U.S. cities with bloated city proper populations due to annexation

[Segun]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Really? Rogers Park near the lake, to me, feels more like Edgewater and Uptown. It's very urban. Evanston feels more like a streetcar suburb, with older suburban neighborhoods. Much of Evanston feels more like Wilmette than like Rogers Park, IMO.

Where I lived off Howard was wall-to-wall apartment buildings, with some of same buildings across the street on the Chicago side too. It's a small area, but Evanston is only 10 square miles. If you go further into Evanston, it starts resembling Wilmette, but it's not that dramatic. South Evanston is essentially the same neighborhood as Rogers Park. If you live off Howard, the shops and restaurants are right across the street and vice versa. They share the same business district too. Many people walking to and from both cities.

[liat91]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Really? Rogers Park near the lake, to me, feels more like Edgewater and Uptown. It's very urban. Evanston feels more like a streetcar suburb, with older suburban neighborhoods. Much of Evanston feels more like Wilmette than like Rogers Park, IMO.

This is inline with my thinking about where to draw the line in the case of Chicago.

[liat91]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

do you honestly think there are 5.4M people in LA living in contiguous pre-war fabric?

i would say that figure is "super far-off".

besides, liat91 wasn't trying to measure contiguous pre-war fabric anyway, otherwise he would have had to include evanston (and many other burbs) in chicago's figure (which he didn't).

it's why his whole exercise is fairly meaningless, IMO. all he's given us for his criteria is that he goes by "feel" from driving around various cities and looking at maps and making vague value judgement about whether or not a given place seems "bulgy".

i'm sorry, but that is not a sound basis for a system of making objective, apples-to-apples comparisons of the relative sizes of US cities while disregarding municipal boundaries.





from what he's given us thus far regarding his criteria, not in the slightest.

it's all "feel" and vague, extremely subjective value judgements about what to include/exclude.

and apparently he changes up his opinions about what to include from city to city, so we're not getting anything close to apples-to-apples here.

One of the big reasons this exercise cannot be relegated to concrete criteria is the marked difference in how cities are structured around this country. I used different measures for each city, but also used a basic nationwide criteria based on a perceived average.

Chicago is sprawled, prewar streetcar, old school urban and new school urban all at once. One of the reasons why I didn't have to take or add from it much. LA on the other hand is a weird mix of jumbled boundaries, some prewar, sunbelt sprawl along with multinodal layout. Driving into the city in LA is much different than doing so in Chicago, New York or Atlanta, thought there are a few commonalities; hence the nationwide criteria.

Evanston is bigger than OP and has urban qualities, but it isn't on par in being as interwoven with Chicago. It could be included in Chicago if you only cared about proximity and having urban qualities. I would add Lincolnwood to Chicago, before Evanston.

Miami was another tough one for me. Having lived there, I can tell you that even though one could consider North Miami Beach as part of Miami, relatively speaking, it is a close in suburb rather than an extension of the city. Miami Shores being in between helped me make that distinction. Miami Beach, Coral Gables etc, are easily an extension.

There can be no ironclad objective criteria you could use for all the cities I listed. It's not possible and would result in wild variations of city boundaries.
Especially when considering blind borderless sprawl emanating from some of these cities.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by liat91

I would add Lincolnwood to Chicago, before Evanston.

i didn't think it was possible, but now you've managed to lose me even more.

as someone who grew up in wilmette, lived in both rogers park and edgewater, and worked in evanston for 20 years, i simply don't agree with you. at all.

probably best to agree to disagree and move on because we'll likely never see eye to eye on that list you created.


you think your list has value. i do not.

not much more to it than that at this point.

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by Buckeye Native 001

I knew a couple of folks from Orange County when I lived there who talked about the defense layoffs in the late 80s/early 90s with the same kind of PTSD people have when talking about experiencing the 1994 Northridge earthquake. For better or for worse, it was (in some ways) the SoCal equivalent of Midwesterners who had decent jobs at the plants (steel mills, auto, etc) before they all started closing en masse.

