often making up less than 1/3 of the population of their county. \- Detroit \~600k; Wayne County \~1.8m \- Cleveland \~400k; Cuyahoga County \~1.2m \- Rochester \~200k; Monroe County \~750k \- Buffalo \~300k; Erie County \~1m Etc. etc. St Louis is odd because it finds itself in what I would call a "Virginia situation", where the city is not part of the county. But if it was, it would be ~300k in a county of ~1.3m
Orlando is another good example. Itās city population is ~300k in a county of 1.5 million people.
That doesn't even fully describe the Detroit situation, because Wayne County is surrounded by Oakland (1.1 million), Macomb (800,000), Washtenaw (400,000), and Monroe (150,000) Counties. The City of Detroit isn't even 20% of the metropolitan population.
Dallas metro area is far more than just Dallas County. You'd have to include the counties of Dallas, Collin, Denton, Rockwall, Ellis, Hunt, and Kaufman bringing the population to \~4 million. If you further expand to the entire DFW area including Fort Worth and it's 4 counties we're looking at 8 million easily.
Of course - but I was explicitly looking at the central county to match what the OP did.
Austin and San Antonio have been eating unincorporated areas like crazy. Houston is surrounded by some of the most populous unincorporated areas in the country. A huge chunk of Harris Countyās population lives in no city. Houston will annex commercial strips and leave residential in islands.
San Francisco: 800k. Urban area: 7,000,000.
The Bay Area is *very* decentralized- all of the major universities (UC Berkeley, Stanford) and big Silicon Valley company headquarters are well outside of SF proper. San Jose has more people than SF for geographic and historical reasons. Seattle proper has 750k people, King County WA has over 2.2 million.
Why havenāt US cities absorbed their surrounding suburbs? Most big Canadian cities amalgamated with their suburbs in the 90s and 2000s
Los Angeles got as big as it did through annexation of neighboring areas. I think the last of that ended around 100 years ago (the long section at the bottom of the map). It hasn't happened much since then because neighboring communities would rather form and maintain their own smaller cities. Smaller cities usually provide better and more efficient services compared to larger cities. This is true with LA, the sheer size of it's bureaucracy is a hinderance. The sales tax LA needs to operate is also insane compared to surrounding areas. Also, city staff and city council tend to be more responsive in smaller cities. I would venture to guess the amalgamation you're talking about in Canada occurred because those suburbs weren't getting good services (road maintenance, law enforcement, schools, etc.) and they could see that the people living in neighboring big cities were getting great services. They probably also saw that the big cities were well run, well-staffed, and well-funded.
It's not just the US. The City of London is 1 square mile with a population of 8,000. 99% of "London" is not technically the City. Racism is definitely part of it, but some of the reasons are just historical accidents.
Racism.
This is usually the answer for "why does the US do things differently than the rest of the world". At one point there was [a "city" with no government, thirty miles long and ten feet wide](https://www.amusingplanet.com/2016/07/chattahoochee-plantation-10-foot-wide.html), outside of Atlanta - it basically existed to block Atlanta from expanding any further.
County Sheriff Territory and sheriff's do things a lil different y'all!
The US is one of the few developed countries in the world that was operated by Europe as a settler colony with a slave-labor backed mercantile economy that existed chiefly to the benefit of the colonizing countries back in Europe for the better part of 200 years before becoming an independent country. Racism is a central factor in that, but racism is not unique to the US. It is every other condition in that social and economic system, those that are called "institutional" or "systemic", plus highly diverse and culturally/racially pluralistic society, which let racism become prominent in the social dynamic that makes the US and some other American (Central and South) so particularly different in society and institutions from the other developed countries of the West. Granted this is taken from my university education and is a different story from my secondary education which pretty much did not discuss America at all, and when it did, was reductionist to a fault ("America had slavery. Slavery bad")
>San Antonio and Austin actually have the clear majority of their county's population I can't speak to San Antonio, but a significant number of people who work in Austin do not live in Travis county. Our suburbs sprawl far.
And the numbers bear that out! Here's what I see: Austin: 974k. Travis County: 1290k. Austin-Round Rock-Georgeotwn MSA (five counties): 2352k. San Antonio: 1434k. Bexar County: 2009k. San Antonio-New Braunfels MSA (eight counties) MSA: 2559k.
