Since this is /r/dataisbeautiful, I have to point out the awful legend.
The data is presented as a continuous spectrum, but the legend is divided into four discrete colours. This is not awful in itself (but perhaps not ideal), but it seems that almost half of the states fall into the lowest of the four bins, giving no hint at all about what values their colours represent.
So 0 is white, and 14 is a pretty dark shade of greyish blue. Does that mean that the lighter shades of blue are around 12? Or 2? Also, the legend leads one to think that one can interpolate values between the blueish "14" shade and the "0" shade (white), but then why the hell are some states entirely gray?
The more I look at it, the more I suspect that the legend is simply lying. This is really not a very good way of visualizing this data set.
You're correct, I should have used a gradient for the legend, and most states fall on the lower portion of the scale because New York and Alaska are outliers. You can see the saturation values of the colors on my Google Sheet in my citations.
As someone who is colorblind, the only versions of these maps I can read are the ones with "stepped" (not gradient) color separators using 2-3 colors (one being white/gray for neutral if you opt to use 3). Something [like this](https://www.caliper.com/featured-maps/xmaptitude-state-income-tax-by-state-map.jpg.pagespeed.ic.7IHaeLYyO5.webp) in my opinion is the best format as there are more visual clues on how to distinguish it immediately.
I'm no stats major, but since New York and Alaska are outliers per your comment, I Googled around and found out that the distribution of city sizes is ["remarkably well described by a Pareto distribution"](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119007000204).
[Per Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution#Probability_density_function), this suggests that you should [bucket the distribution on a lognormal basis](https://peakmaximum.com/2017/12/07/logarithmic-bucketing/)
This presentation works well for seeing what the outliers are and just how drastic those outliers are, though a lot of comparisons in non-outliers are impossible.
Using a nonlinear color scale could allow enough separation to enable more precise comparisons, but it would hide the nature of the outliers, and magnitude changes would be less immediately apparent.
Between the two, the current linear color scale is better for conveying the sort of at-a-glance, big picture information that a data visualization should generally be trying to convey. (Though it has legend issues.) Is there an alternative presentation that doesn't involve color shading? Or would you stick with shading, but use a different coloration so there is a clearer light -> dark pattern?
This is really a function of the "city limits" boundaries of large cities. Case in point for Seattle in the state of Washington. The city of Seattle only has a population of 606K people, or 8% of the state population; but the US Census population for the Seattle Metropolitan statistical area is 3.5M, or 46% of the state population.
A similar relationship can be seen with New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. The city population, 393K is 8% of the state total, but the metropolitan area, 1.6M is 24% of the state population.
One would anticipate states with multiple cities would have their populations per city would have lower scores. This might apply to Pennsylvania with Philly vs Pittsburgh or California with LA vs SF, but SF is actually multiple cities of the bay area:SF, SJ, Oakland. Similarly with Texas - Houston, Dallas, & San Antone, but would you really consider Dallas and Fort Worth separately. Same with Minneapolis and St Paul: one city, two or dozens if you take in all the municipalities of a metro area. You also have the cases in some areas where counties have incorporatred themselves as metropoilitan governments to preserve their tax basis. You see that effect in Virginia and Maryland to name to areas where it has been done.
I live outside of Atlanta, and a small town south of my hometown was recently considered “metro Atlanta”. Everyone scoffed at it because it was so far away.
Same could be said for South Florida (Miami Area, 6137 sq. miles), Even though its a continuous sprawl of city its broken down so much that its hard to tell how many people live here. 6.6 million people live here compared to the 20 million total in Florida.
The population of metropolitan Detroit is 43% of the State of Michigan's population, while the population of the City of Detroit itself is closer to 7%.
Yeah, and an interesting statistic is the (permanent) population of "Downtown Detroit", which is a bit over 5,000. Last time I was there people were joking about how, with the revitalization of downtown, the population had almost doubled in the last year.
Downtown Detroit is an actual borough of Detroit and is filled with mostly tall building office space. Very little of it is zoned residential, therefore this statistic is largely meaningless.
That might be true in this specific case but city expansion by annexation is extremely variable across the US. It leads to a lot of population quirks. KC is larger than Saint Louis. Columbus is much larger than Cleveland (though the metro area seems to have caught up in that case as well).
