San Diego known for Balboa Park, Mission Bay beaches an of course the pacific ocean beaches has a lot of open space parkland with our canyons that are basically impossible to develop. I can't stress enough how much of an asset these are to city living. The city has done a great job with pedestrian access to these natural open areas.
Yeah, LA suburbia is some of these most consistently medium-high density suburbia in the nation. There's not a ton of low and ultra-low density sprawl on it's edges dragging the MSA number well below the city like in most other cities.
I'd be curious to see similar city vs. weighted density stats for a place Vegas that is probably even more uniform across the board (Vegas suburbia tends to be quite dense, and city proper Vegas doesn't have the urban core density spikes of LA).
Las Vegas winds up being very similar to its suburbia. The closest tract mapping winds up being 640,389 people, 1600 shy of the actual city (about half a tract's worth).
Las Vegas city: 7,308.8 ppsm
Clark County/Las Vegas MSA: 7,031.7 ppsm
The third densest MSA behaves more like its peers:
Vegas has to have the flattest density gradient of any major 1M+ MSA.
It's like an entire major metro area built out with a consistent 7,000 ppsm density. Nothing egregiously high, nothing egregiously low, just 500 sq. miles of tightly packed suburban tract homes and then abrupt desert wilderness. it's like the anti-minneapolis.
__________________ "Missing middle" housing can be a marvelous middle ground for many middle class families.
Last edited by Steely Dan; Apr 23, 2022 at 12:24 AM.
Vegas has to have the flattest density gradient of any major 1M+ MSA.
It's like an entire major metro area built out with a consistent 7,000 ppsm density. Nothing egregiously high, nothing egregiously low, just 500 sq. miles of tightly packed suburban tract homes and then abrupt desert wilderness. it's like the anti-minneapolis.
A spreadsheet I have from making the numerical density threshold lists has all of the MSAs by population in each bin of 1000 people per square mile. Here is Las Vegas:
Left column is density bin. First is 0 to 1000 ppsm, second is 1000 to 2000 ppsm, so on. Second column is the population of the MSA in that bin. Vegas is indeed perhaps the flattest such metro.
- Chicago is the whole Cook, Du Page and Lake, IL counties. For the others, I used census "minor civil divisions" as units: Kane without the 1/3 western part (minus 5 divisions), Kendall with only 2 divisions (basically Oswego), McHenry without the western half (minus 9 divisions), Will without the 1/3 southern part (minus 9 divisions), Lake, IN without the 1/3 southern part (minus 3 divisions) and Porter with only 1 division (basically Portage). You can see the maps on citypopulation.de
That's 3,300 sq mi for a 2,700 inh/sq mi density. It's very close to Chicago's urban area. It's a 9 million people city.
^ i still prefer the finer grain of the "census tract" over the "minor civil division".
in 2010, the chicago UA had 8,608,208 people on 2,442.8 sq. miles of land.
though the CB splits it off into its own UA, i think a fairly reasonable "not by the letter of the law" case could be made to include the adjacent round lake UA into chicago's UA.
in 2010, the round lake UA had 290,373 people on 152.6 sq. miles of land.
so combined, that would be a "CUA" of 8,898,581 people on 2,595.4 sq. miles of land.
that's a pretty "real deal" picture of chicagoland IMO. granted those are all 2010 #s, but chicagoland only added ~150K last decade, and most of that was in cook county anyway, so the land area of new sprawl is fairly minimal, at least relative to the previous 6 decades of unrelenting cornfield gobbling.
__________________ "Missing middle" housing can be a marvelous middle ground for many middle class families.
^ i still prefer the finer grain of the "census tract" than the "minor civil division".
in 2010, the chicago UA had 8,608,208 people on 2,442.8 sq. miles of land.
though the CB splits it off into its own UA, i think a fairly reasonable "not by the letter of the law" case could be made to include the adjacent round lake UA into chicago's UA.
in 2010, the round lake UA had 290,373 people on 152.6 sq. miles of land.
so combined, that would be a "CUA" of 8,898,581 people on 2,595.4 sq. miles of land.
that's a pretty "real deal" picture of chicagoland IMO. granted those are all 2010 #s, but chicagoland only added ~150K last decade, and most of that was in cook county anyway, so the land area of new sprawl is fairly minimal, at least relative to the previous 6 decades of unrelenting cornfield gobbling.
