In your view, is Salt Lake a city of 1.2 million or 2.7 million?

[SaltCityScrapers]

I'll throw in my 2 cents:

I feel like it is a metro of 1.75 million. The basis for this is combining Weber, Davis, and Salt Lake Counties' populations.

Natural physical barriers, like the Point of the Mountain, make me exclude Utah County.

I'm excluding Tooele and Boxelder Counties for the same reasons.

Also, it just "feels" like a metro of 1.75 million to me, albeit with a medium/small downtown.

As far as "urban" goes, I look at the historic nature of the buildings around downtown and outside.

Vegas is much bigger than SLC, both the city itself and the metro, but it does NOT have the historic buildings that SLC has, especially when comparing downtowns. There are no Exchange Place-esque buildings in Vegas, or City-County Buildings or houses built in the 1890 - 1920 era. That counts a little bit to me, as far as feeling. But Vegas is definitely in a different league as far as metro and building size.

Northeastern cities have much older, more historic buildings and houses. We are building up more and more of the 6 - 8 story apartments, but they are brand new. No historic feel.

Hence, a city like Providence will "feel" much more urban.

SLC feels similar to Sacramento to me, size-wise, urban-wise. We are significantly smaller than Portland Oregon's downtown and metro, but have a similar "feel", especially since Portland seems to have many highrises in the same size range as ours.