Which American cities are smaller than most Americans think?

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MummyDustNOLA@reddit

New Orleans. I can get anywhere in 15 mins

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Ozone220@reddit

Huh. TIL my city is bigger than New Orleans

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christine-bitg@reddit

Absolutely it's New Orleans.

nola_throwaway53826@reddit

It was for a wedding. It was over two nights, one night was the wedding itself, and the next night was the reception. Katy was kind of in-between both venues, though the reception in El Lago was a bit further away.

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christine-bitg@reddit

Thanks for that.

To me, it's odd to have the two of them on separate days, and so far apart.

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Bootmacher@reddit

Was it at Villa Capri? My stepbrother had his reception there.

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daveescaped@reddit

Yep. I live in/near Houston. I pretty much stick to my corner of Houston unless I want entertainment such as live music. I’m only 4 miles from my office and it only takes me 12 minutes door to door. But anytime I have to drive across or into the city at a busy time of day I end up wanting to move.

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llIIIlIllII@reddit

NO is three times the size of SF

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SomewhereEffective40@reddit

Metro New Orleans is a million people, with a city population of 385,000.

Not just that but New Orleans has a hell of a lot less people than most people would think. Its cultural influence is MUCH higher than its current population would ever indication.

Rochester NY, Greenville SC, Omaha NE, Honolulu HI, and Bridgeport CT all have more people in their metro areas than New Orleans. Hell, it’s less than half the size of Cleveland and roughly half the size of Virginia Beach.

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BB-56_Washington@reddit

That's mostly to do with it's decline as a major city. New Orleans was the largest city in the south for well over 100 years, and even into the 1990s, it was in the top 25 biggest cities in the US.

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Jdevers77@reddit

Exactly. Everyone thinks it’s larger than it is, it shrank while almost everywhere else in the country grew a lot.

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ShookMyHeadAndSmiled@reddit

Can't discount Katrina. NOLA lost a lot of folks who could never afford to move back.

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Boston has a charter but it isn’t a home rule charters. It is done by the state legislature.

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Quix66@reddit

Still shocked at how many areas my friend I walked through Boston on an afternoon stroll from Cambridge.

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tuna_safe_dolphin@reddit

I mean you did but while it's true that the city of Boston (proper) itself is fairly small, you most definitely didn't walk much of the area within city limits - Charleston, East Boston, South Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, the South End, Allston/Brighton, etc.

Yes, you may have walked around all of downtown but there's a bit more than that within city limits.

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Quix66@reddit

But we did walk to the Back Bay and walked by the Christian Science Mothership and on to Dorchester.

We actually didn’t go to the popular tourist sites that day as we were living in Cambridge at the time.

We walked for several hours.

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tuna_safe_dolphin@reddit

Sure, but you definitely didn't see most of Dorchester, it's the largest neighborhood in Boston. Downtown and the Back Bay are pretty small.

No_Statistician9289@reddit

Boston is not unique in this

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therealcmj@reddit

It’s not. Buy Boston takes it to absurd levels. Go look at the map of Boston and Brookline for example.

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Hairy_Greek@reddit

Yeah it’s wicked dense within 128. I heard it’s something like 2 million people live within route 128.

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katarh@reddit

That's how Atlanta is. The city of Atlanta is like 400K people. The metro area is millions.

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ghdana@reddit

Maybeitsmeraving@reddit

Boston has an endearing local feel that none of the other major cities I've visited have. I wonder what the experience is like for the locals, because I'm given to understand Massachusetts is dense and high cost almost in it's entirety.

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tuna_safe_dolphin@reddit

I grew up in Boston and it is basically heart breaking because it's too expensive to live there, like many other US cities.

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OpportunityDry2450@reddit

palm springs, ca was a lot smaller than I thought it would be, having heard it mentioned many times throughout my adult life

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Dio_Yuji@reddit

New Orleans is 365k, down from 600k in the 60s.

Icy-Role2321@reddit

And the metro area extends way far out

When Australians talk about a city they are taking about the metro area. If they are referring to just the CBD then they would say Sydney CBD.

So the 62% is the 5 main cities which includes the hundreds of suburbs of Sydney, likely even including places like Campbelltown as part of Sydney.

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FWEngineer@reddit

interesting. I was using cityquiz.io, which treats suburbs separately in the U.S. (and the rest of the world I thought), but it does seem to include suburbs with the city in Australia. It does treat Campbelltown separately, but it doesn't recognize nearby Eagle Vale as a separate place.

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unique_usemame@reddit

looking at cityquiz...

They do count camden, penrith, campbelltown, gosford as separate cities.

However they do not count Parramatta or Hornsby or Bankstown or Blacktown or Liverpool.