I think minor divisions have more flavour while census tracts are too technical.
Looking at it again, maybe I could have slashed 4 more low density divisions in Will, just south of Joliet and New Lenox, another 2 in McHenry. That alone would cut some 550 km² (210 sq mi) and few thousand people less.
That would bring its size very close to the official UA. Maybe even Portage could go as it's too far away, despite the continuous sprawl all the way there.
A spreadsheet I have from making the numerical density threshold lists has all of the MSAs by population in each bin of 1000 people per square mile. Here is Las Vegas:
Left column is density bin. First is 0 to 1000 ppsm, second is 1000 to 2000 ppsm, so on. Second column is the population of the MSA in that bin. Vegas is indeed perhaps the flattest such metro.
Are Yorkville towers really that dense or is that some kind of issue with border cut off points? They do not look like anything special in person in NYC context, typical tower in the park development.
Are Yorkville towers really that dense or is that some kind of issue with border cut off points? They do not look like anything special in person in NYC context, typical tower in the park development.
Are you talking about Yorkville in Manhattan? Like the Upper East Side mini-neighborhood?
I can't think of any tower in the park developments in Yorkville. It's pretty much entirely newer urban towers or older tenements. It's almost certainly the densest residential neighborhood in U.S./Canada.
Are Yorkville towers really that dense or is that some kind of issue with border cut off points? They do not look like anything special in person in NYC context, typical tower in the park development.
Looks like it's populated enough to be its own census tract. It's not anything special, but when a development is its own census tract it will look extremely dense. This would be the case in any city.
Looks like it's populated enough to be its own census tract. It's not anything special, but when a development is its own census tract it will look extremely dense. This would be the case in any city.
yeah, in some cities the census bureau has some extremely tiny odd-ball census tracts that consist of just a couple highrise residential towers that can produce some outlandish density results.
there's one of those up in chicago's edgewater neighborhood. census tract 307.02 has a population density of 270,944.7 ppsm!
but in reality, the entire tract consists of only the tall black Miesian skyscraper pictured below and the one immediately north of it. that's it.
my mom & dad actually live in the tall black building, so i'm quite familiar with the area. it's just a statistical quirk from a tiny little fly-speck tract.
Does anyone know where one could find the land area of census subdivisions? I found the TIGER site, do I need to pull the ZIP files and find a land area column?
I am wanting to recalculate the weighted densities using census blocks, to get a far finer measurement than the census tract numbers. I have the population of each block off the Census Data Explorer, but I can't find the land area of each block.
(To give a sense of the improved granularity: Cook County, Illinois is 1,332 tracts but 83,018 blocks!
Edit: Found the Gazetteer files which have the areas for census tracts and other subdivisions, but not block groups or blocks. Looks like that would be a massive GIS undertaking to scrape the areas for the individual blocks.
Although it seems like we'll get the 2020 urban area delineations by October, as those will be included in this year's gazetteer files.
Does anyone know where one could find the land area of census subdivisions? I found the TIGER site, do I need to pull the ZIP files and find a land area column?
I am wanting to recalculate the weighted densities using census blocks, to get a far finer measurement than the census tract numbers. I have the population of each block off the Census Data Explorer, but I can't find the land area of each block.
(To give a sense of the improved granularity: Cook County, Illinois is 1,332 tracts but 83,018 blocks!
Edit: Found the Gazetteer files which have the areas for census tracts and other subdivisions, but not block groups or blocks. Looks like that would be a massive GIS undertaking to scrape the areas for the individual blocks.
Although it seems like we'll get the 2020 urban area delineations by October, as those will be included in this year's gazetteer files.
I thought Census tracts were the smallest divisions.
I thought Census tracts were the smallest divisions.
Tracts are divided into block groups, which in turn are divided into blocks.
However, for urban areas, sub-tract divisions get *very* numerous very quickly, so tracts strike a decent balance between granularity and amount of data.
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