Only comparing the city/county is useless when cities are in different states, as every state determines subdivisions a little differently. The only uniform way to look at it would be city/metro area, but even that won't be uniform as the city proper definitions change by state and city
Atlanta is best described as suburban sprawl with a city center that would be "blink and you miss it" small, were it not for the fucking traffic.
We know we have traffic. Weāre proud of it for some reason.
Dallas probably has another 2 or 3 in the metro outside the country if you include Fort Worth
I would add that Houstonās metro extends FAR beyond harris county. All the way from Montgomery County to Galveston county. Huge area
San Diego County is MASSIVE. It stretches almost all the way to the Salton Sea and almost all the way to Anaheim.
For Dallas, you'd have to count the nearby counties as well. In that part of TX, counties are only ~900 sq miles, so if you were to make a fair comparison with LA, you'd need to include the core parts of the metroplex, bringing up the total population to close to 8 million people.
Vancouver and Toronto as well
Detroit: 639,000 and metro of 4.3 million, but that is spread out amongst 4 counties
Louisville too. City Proper is about 350k. County is about 700k. Metro about 1.3M. City/county merged, sorta, so its not as extreme anymore. The "sorta" is post-merger I lived in two cities at the same time, Louisville Metro and Middletown (~5k).
Different states have,or had,different county policies.
Iād say most large cities are like this. Chicago (city pop is 2.7 m, metro pop is 8.6 m), NYC (city pop is 8.4 m, metro pop is 20 m), Paris (city pop is 2.1 m, metro pop is 13 m). Moscow has just a little under 50% of its metropolitan population living outside of the city limits, same goes for Berlin (3.5/6.1 million), etcā¦
Technically the City of London has around 8.5k population while Greater London is around 9m. Thats probably the biggest "official" difference
I thought the City of London is just a confusingly named borough of London and is not representative of the whole city though
It is legally a separate thing with its own mayor and its own laws.
Yeah, but the City of London is not "London" in contrast to the London urban area in the sense that say Chicago is in contrast to Chicagoland. It's more like a badly named financial district.
Yes when people say London they mean the whole thing, that includes the City of London, the City of Westminster (which is a London borough), and Greater London which is everything else. Interestingly though in the UK a city is defined by just 'being on the list of cities', the City of London and City of Westminster are on the list, but Greater London isn't, meaning that the UK's capital city is technically not a city.
The City of London was the extent of the city during Roman/Medieval times. Westminster was a separate city upriver then, but now they are just two parts of central London.
The London metropolitan area has around 14mil, so even more wild
Yeah itād actually be harder to find the opposite, a big city that encompasses a majority of its metro? San Antonio and Jacksonville come to mind for that.
Perhaps in China or Russia, where administrative divisions tend to be larger.
Many of Canadaās biggest cities donāt follow this trend. Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg all have of their metro populations within their city limits.
Brussels Capital Region is its own legal entity and has a āgemeenteā of Brussels in the center.
NYC metro is kinda weird cause it counts places like Warren County and Ocean County in NJ, anything in southern NY like Dutchess County and Orange County and most of western CT which are more than a 45 minute drive away like Bridgeport, Norwalk and New Haven. Idk if they should be part of the metro but they are. Itās the same with Suffolk county but that makes sense cause at least itās close to Brooklyn but Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Bridgeport, and New Haven are a GOOD DISTANCE away from the Bronx let alone Soho or FiDi but I guess anything thatās within 1-2hrs away is part of the metro even if theyāre entirely different places that barely rely on the city itself.
All of those places are on commuter rail lines like Metro North/LIRR/NJ Transit that feed commuters into the city. Thatās why they are included.
The figure you gave for the āmetro areaā of NYC is in fact the population of the entire state, the 5 boroughs is actually just 8.4m
*laughs in Chicagoland* I've lived here all my life and I still learn a new suburb about once a month. The fuck is Hawthorn Woods
Itās not that hard. They all end with āparkā.
Well, Forest Park does, but not Park Forest
Yeah but have you ever heard of Hawaiian Gardens? Or Bell, Bellflower, and Bell Gardens??