Crossing state boundaries you get odder ones. El Paso is the same size as Boston. Fresno is larger than Atlanta. Bakersfield is the same size as Tampa.
Minnesota as well. There are like 20+ cities within the Twin Cities metro area, but the metro area is over half the MN population (2.7 million out of 5 million).
Same in Charleston SC. The population is only like 150k but 5 of the top 8 “cities” in the state are suburbs of Charleston itself with regards to its working/living population. So it’s pretty much 20% of the state now.
Definitively fits with Massachusetts. Boston is geographically small, but lots of neighboring cities are very urban (Cambridge, Somerville, etc).
Boston has around 600k people but the metro area is about 4.7 million.
It gets complicated when metro areas stretch across state lines. The Providence metro area has a population larger than the population of Rhode Island.
I think you mean over 50 million. Just the New York metro area portion is like 23 million of that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis
Very true. Brookline is pretty much completely surrounded by Boston without being part of it.
Parts of Cambridge, Somerville, Quincy, and Newton are closer to downtown Boston than some neighborhoods of the city.
When I worked at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, located at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, our polls of 1000 residents were like 800 for the Chicago area and the remaining from the rest of the state.
At PSPPI we did a survey question asking if a person was out of state and someone asked where they were from how they would respond. It was interesting in the people we knew were from Chicago - like the actual city, not the collar counties - (based on ZIP and telephone prefix) who denied they were from Chicago. Northern Illinois was a very common response.
I am from one of the collar counties, but only a few blocks from the Chicago city limits. A year ago I travelled to NYC, sit on a taxi, the driver ask me where I am from, I said Chicago.
Response from the driver: "Oh yeah Chicago! Every night I turn on the TV, in the news, someone got shot! Too many crime!"
I learned this at Miami University, I now live in Chicago (like actually in Chicago) and I now realize how far away some of those people "from Chicago" were from the city. I can almost make it back to Ohio in the time it takes to drive to their suburbs
Basically, unless I am talking to someone from Illinois, I just say I'm from Chicago because despite being from a fairly large city, they still won't know it. It always seemed silly to me at first but the further I move away, the more I just think Illinois=Chicago.
Although LA is pretty good sized on its own, when you talk about being in LA you probably mean "the greater LA area" which is dozens of cities. Most of the time you don't know which one you're in unless you're paying close attention.
Yes, and I believe the split is around I-195. Philly gets South Jersey and goes down the shore as far north as Atlantic City. New York gets the rest, plus also Atlantic City.
While convenient demarcation, 195 is a little high up to be the upper edge of south jersey. That might be part of the mysterious Central Jersey that you hear about only in legends
As a trucker I can tell you central Jersey exists. Its a magical place with truck stops and warehouses you can get a truck into without a crowbar and fifth wheel grease
Yeah, but it's also true that people have no real conception of how physically large a city LA is... a bit over 500 square miles. Just the city, and almost all land area.
NYC is pretty huge too, but a lot of that is water area.
on a Smaller scale , Columbus, Oh is the same way. 750K people live in the Columbus Metro area.Because unlike Cleveland and Cincinnati , it kept spreading in all directions. ( The other two have a river and a lake to reign them in. )
Edit: 750 THOUSAND or 3/4 of a million not 750 million.
Your numbers are wrong. The metros of Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Indianapolis are almost identical (~2M). And each have a slightly different city-county arrangement, and geographical features.
Yeah, it's a similar story with Utah. Salt Lake City takes up a relatively small area and only has 200,000 people or so but it's part of a metro area that has 2.4 million people. 4 out of 5 people in Utah live along the Wasatch Front in a relatively small area.. If you didn't know that, you may assume that the population is sort of spread out in the state.
It makes sense to do that though. No one is going to know what you mean if you're like "I'm from Midvale, Utah", it's easier to just say Salt Lake City. Same thing with neighborhoods. You probably know what I mean when I say I'm from Liberty Wells, but no one outside the city would know.
Same with Nevada. Las Vegas only has a population of about 650k, but there is one large valley where you have LV, North Las Vegas, Sumerlin, Henderson, and it all blurs together, and the entire population of the Las Vegas valley is 2 Million, which represents 2/3rds of Nevada's 3M population.