My personal favorite "factory on the beach" was San Onofre. I am simplifying this/dumbing it down way too much but it always amused me that someone thought it was a good idea to construct a nuclear power plant right on the beach in a major seismic area. I think it went offline right around the same time as the incident in Fukushima?

i remember the silly early 90s caricatured t-shirts he’d bring back and wear mowing the yard for like seal beach or whatever. he’d always say something like “southern california is full of freaks” but he seemed to enjoy going. early 90s southern california man - Point Break and all that.

[Segun]

Evanston/Lincolnwood. I don't know now, the best buffalo wings in the city and suburbs might just could be at Lincolnwood Town Center. Extra points in walkability for that alone?!

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Segun

Evanston/Lincolnwood. I don't know now, the best buffalo wings in the city and suburbs might just could be at Lincolnwood Town Center. Extra points in walkability for that alone?!

Wait, better wings than buff joe's?

Color me skeptical..... What's the place?

[Segun]

^

GFC Chicken Wings.

I want to do a side by side one day in the same vicinity, but for now, I got to give the edge to it.

[Steely Dan]

^ maybe a blind taste test wing-off is in order after the fucking covid finally fucks off.

FWIW, a long time ago i had a coworker (in evanston) who was born and raised in buffalo, and he said that buff joe's wings were the most authentic he'd ever had outside of buffalo (though the ranch rightfully baffled him).

we all know how territorial native buffalonians can be about their town's namesake chicken wings, so that wasn't faint praise.

[memph]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

not quite.


LA County:

1940: 2,785,643

1950: 4,151,687 (+1,366,044)

1960: 6,038,771 (+1,887,084)

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_An...a#Demographics



but yes, LA's immediate post-war population growth was amazing.

lots of WWII soldiers & sailors first exposed to cali by way of fighting in the pacific theater came home after the war and said "this seems like an awfully nice place to settle down and start a family". and so they did, by the tens of thousands.

I'd estimate LA's urban area had a population of around 3.2 million in 1945.

However, LA back then was very suburban, easily one of the most sprawling and low density cities in the country. The majority of the built area was single family homes on small lots. The average census tract that made up the urban area had a density of only about 7-12k ppsm. While most US urban areas have seen their weighted density decrease 2-4 fold since 1950, Los Angeles' urban area weighted density increased by 36%.

This was partly due to post WWII suburban development largely matching the density of LA's pre-WWII development, and partly due to increasing densities of the pre-WWII core. I wouldn't be all that surprised to find out LA's pre-WWII core densified by 2 million people since WWII tbh, which means that the 5.4 million figure isn't that far fetched.

I would say 4.5-5 million is more likely, but trying to draw boundaries for LA based on WWII is pretty arbitrary anyways. Since the city was growing very rapidly during this period, there's probably hundreds of thousands of present day Los Angelinos living in neighbourhoods that were platted out and partially developed in 1945 and then filled out in the decade that followed.

Also the difference between pre-WWII and post-WWII built form in LA is not that big. Since most of the pre-WWII development was from the 1920-1945 period, it already had a lot of relatively suburban characteristics, with car ownership rates already being quite high during this period, and as I said before, relatively low densities and SFHs. Post-WWII development was of broadly similar densities, and because most of rural LA county was already subdivided into 1/4 to 1/2 mile square blocks, it made sense to just continue building infill streets in a way that more or less followed the street grid development.

[KB0679]

Originally Posted by ckh

A lot of Southern, along with some Western and Midwestern cities come to mind. I'm thinking of Phoenix, Columbus OH, Nashville, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, Madison WI, Fresno, any NC city, Charleston SC, Louisville, Chattanooga and Knoxville TN, etc.

Charleston??? Absolutely not; as a matter of fact, no city in SC is a contender here as the state has some of the most restrictive annexation laws in the country. Charleston has a population of about 135K people on 109 sq mi of land (a good bit of it being wetlands or undeveloped) with pretty bizarre boundaries, plus it's hemmed in by other municipalities on all sides. North Charleston is almost as populous (111K) and Mount Pleasant is creeping ever close to 100K itself (87K currently), and on top of that, a city councilman representing the West Ashley area of the city (west of the downtown peninsula across the Ashley River), which contains at least half of Charleston's population, is talking about seceding from the city. He's just blowing smoke I suspect and it would be a pretty ridiculous and cost-inefficient thing to actually do, but his online petition has already garnered a couple hundred signatures.