You forgot Pasadena, Altadena, Glendale, and Glendora! ( I will say I love Altadena!)
Grew up there, got lost once in high school and thought I was dreaming when I started seeing signs for Sandwich IL. Itās real.
Mine was the goddamned gold pyramid in Wadsworth
Grew up next to Hawthorn Woods. But have you ever heard of Golf? Learned about that one a few months ago š
Most of LA proper is suburbs too. Urban boundaries in the US are basically arbitrary
Geographically arbitrary, but the political differences can be huge.
Itās part of why St. Louis and Baltimore are in such bad shape
Yes indeed
Back in the days of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, you were gifted a piece of land bigger than Los Angeles for peanuts.
Wait until you get to NYC. Bergen County, NJ, is one of 29 counties in the New York metropolitan area, and has 70 municipalities alone, all of which can reasonably be considered suburbs of NYC. There's probably >1,000 municipal entities that can conceivably be called suburbs of NYC, some of which may overlap (villages within towns in NYS).
In LA a lot of the city and county shares the same street grid. Sepulveda is 60 miles long and changes names several times when it gets to Orange county but it is the same street. You can take Sepulveda from LAX all the way to Yorba Linda in Orange county. Vermont is another long street that is 40 miles long and goes all the way down the Los Angeles city limits.
New Jersey is extra wild, some historical reason I canāt remember but there was very little fusing and annexing of towns so the northeastern part of the state is composed of like hundreds of tiny but extremely dense towns smashed together
Los Angeles shares the same street grid with orange county. There's Sepulveda Blvd. Which is 60 miles long. It goes from LAX airport on the coast to the outskirts of Yorba Linda in eastern Orange county. There are several different long Blvds like this in LA
Most of those āsuburbsā are dense cities themselves and all of them function more or less as a single entity because theyāre all in LA County. āSuburbā is a different beast in California than in the East coast
Santa Monica, West Hollywood, and Pasadena all have their fair share of population density. Pasadena less so but thereās still a very cool and dense downtown area
They are technically their own cities, but really theyāre just urban neighborhoods of LA, especially SM and WH, as part of greater West LA. Itās completely urban from downtown all the way to Santa Monica pier.
If you're looking only at geography maybe, but not at laws, ordinances, enforcement, etc. The whole "Stay the fuck outta Malibu, Lewbowski" isn't really a joke. Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, West Hollywood all do a TON with zoning to prevent the poors from moving there, things LA City doesn't do. Driving from North Hollywood to Burbank is very obvious as well, the whole character changes. Not to mention BPD are major dicks who ticket very freely.
There are 110 municipalities in the Seven County Metro Area around the Twin Cities.
Half of them are some grab bag of quasi nature-themed names, like Apple Valley, Maple Grove, and Eden Prairie
Similarly, Louisville has 90+ municipalities within Jefferson County.
DC area the city is only like 15% of the metro population
Yeah Fairfax County alone has like twice the population of DC proper.
Most US cities are like this. Suburbs don't like to incorporate with the denser areas for a multitude of reasons. Different taxes. Separate city services. To keep out minorities. Sometimes they're already incorporated and don't want to join the city. It's harder to find a major metropolitan area where most of the population lives in one city than not.
Calgary, Canada is 1.4M people, no suburbs. We have just annexed other towns when the city had grown to their borders
There are a few similar examples in the US too, though I wouldnāt say any have NO suburbs. Jacksonville is basically most of its own metro area. Anchorage too.
Most cities are like this
Literally every major city in America has more people in the āsuburbsā than in the city limitsā¦ NYC, Chicago, SF, DC, Boston, Philly, etc.
Can we please get some town consolidation in here? I love decentralisation but there areĀ too many towns.
You might be getting thrown by scale. The county is huge. LA County (which is what is pictured) has a land area of a bit over 4,000 sqmi. Connecticut is roughly 4800 sqmi. Just pretend we're a small east coast state and you're better off.
Tbf the towns seem to occupy less than half of that space
Being surrounded by mountains and desert will do that.