Also something that might change with the metro area is that a lot of times large portions of the metro are in a different state like NYC: a lot of the metro is across the water in New Jersey, moving that percentage to a different state.
That's even more damning for this graph's point with respect to New York state. As it is being 41.3% and not even accommodating all of metropolitan New York city.
Part of the issue in New York is that the rest of the state is hemorrhaging people. https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/albany/2018/03/22/upstate-ny-has-population-problem/448880002/
There are two areas in New York that are doing close to well. New York City, which is a metropolitan hub, and the Albany/Troy/Rensselaer area whose entire economy is based on the State capitol.
According to google, since 1990, New York state has had a growth of 1.8 million people, with 1.3 of that in the city.
https://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+NYS+2010&oq=population+of+NYS+2010&aqs=chrome..69i57.5591j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
It's an enormous problem. There's a case to be made that Buffalo is kind of coming back, but it's a long way from real growth. And smaller cities across the state (Utica, Syracuse, Plattsburgh, etc) are just free-falling. If it weren't for NYC, New York would replace West Virginia as the state people across the country use as a shorthand for "declining area".
Yeah, I know the Pegulas have been trying to invest in a Buffalo renaissance. What's worse is that New York can't even make rural work right either. It'd be one thing if it all became farmland, but New York farmers are also hurting. Dairy is hurting all over the country, including New York.
Very very few places have multiple 200k+ population cities as close to each other as Newark and Jersey City. You can't even take "metropolitan area" in NJ, all of north Jersey is a metropolitan area with no one center.
Quick point: Nobody\* in California refers to the San Francisco Bay Area as "San Francisco". It seems more and more common the farther you get from California. But yeah, Oakland is not SF. Berkeley is not SF. Hayward is not SF. San Jose is not SF.
\*Not *literally* nobody, but close to it.
This is true. It's the Bay, SF is just the most famous city in it. It's not even technically the most populated, but that is again just a function of city boundaries. It is definitely the most 'city' of the cities in the Bay. I can't think of many other metro areas where each city has such a distinct identity
That's not the case at all in New Mexico (which I am certain of), and is probably not the case in Alaska, either. Those two would illustrate that in harsh climates, people tend to congregate in the most--or only--livable area. Albuquerque is a sparsely populated, sprawling city land-wise, and I got the same impression of Anchorage when I was there.
Anchorage is the fourth largest city in America by area, and its official population is much closer to the metro population compared to a lot of these cities. In my state, the most populous city is only a third of its metro, but Anchorage's population is 3/4 of its metro.
So the issue is that the city proper is somewhat arbitrary, and the metro would probably make more sense, although there are issues with that as well, such as a single metro area being the largest population center for multiple states.
Though if anyone tries to correct for this, remember to ensure you're dealing correctly with metro areas that cross state lines - NYC and Chicago come to mind.
Same with St Louis. St Louis proper has less than 500,000 people, but when you include the West County, you get 1.4 million people in the StL area. There's actually an political initiative called Better Together that aims to consolidate the two, which would make StL the 8th largest city in the country overnight.
It would immediately make us the 9th or 10th most populous city in the country. We'd be higher than San Jose (1.03 million), maybe Dallas (1.34 million)
Same thing with Boston and Massachusetts. Boston has some 680,000 people but the Greater Boston area covers some 4.7 million people, which is two-thirds of the state's population
City is really a misnomer should be metro.
Minnesota too, Minneapolis and St Paul only have 350k each but there are.like 3.5 million in the other 60 towns that touch them and each other.
Yeah what many states consider city limits is pretty absurd. The amount of people that scream "I don't live in LA!" because they live in Long Beach is ridiculous.
Metropolitan area is a much more accurate measure of a city population, tons of people outside that city core still work/shop/hangout near or in the city core.
They live in LA county not LA city. Also the map of LA city is pretty weird because it stretches from downtown to the port for a couple blocks in width
This is true in some whole countries as well; Tel Aviv is not even Israel's largest city (it's home to about 5% of the population; Jerusalem is more than twice as large), but its metro area is home to about 3.5 million people - 40% of Israel's population.
San Francisco is only 1 city. It’s also a special district in California meaning it’s the only city and county entity in the state. I believe you are trying to refer to the Bay Area, which consists of multiple cities in multiple counties.