All NC cities don't qualify either. Charlotte I can see (has the same land area as NYC), Raleigh (similar land area and population as Atlanta) isn't too bad, Fayetteville yes. I wouldn't at all characterize Greensboro, Durham, and Winston-Salem as bloated, and certainly not Asheville, Wilmington, High Point, Hickory, or Greenville.

[Dylan Dude]

I think St. Louis is a good example

[KevinFromTexas]

Originally Posted by ChiSoxRox

A good way to attempt to quantify this would be the cities that have the largest percentage of their urban areas in their city limits. Here's the leading metros over 1,000,000 by percentage in the city center (using MSAs which are bloated but easier to find the 2019 numbers for):

San Antonio - 60.7%
Jacksonville - 58.4%
(Fresno - 53.2%) - 999k in 2019 estimates
Tucson - 52.3%
San Jose - 51.3% (Yes, I know San Jose MSA is silly)
Louisville - 48.8%
Memphis - 48.4%
Oklahoma City - 46.5%
Austin - 44.0%
New York City - 43.4% (the lingering effects of 1898)
San Diego - 42.7%
Columbus - 42.3%
Indianapolis - 42.2%

Two sub-million examples
El Paso - 80.6%
Anchorage - 72.7%

One interesting note about El Paso is that it has the 24,247 acre Franklin Mountains State Park located entirely inside the city limits. That accounts for 37 square miles of the city land area. It's one of the largest urban parks in the US, though, it's a wildland park. So, basically, 37 square miles of El Paso look like this:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankl...melephant2.jpg

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by Dylan Dude

I think St. Louis is a good example

of city population being bloated due to annexation?

lol.

[Buckeye Native 001]

Originally Posted by KevinFromTexas

One interesting note about El Paso is that it has the 24,247 acre Franklin Mountains State Park located entirely inside the city limits. That accounts for 37 square miles of the city land area. It's one of the largest urban parks in the US, though, it's a wildland park. So, basically, 37 square miles of El Paso look like this:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankl...melephant2.jpg

I think Phoenix and Los Angeles have similar issues. Phoenix has several city parks/mountain preserves (South Mountain, Piestewa Peak) within city limits and there's a whole bunch of mountain ranges within the city limits of Los Angeles that I can't remember off the top of my head.

[Obadno]

Phoenix,

1/3rd of the cities limits are undeveloped desert gobbled up decades ago, one of the reason our Density numbers are much lower than reality.

These are the Official "Phoenix Villages" kind of like Burroughs, some have their own identity like Laveen & Ahwatukee, Paradise Valley, Encanto. Most are arbitrary.

Notice the top 3, they are virtually undeveloped, and what's even better is there is more city owned land that ISNT EVEN ORGANIZED its just empty land.

This does not include Mountain preserves which there are a few massive ones.

[Manitopiaaa]

^^ Agreed.

To illustrate, here are the population counts for those neighborhoods (population density in parantheses)

• Ahwatukee Foothills: 77,288 (2,047)
• Alhambra: 128,662 (6,691)
• Camelback East: 134,937 (3,626)
• Central City: 56,543 (2,682)
• Deer Valley: 165,719 (2,917)
• Desert View: 42,857 (645)
• Encanto: 54,523 (5,241)
• Estrella: 81,107 (2,321)
• Laveen: 48,021 (1,553)
• Maryvale: 204,435 (6,373)
• North Gateway: 15,471 (411)
• North Mountain: 161,333 (4,650)
• Paradise Valley: 166,927 (3,998)
• Rio Vista: 3,343 (110)
• South Mountain: 111,315 (2,966)

Desert View, North Gateway and Rio Vista have density levels lower than you'd find in rural towns.

[KB0679]

Originally Posted by The North One

Memphis is a very extreme example. It's city proper is basically it's entire metro area.

El Paso is a better example of that.

City: 681,728
MSA: 845,553

But it could be argued that El Paso is truly a bi-national metro area of 2M+.

[Dylan Dude]

Originally Posted by Centropolis

of city population being bloated due to annexation?

lol.