Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
I didn’t notice, because when I lived in DC I was a car-lite urbanite and rarely visited Maryland other than to pass through. And when I did, Baltimore felt like a distinct entity.
The whole “suburbs blend together” is a very slippery slope. We might was well say that the entire northeast is one massive metro, if we continue to go down that path.
And it serves little use. Suburbs are just a jumble of housing subdivisions nowadays anyhow. Cities are the places with real identity, at least cities largely built out before WWII. Whatever “flag” a suburb wears is beyond the point. There are people in Waukegan or Zion, IL who spend most of their time going up to Milwaukee, while there may be Oak Creek, WI who go to Chicago a lot.
Point being, we are better off narrowing down the definition of a city/metro rather than trying to expand it, which leads to a lot of splitting hairs.
|
I would totally agree that Baltimore is a distinct entity from DC... they're different. I think that would be the case regardless of which city was "paired" with Washington DC. It's likely magnified because DC is what it is. Baltimore and DC obviously function differently, but they're also two very old, large cities with centuries of their own histories and culture -- they just fully grew physically together in the age of the auto.
I think you see can distinct differences within other MSAs/CSAs too. Dallas-Ft. Worth comes to mind as two distinct larger cities that grew together.
Yeah, I agree that the "suburbs blend together" descriptor can be problematic because... yeah, where do you draw the dividing line? I also think that narrowing the definition is much more informative. And maybe it could result in people who live in outer exubrbs claiming that they are "from" ________ (enter city name).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sun Belt
Can we just combine Washington to Boston as one giant CSA already and move on?
|
There is a bit of a break in connection between the overall Boston-anchored portion and New York and between the overall Philly-anchored portion and Batimore though. Philadelphia and New York "share" Jersey between them and are more closely connected than Philly is to Baltimore and New York is to Boston.
But based on how the OMB arbitrarily assigns CSA classification in the east coast corridor's case, yeah, why not just combine it all? That's no sillier than what they do now.