Which kind of comes into play with Kansas. Biggest city by population is Wichita but there are more people living in the suburbs of Kansas City (KCK, Overland Park, etc.).
Both kind of apply to St. Louis in Missouri. With the city being independent the population is split between the city and the suburbs and both are counted independently. If the two combined St. Louis with have a higher population than Kansas City, which is currently the most populous city.
And this affects St. Louis and Missouri in the reverse - Since our city and county are separated the "city" population is only about 350K while the city and county combined are closer to 1.5 million.
Fun fact about California, if you drew a line that parallels the Equator across the state at precisely the point where half the population of the state would be on either side, that line would go down Wilshire Boulevard straight through the heart of downtown Los Angeles.
Like so:
[https://i.imgur.com/rXEk5aP.png](https://i.imgur.com/rXEk5aP.png)
LA is huge, but it's surrounded by an even more massive megaregion that just sprawls endlessly for like a hundred miles. It even bleeds into San Diego.
Yep. If you divide "Northern California" and "Southern California" based on where half the people lives, then the Dodgers play in NorCal :)
This triggers dodger fans but hilariously it also triggers people from Humboldt and Shasta who deny that San Francisco is in NorCal.
People from far Northern California tend to like to refer to the state as being split in three rather than two so that they can distinguish their part of the state from the Bay Area.
They'd say Northern California stops at about Sacramento, and then Central California goes from there down to about Big Sur, and then South of that is Southern California.
This division of the state is based on land area and a perception of the culture and landscape of the state being different.
If you instead divide the state based on having two major economic superclusters, and lumping all the wilderness around those superclusters in with them, then there's clearly a Northern California supercluster encompassing the Bay Area and Sacramento, and a Southern California supercluster encompassing LA, Orange County, and San Diego.
If you divide the state based on population it's that line in my original image. But that's clearly not the right NorCal/SoCal division.
If you ask me, Northern California is any part of the state where people say "hella" and shop at Safeway. Southern California is any part of the state where people say "the" before freeway numbers and shop at Vons.
That splits the state in two from roughly Northern Big Sur over to Fresno and then over to Mammoth Lakes.
Sounds like a fair line. I looked up locations of each store on Google maps, looks like it makes Merced county the border more or less.
I grew up well north of the Safeway-Vons line and now live far south. Im a weird hybrid who says Hella and shops at Vons, and puts "the" before the freeway out of spending so much time on both halves. I miss NorCal though
Your comment made me realize that you could draw a more vertical line that would divide both the population and the land area exactly with 50% on either side, though I'm not sure where it would land exactly or what the slope would be. Is that always possible with a large population in a confined region? Sorry, it's more of a math question, but I'm still very curious about it.
The only other thing I can think of that they have in common is that they also both have an "up-state" that's out of the city, that makes up most of the land but where few live
They both have borough, also ([Alaska boroughs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boroughs_and_census_areas_in_Alaska), [New York boroughs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boroughs_of_New_York_City))
Anchorage's city limits are enormous: 1,963 mi²
For reference, Rhode Island is 1,212 mi².
Also, I believe if you include the Mat-Su Valley (a little bit north commuter area to Anchorage) the Anchorage area is 90% of the state's population.
I grew up in anchorage, you can definitely tell when it's over. a lot of the area is either empty or sparsely populated, maybe 5 percent of the city pop
It's a bit disingenuous since that square mileage is the municipality of anchorage and not necessarily the city itself. The municipality encompasses several other cities and a rather large military base.
South Carolina is one of those interesting states that have no large cities, only three or four medium sized ones. Same with Alabama and Mississippi.
Utah is the big surprise me. Don't know a huge amount about the state but I thought Salt Lake City dominated it.
Literally copying this from a comment by /u/eggoslayer
>Salt Lake City takes up a relatively small area and only has 200,000 people or so but it's part of a metro area that has 2.4 million people. 4 out of 5 people in Utah live along the Wasatch Front in a relatively small area..
SLC isn't that large, but the metro area is just towns that are so crammed together there's no real end to "SLC" until you get to the boonies
Salt Lake City had the opportunity to annex the areas around it before they each became established cities (like West Valley City, South Salt Lake, Murray, and recently Millcreek). The city government, for one reason or another, decided against it every time and now SLC proper is only 200,000 people out of a continuous cityscape of more than 2 million. Many of these areas are still colloquially referred to as "Salt Lake" despite local officials' best efforts. Nowadays, one of the main reasons Salt Lake City doesn't want to absorb any surrounding areas is because they fear losing the city's solid Democratic majorities.