Parramatta (let's approximate it as the equivalent of San Jose in the Bay Area) is a city within Sydney (i.e. in the greater sydney area)

In google maps when you type in sydney it shows the greater sydney area which does include places such as camden, penrith and campbellown as well as everything that cityquiz counts.

And what people call "city", is probably mostly suburb anyway. GIS maps showing population density make it very clear that most American metros don't have a lot of space that would be urban elsewhere (say, 15k people per square km?).

A fun comparison is Texas vs Spain. Similar total area and total population, but the population distribution is completely different.

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CubicleHermit@reddit

By population, pretty much all of them.

There are at least ten metro areas over 5 million people, more if you use a more expansive definition of metro area (10 via MSA vs. 14 via CSA)

There are only four cities over 2 million people (NY, LA, Chicago, Houston) within the incorporated city itself.

Even with those 4, none of them hit 50% of their metro area in their incorporated population.

San Francisco and DC stand out as both are the center of two of the biggest CSA areas but show up much lower in the MSA listings, and where none of the individual cities are that big. Especially for San Francisco, where the cultural "anchor city" (SF) is significantly smaller than the largest city in the region (San Jose.)

DC proper and SF proper are also geographically quite compact.

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goog1e@reddit

Baltimore has the opposite of this. If you count the supposed metro area it's much larger, but that doesn't reflect people's actual lifestyle in the surrounding area.

People who don't live in the city center rarely commute in or interact with the city. Comparatively .

More people commute to DC or its burb counties, and just live nearer Baltimore because it's cheaper, but don't culturally interact with the city at all.

In all Maryland, 120k commute into Baltimore, but 240k into DC.

I’m thinking OP meant there are Chicago suburbs with populations bigger than St. Louis proper. STL proper is only 278k.

There’s some Chicago suburbs that get close to that but still smaller.

Or perhaps OP means that Chicago’s metro area is 9M but 7M out of 9M live in the suburbs.

While the entire STL metro area is around 2.8-2.9M people.

Atlantic City NJ has 9 operating casinos, a large convention center, the ‘World Famous’ four mile long boardwalk and Atlantic Ocean beaches.

But it's Metro is 2.8 million.

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gothiclg@reddit

As someone who’s lived in Denver and Los Angeles I’d say Denver feels absolutely puny in comparison. The entire Denver metro area has a smaller population than just LA proper does, if you consider LA metro it really really dwarfs it. I love Denver and will defend it every day because I grew up there but LA makes it feel like I didn’t grow up in a big city.

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Deep_Cellist_4488@reddit

That’s all true. I’ve spent only a little amount of time in LA but will agree that it does dwarf Denver in both area and population, whole area wise. Doesn’t make Denver a small city, unless we say only cities with multimillion strong populations are big.

I got drunk one night and walked down a huge portion of Geary, like USF to Fisherman’s wharf, and woke up on the trampolines at the wharf as the sun rose. I had pics on my phone documenting parts of the trip 🤣

There aren't that many jobs in Fremont, are there?

There totally is - a big part of southern Fremont is comprised of huge business parks. I can't find exact numbers (it's really hard to separate "employed residents" from "employees working in Fremont"), but I suspect that Fremont may even be a net importer of workers.

Bayside Technology Park employs 30,000 people; Tesla factory alone employs 30,000; Fremont "downtown" / city center encompassing Washington Hospital, Kaiser and Sutter, along with the City of Fremont, Fremont Hub and BART employs 30,000. 4,000 employees in FUSD. There are fewer semi high-tech manufacturers in Fremont than there was 25 years ago, but there's still a lot - the city's website says 25% of the jobs in Fremont are related to advanced manufacturing.

With that said, I suspect a huge number of people commute to their jobs in Fremont, just like a huge number of people in Fremont commute to their jobs in the Valley.

I understand separating SF and SJ from each other, and maybe combining Oakland with SF, but separating Fremont from Union City and Newark as separate economic and residential entities is just splitting hairs. Fremont literally encompasses Newark; it's an exclave.

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mckenzie_keith@reddit

Ah, OK. I lived there in the late 90s and it seemed at that time like a bedroom community. I think NUUMI was still in business, but I kind of forgot about NUUMI because those were not office jobs. You are right about Tesla, although I am not sure how much of the engineering work is in the old NUUMI site. I think it may be mostly manufacturing.

I'm definitely not sure where the lines should be drawn. And I totally get that people don't always live close to where they work. One person may live in milpitas and work in fremont and another may live in fremont and work in milpitas. Etc. They would probably be happier if they swapped houses.

But the main point is that the jobs are in clusters. The job clusters create attractors that suck people in from their home in a daily ebb and flow and in the long run cause housing to be built if it doesn't already exist.