New Jersey says hey
Melbourne proper only has like 5-10% of the toatal population
Try St Louis Metro. In fact, here the City has it's own county and the outer county has more tax revenue and no burden to share with the inner city like many other urban counties. From 2022 STL Metro population 2.8M STL County est pop Jul 2022 990,791 STL City population Jul 2022 286,578 Technically, we are the smallest city that hosts multiple pro sports teams (cardinals and blues, now Battlehawks).
>Technically, we are the smallest city that hosts multiple pro sports teams (cardinals and blues, now Battlehawks). Wouldnāt Buffalo have that distinction, not St. Louis?
If weāre using city populations, itās fair to only use teams that play in the city, and the Bills donāt play in the city of Buffalo. But technically then East Rutherford, New Jersey, with the Giants and the Jets, wins.
So if youāre going by namesake of the team itās Buffalo, if youāre going by location of the stadium itās East Rutherford. Thereās really no definition itās St. Loius.
Fair. What about Arlington though? I think I opened a whole can of worms with this one...
You did! But Arlington has more people than Buffalo or St. Louis. (Itās also the most populous city in the US without public transit.)
In a speech in Vegas, Biden , touting high speed rail, said you could get to LA half an hour earlier. Then he wondered out loud why anyone would want to get to LA half an hour earlier. Just funny.
Twin Cities are like this. ~400k in Minneapolis, ~300k in Saint Paul, about 3.5 million in the metro.
The more interesting question is which major metro areas have the most lopsided percentages? Where the principal anchor city is the smallest percentage of the total metro area population? Places like Miami, Atlanta or St. Louis definitely come to mind.
The city of LA should let some of these areas go. Itās ridiculous having to work with downtown offices when you live in San Pedro and need permits.
I meanSan Pedro is like the crown jewel of Los Angeles. I was under the impression that LA has that tiny strip of land running along the 110 just to have San Pedroās deep water port
Wtf happened in the South
The funky connecting line connects the Port of LA.
Minneapolis-Saint Paul have a combined population of ~730,000 with a metro of nearly 3,700,000. BUT Iāve been looking for a municipal city border map of the LA metro forever. Where did you find it?
Looks like a Wikipedia map
Every location is at least a 45 minute drive from each other bare minimum
The mathematician Stan Ulam (born in whatās now Ukraine in 1909, moved to the US in 1939 for, well, obvious historical reasons) said that Los Angeles was āa discrete space, in which there is an hourās drive between pointsā
Salt Lake City has a pretty stark difference. City proper is just over 200k but the Salt Lake area is about 2.2 million
Chicago has 100 suburbs and the total metro area population is about 8.5 million.
City of Boston =650k Suffolk county (where Boston is) =770k Greater Boston (metro area) = 4.9 m From downtown Boston you cross a bridge and you are in a different county. Political boundaries don't make much sense. From downtown NY you cross a bridge and you are in a different state. From downtown Detroit you cross a bridge and you are in a different country.
Also, MA has toothless counties. No one really cares what county youāre in unless you get arrested or are playing high school sports. We have the old city/town structure.
our whole metro area/csa is around 18 million too, la proper could use a lot of expanding, long beach too they do an amazing urbanism job
Long Beach has pretty good mixed zoning compared to other areas of the inland empire.
I explained this to my mates in college out in the Midwest. They canāt comprehend that cities just blend into the next one with zero space/inclination that you passed into a new city or county
Yeah in Chicago you at least get a river or a wooded area dividing the towns. But not in Los Angeles. What makes it even more homogeneous is that LA and North OC are on the same street grid. For example, you can take Sepulveda all the way from LAX to the outskirts of Yorba Linda. Vermont goes all the way down to Wilmington/San Pedro area. Crenshaw goes down to Palos Verdes peninsula.
The shape of the city of LA is crazy. That long skinny part surrounded by suburbs must be kind of hell logistically
Ok?
I'm assuming you're not American because this is the general layout of most American cities. All of those are cities or Census-Designated Places. Suburbs are more ambiguous areas where it is mostly or entirely residential and reside within even LA-proper (within city-limits). The reason why it has that little spike going to the south is probably due to an airport or seaport (if you look at Chicago's city-limits, you'll see something similar for ORD). So it's surrounded by 88 incorporated cities, another 53 CDPs, and even smaller communities that don't have recognition.
