Based on 2010 Census Bureau definitions of urban areas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...10_urban_areas
Thought this was an interesting visualization to show sprawl in California vs sprawl in the Northeast. However, it also demonstrates the problematic issues of how the Census Bureau defines "urbanized areas".
For example, unlike New York which retains the bulk of its contiguous urbanized area, LA and the Bay Area for some reason have the bulk of their urbanized region split into a dozen different smaller sections. For example, there was no break in development between LA-Long Beach-Anaheim and Mission-Viejo-San Clemente, Thousand Oaks, or Riverside/San Bernardino urbanized areas by 2010, bringing it ~17 million compared to NY's 19 million (if including Bridgeport). Similarly, no break in development exists between SF-Oakland and San Jose.
The way Census Bureau defines density requirements of urban areas are very lax, which favors New York's urban area to be defined much more expansively to actually include numerous disparate and noncontiguous cities and wide swathes of low-density rural areas, making New York's urban area seem much more contiguous than it actually is, in contradiction to LA, with its own respective surrounding suburban cities like Santa Clarita, Ventura, or Temecula that for strictly excluded due to the confusing way the CB defines an urban area.
The latter point demonstrates the different density profiles of each metro area that result from the Census Bureau's problematic density guidelines: that is, NY overall is less dense than LA as a whole, due to the Northeast's exurban development patterns. LA sprawl is more medium-density and contiguous, while New York's "sprawl" more disparate and more lower-density/rural as a result of including numerous lower-density rural swathes, despite the densities in their respective urban cores being the opposite.
Threaded Mode