If you say Fremont/Newark/Union City should be in the same cluster, I totally believe you. One of the problems with growing up in SF is that you kind of don't know where a lot of the suburbs are because you don't have that much reason to visit them. But I did live in Fremont for a little while.

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TheLizardKing89@reddit

The U.S. Census Bureau considers the San Francisco metro area and the San Jose metro area as two separate areas.

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mckenzie_keith@reddit

That seems reasonable and accurate to me. It would be interesting to have access to real commute data showing where employed people work and live in the Bay area. I suspect there are at least 4 areas with a high density of jobs that attract people from surrounding areas. And that most people don't commute more than 25 or 30 miles in the bay area. Of course there are super-commuters who drive in from Stockton and places like that.

Funicularly@reddit

46.9 square miles, from official government figures.

San Francisco city, California is a city, town, place equivalent, or township located in California. San Francisco city, California has a land area of 46.9 square miles.

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mckenzie_keith@reddit

Maybe if you include the Epcott Center. It has been forever since I went to Disney World since I live in California. But my recollection is that you could walk around it in a day pretty easily. Walking around the whole city of SF would tire you out. Just walking from Fisherman's Wharf to Land's End would be a hike.

Or are you also including the parking?

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threesimplewords@reddit

You absolutely cannot walk around Disney World in a day. It's hard to grasp the scale of Disney World, especially when compared to Disneyland. Animal Kingdom alone is over twice as large as Disneyland's magic Kingdom and California adventure combined. You'd have to go to the 4 main parks, two water parks, Disney Springs, and a bunch more. Last time I was there my wife and I walked 16 miles in one day hitting 3 parks.

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mckenzie_keith@reddit

Yeah I am picking that up. I should know better. I was there once in the late 80s. I should have realized that my memory would be faulty or that it may have expanded since then.

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Curmudgy@reddit

The “size of San Francisco” statement for DisneyWorld refers to all of the land owned by Disney at that location (except possibly the parts of Celebration Disney still owns; I’m not 100% sure).

I’d say Chicago. I think it’s presence in the past (as well as the citizens attitudes towards everywhere else) makes people think it’s kinda a Midwest New York

But it’s much much more like Philly or DC than New York.

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cHunterOTS@reddit

Wtf are you even talking about? Whether you’re talking about the city proper or metro Chicago is almost twice as large as Philly in both population and area and several times larger than DC

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CupBeEmpty@reddit

Seriously it’s the third largest city in the US.

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Odd_Addition3909@reddit

Twice as large is wrong lol. Chicago has 2.7m, philly has 1.6m. Chicago does have twice the murders though lol

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1maco@reddit

Metro Chicago is~45% bigger than DC or Philly and New York is 115% bigger than Chicago

CupBeEmpty@reddit

Indy is a lot like that. They merged the city and county back in the 70s so almost the whole county is the city.

The weird side effect of this is that some formerly suburban towns remained independent and are now surrounded completely by Indianapolis. So they are kind of sort of technically incorporated in Indianapolis but have their own independent government.

My favorite is Rocky Ripple. It is completely surrounded by Indianapolis and is nearly an island between the canal and the river. It doesn’t even occupy the entire “island.”

The only access to it is a footbridge and a pair of tiny two lane bridges over the canal.

The people that live there (a mere 655) have bumper stickers that say “I’m Not Lost I Live Here: Rocky Ripple, IN.”

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Illustrious_Code_347@reddit

NEW ORLEANS. I can’t emphasis how shockingly small this place is. I just visited for the first time ever (I’m 32). I had always thought of New Orleans as “a major American city” in my mind. It has all those sports teams after all… so I would’ve guessed it was at least top-20 for population. If you had asked me a year ago, I might have even guessed it was in the top-10.

It is the 59th biggest metro in America by population. Even cities many Americans are not familiar with, like Tucson, Arizona, are much bigger.

It is also geographically very small. You can see everything in that city in like 2-3 days.

Sa1ntmarks@reddit

When people talk about it's growth, they're often including growth in the metro area or even in the surrounding metros, like Ogden or Provo-Orem.

SLC's metro area is around 1.3 million people though and surrounding Wasatch Front area has about 3 million (including SLC metro). Salt Lake is surrounded by a bunch of cities that are surprising that they're not just part of it, like the cities of North Salt Lake, South Salt Lake, Millcreek and maybe West Valley.

St. Louis bad = small area chosen for bias

Same here - except I live in the IE now. Apparently, everything from Ventura down to Camp Pendleton and out to the Colorado River is “the greater L.A. area”.

You are right about the Disneyland thing! The one that kills me is The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (which translates to The The Angels Angels of Anaheim LOL). There is nothing about the Angels baseball team that is L.A. other than their dumb name.