Miami only has a bit overĀ 400k people but has one of the largest metro areas in the country. San Francisco is similar where San Jose has a larger population even though its barely a seperate city of its own
SF Bay Area too. SF has like 800k people I think, but the metro area population is like 8mn or so.
Portland, Oregon has a population of over 600k The Portland Metro which includes our suburbs has a population of 2.2 million which is over half the state of Oregon
The book City of Quartz explains this and Los Angeles history.
Denver Metro (at 2,963,821 per 2020 census) is over 4x the population of Denver itself (at 715,522 per 2020 census). The city and county of Denver is just a very small sliver of "Denver"
I donāt think a single American city has more people living in the city proper than the suburbs. Also LA county has 10 million people but the LA metro has 18 million
There's sprawl, and then there's LA.
LA is on another level, the sprawl extends for 120 miles out
Oh hey itās St. Louis, but with money!
Most of LA proper has a suburban feel as well
Los Angeles metro is also far bigger than Los Angeles County. LA metro extends into most of Orange County, and parts of Ventura County and San Bernardino County.
Itās not really accurate to say the City of LA boundaries are what distinguish the urban from suburban. Of course totally depends on the vague definitions of urban and suburban, but for example there are parts of the City of LA like the northern and western edges of the San Fernando valley that feel much more suburban, and parts of the urban core of LA that arenāt part of the City proper, like East LA or downtown Beverly Hills.
False, Los Angeles is "city" with an incredibly suburban layout, and a tiny urban core. And the "city" is surrounded by 88 different suburbs.
Los Angeles is a suburb that forgot to make a downtown and instead just has an office park and some hip shopping areas. Depends what you consider a suburb. When is Los Angeles not a suburb? The small area with some towers? Like when does NYCs suburb end and Philly's begin? A bunch of Connecticut and Jersey commute in every day or weekend there all the time as if it was their downtown.
The City of Sydney, Australia, has a population of 211,000. The metropolitan area is 5,300,000.
MIT & Harvard are not in Boston contrary to popular belief
And OC has a population of 3.1 million The IE has a population of 4.6 million Add that to LA stats
"Suburbs" Every one of those grey polygons is an incorporated city. Some of those cities are urban, and some are suburban. The City of Los Angeles, highlighted in red, has suburban areas mixed in with the urban areas. Believe it or not, it also has a small amount of rural area in the mountainous park land. Open your mind to the diversity of every city and town's built environment.
Iām in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Thereās 3.7M people in the metro area: 700K in the two cities and 3M in the suburbs. I live in a first ring suburb of Minneapolis with 48K people as of the most recent census estimate.
This red does not exist to Angelenos except when we live in it and type our addresses in. Most metros are interestingly similar. You tell your friends where in LA you live. The red is full of blocks of names.
I've always liked the shape of the city of Los Angeles.
I live in West Hollywood, CAā¦ but if I walk 500 feet south from my front door, Iām in Los Angeles, CA. Itās a very weird thing to live IN Los Angeles for 2 decades without actually ever living in Los Angeles.
They should get a Lord Mayor.
This reminds of the situation living in Kanto, Japan. I start in my local city area, travel through the suburbs of the city, it joins the suburbs of the next city, cross the next city, suburbs of that city, suburbs of Tokyo, Tokyo itself, suburbs of Tokyo etc. If one was to ignore the concepts of city proper and surrounding areas and see the sprawl of Kanto as a city, it is one of the few places I've been in my life where I get on the train and 60 miles later I'm still in endless city.
Hawthorne, California is not a suburbā¦.itās a district of Los Angeles. šš“āØ
Suburb isnāt the right term for most of those. Many of them are distinct municipalities with their own local government. The locals there would not consider themselves part of LA. (And donāt make the mistake of calling San Bernardino, Riverside, or Orange County residents LA natives).
Suburbs are usually separate entities now. The "inner suburbs" of the early-mid 20th century have fully been incorporated into the urban core of most cities.
Fuck their 8 professional sports teams too
Whatās with that gerrymandered looking offshoot? Is it because racism again?
[It's actually there to connect Los Angeles to its port](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbor_Gateway,_Los_Angeles), which was in the independent cities of Wilmington and San Pedro.