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ForgetfulFrog77@reddit

Atlantic City, NJ. Population is less than 40k. The city is extremely small but feels larger because of the casinos

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Awkward_Macaron6222@reddit

Fairbanks, Alaska. It’s the second largest city in the state, but has only 30,000 people. (Anchorage, the largest city, has 300,000.)

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3Oh3FunTime@reddit

Las Vegas. Most people that have been to “Vegas” have only been to Paradise, NV.

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Master-Collection488@reddit

When cities have or had no space to expand into they tend to be a lot more densely populated. New York City comes to mind. So do San Francisco and Las Vegas.

deadplant5@reddit

Cleveland.

Of the major cities: Cleveland, St. Louis, Hartford, and Portland ME. You can walk across Portland and barely know you did it.

Also many of us had to learn all the states and capitals and it’s shocking how many state capitals are tiny. Montpelier, Pierre, Annapolis, Dover, Juneau, Concord, Helena, Cheyenne, Bismarck; and Carson City are all tiny but have an outsized importance.

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limbodog@reddit

Boston's about 650k people. Some like to say we've got a rivalry with NYC, but they're about 31 times a bigger city than we are. I don't think it's a fair competition

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FWEngineer@reddit

I've been doing this thing on cityquiz.io where you name all the cities you can think of about a continent or country. One thing I noticed is that a lot of "cities" that everybody here has heard about aren't nearly as big as you think, like Santa Fe, NM (pop. 87,500); Des Moines, IA (pop. 214,000); Pittsburgh, PA (pop 303,000); Syracuse, NY (pop 148,000); Fort Lauderdale, FL (pop 183,000); Daytona Beach, FL (73,000). The biggest city in Mississippi is Jackson, pop. 153,000.

Compare that to cities in Europe that many Americans have barely heard about, like Hamburg, Germany at 1.9 million; Birmingham, England at 1.2 million; Liverpool, England at 860,000; Warsaw, Poland at 1.7 million. Don't even get started on eastern Europe, like Kazan, Russia or Samara, Russia both over 1.1 million or Minsk, Belarus at 2 million.

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beanomly@reddit

Green Bay

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VoiceArtPassion@reddit

Almost every city in Alaska. With the exception of Fairbanks, Juneau, and Anchorage, most other cities in Alaska range from 500-8000 people.

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ripyourlungsdave@reddit

Tampa.

For how many jokes get made about it being loony and dangerous, there isn't much to it.

Some cities metro are in other countries. It has to do with the amount of people who travel daily back and forth. Like people in New Jersey who travel into NYC, and people in NYC travel into NJ, that makes a metro.

If people from one town travels into a city, but people from the city don't travel to that town, that makes the town a bedroom community.

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ITrCool@reddit

Kansas City. It's not as big area-wise as people think. It's quite dense as a city but has become surrounded by several smaller area cities and subrubs so it seems much larger in its overall metro area that spans across two states too (MO and KS):

You've got:

(KS side)

- Overland Park

- Merriam

- Kansas City, KS (AKA: KCK, separate from KCMO)

- Olathe

- Shawnee

- Mission

- Lenexa

- Leawood

- Bonner Springs

- Prairie Village

- Baeshor

(MO Side)

- KCMO

- Blue Springs

- Liberty

- North Kansas City (north side of the river)

- Gladstone

- Sugar Creek

- Grandview

- Belton

- Raymore

- Parkville

PIttsburgh. It has fewer people than Irvine!

most state capitals

I am fortunate that I have been able to visit all of them and in general, most of them were smaller than expected. It’s more of an observational thing than it’s me saying it’s a good/bad thing. Aside from those places:

miami - even though it has the 3rd most ‘skyscrapers’

new orleans - once outside the quarter, the city limits don’t extend that far.

san francisco - way smaller than I thought. If you need to work on your thighs and calves, a walk around this city will pay dividends.

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whatisakafka@reddit

Probably DC. You can walk the short way across the city in like 2 and a half hours.

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Anxious-Seaweed@reddit

Las Vegas, one of the more well known US cities and regularly in the top 5 most visited US cities but it's 29th in Metro population.

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john510runner@reddit

San Francisco is 46 sq miles.

Las Vegas is 135 sq miles.

Los Angeles is 503 sq miles.

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Atlanta

Atlanta!?!

People are mentioning Boston and how it’s walkable. Sure, if your just counting the neighborhoods close to each other like Back Bay, South End, Fenway, or Downtown Crossing, Beacon Hill, etc…

When you then factor in other neighborhoods such as Dorchester, Roxbury, Southie, West Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Mattapan, Allston-Brighton,East Boston,etc.. then it’s a lot bigger then some think.

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