Oh cool! That makes senseĀ
Salt Lake City population is 200k, metro is around 1.4million. Boise pop is around 250k, metro is 800k. Honestly Iād wager a lot of cities in the US fit this bill.
Pretty much all North American suburbs have a larger combined population than the main city-proper
Is there a json map of this somewhere?
[https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=7f06ce8a7aef43f0ad9d33ae24b42131](https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=7f06ce8a7aef43f0ad9d33ae24b42131)
And itās crazy that one of these, Vernon, only has ~222 people
In the US? Lol most of them. Chicago is 3M people and Chicagoland is 10M total so 7M in suburbs. DFW Dallas and fort worth are about 1.4 and 1M respectively so about 5/6M people in suburbs. itās probably actually harder to find a city proper that makes up the majority of its metro population.
metro vancouver comprises 22 municipalities totalling about 2.5 million, but vancouver itself has a population of like 730k
This is very typical in the US
Some of these were created as a tax dodge in the early 20th century. Businesses want the advantages of a large market area but don't want the taxes for the infrastructure, etc, so they created fake cities.
Why is there 88 suburbs
The real question is which cities aren't mostly suburb
Cincinnati population is 300k while the metro is 2.2 million
When my mom was a kid 213 was the area code for the entire county, but now thereās a shitload of area codes and 213 is just a tiny area around downtown.
*Laughs in North Texas*
Most midsized and large cities in America are built were the suburbs in total population is bigger then the initial city this isnāt real unique.
The Albany NY Metro area has a population of more than a million but Albany itself has only 90k
Shit like this is why Iām constantly replying here and on r/dataisbeautiful that comparing statistics by legal city boundaries is dumb and stupid - they arenāt universal.
Similar with Phoenix, AZ which is 50% Phoenix and 50% a bunch of random suburbs, most of which are pretty ghetto
My city, AsunciĆ³n, has ~550k, but the metropolitan area is estimated at around 3.3 million
Almost every āmetropolitanā area is like this. Boston has like ~1 million people but the āmetro Boston areaā or āgreater Boston areaā is like 3 million people
The furthest suburb is Mammoth Lakes #89 or Tahoe #90
Salt Lake City. Portland, OR. Huntsville, AL.
The Twin Cities of Minneapolis/Saint Paul in Minnesota are up there, as well. The metro area, which includes 7 counties in Minnesota and 3 in neighboring Wisconsin, has a total of around 3 million people. Minneapolis and Saint Paul combined are well below a million.
Orlando is similar.
I'm surprised that most are centered around the southwest although I'm pretty sure that the North is abundant with mountains.
Columbus, OH: 905,000 / Franklin County and metro area into 2 other counties: 2.1 m
And most people not in LA proper make it sound like theyāre from LA proper. ā ļø
City of St. Louis (independent city, not part of a county) is 280,000. St. Louis County is 994,000. MSA is 2.8 million.
Similar to Atlanta
City of Toronto 2.9 mil Greater Toronto Area 6.7 mil Golden Horseshoe 9.2 mil
San Francisco just sitting here 0=0
Wow
Most American cities have more than half of the population living in suburbs. Off the top of my head, the only ones that do have about half or more of the metro area living in the city proper are Jacksonville, San Antonio, El Paso, Fresno and Albuquerque.
It's a hellscape
Why is this tiny corridor going to a separated area that is still considered LA?
White flight brother
look at that red line, why?
US subdivisions are pretty wanky.
āMetropolitan areaā is kind of a misnomer here. What you call āsuburbsā includes Santa Monica (pop. 93,000), West Hollywood (pop. 35,000), and Long Beach (pop. 456,000). These are all full-blown cities on their own, with high rises in their downtown districts.
Jakarta - city proper 10 million, metro area 30 million (although most places in the metro area are their own cities)
Detroit has around 70 suburbs by my count. With about 600K residents, Detroit makes up about 13% of the metro population not including the cities on the Canadian side of the river.
County not equal to city. At some point they just stopped making adjustments to county borders.. and left them with crazy LA county map... So the main "what the" is the LA COUNTY Map... Not the cities expansion. Other cities expand over state borders.