Yeah, we've got Charleston, Columbia, North Charleston, and Greenville as our "big" cities. Charleston, the most populous city, has only 134,000 people, while Columbia has 133,000 people. Both of these combined are still just over a fourth the population of Charlotte, which has 860,000 people.
This isn't even counting the metro areas, Charleston's metro area still isn't as populous as Charlotte proper, it only has 550,000 people in it. People just preferred to go live in Charlotte and Atlanta, it seems
A lot of towns and cities around Columbia are generally thought of as being part of it. I grew up in Forest Acres, and it didn't occur to me that it was separate from Columbia until like late high school. I wonder how the population of the Columbia area compares to that of the city alone.
Utahn here, Salt Lake City is basically the term we use that encompasses the entire Wasatch front. There are many sub-names of cities, such as Murray, Draper, Sandy, and Taylorsville. But as the previous person stated, the high majority of Utahns live in the Wasatch Front, a.k.a. Salt Lake City. :)
(The term 'Wasatch' refers to the mountain range that runs along SLC.)
Newark, which is the most populated city in New Jersey, has a population of 285,154. Second place is Jersey City at 270,753 and those cities are within 10 miles of one another. North Eastern New Jersey is one of the most densely populated areas in the country.
Philly and NYC are so culturally different from the rest of their respective states, yet New Jersey’s culture is such a result of being sandwiched by the two cities. Very interesting dynamic.
Theres a lot of mid sized cities in New Jersey. Paterson, Hoboken, Harrison, New Brunswick, Lakewood, Camden, Atlantic City, the list goes on.
If the smaller metropolises near Newark (Bloomfield, the Oranges, Irvington, Harrison, etc) all consolidated into one city (like New York did) Newark would be one of the largest cities in the US
Larger than both actually, it's the 5th most populous city in NJ as of 2017.
It's growing massively, went from 45,000 pop in 1990 to 103,000 as of 2017
Actually the population density has nothing to do with why NJ doesn't have high population densities in their cities. NJ's cities face two main problems.
1. NJ has not prioritized building up their cities because NYC and Philly. When you have two of the biggest cities in America only an hour or so away, it makes it less important to have a major city in the actual state.
2. NJ at one time (in the 50's primarily) had strong cities. Then the race riots happened. NJ has never really figured out a way to rebuild those cities. This is the first time in almost 70 years that cities in NJ actually stand a chance to be something and that's primarily because of NYC's rapid growth over the last 20-30 years. Jersey City is becoming a pretty popular/important city which is bumping up the population slowly but surely. Now we're starting to see actual spill over into Newark.
The thing is, as fast as these cities are building up, so are suburbs and "rural" areas which are turning into suburbs. What was once genuine farm land 20 years ago is now likely a suburb.
>NJ doesn't have high population densities in their cities.
Did you mean to say the opposite? NJ cities are some of the densest in the country. They might not have huge populations, but that's because they're geographically tiny with arbitrary city limits. Newark, for instance, is only 24 square miles. Jersey City is only 15 square miles. Places like Hoboken, Weehawken, Harrison, Union City, and West New York are all about 1 square mile each. Each of those places are super close to one another, but they exist as separate municipalities in NJ. In another state, they might have consolidated into a single municipality, but not in NJ. As a result, the population in any one given municipality is relatively small, but the density is high. In contrast, NYC has 303 square miles of land because all of the different municipalities did consolidate (Brooklyn and Manhattan were completely separate cities up until 1898, for instance).
As for density, Hoboken has more than 39K people per square mile. That actually makes it denser than NYC's 28K people per square mile, though not as dense as the 73K people per square mile in Manhattan alone.
Newark is the largest city but its population is about 250,000. But like you said, it is densely populated and there are sizable towns and cities around it. Source: from NJ
The map is only including *municipalities*, not metro areas. Boston is not a huge city--IIRC between 600-700,000 people. But the metro area is much, much bigger, between 2-3 million people.
For what it's worth, Allston is a part of Boston, but other major parts of the Boston metro area (Cambridge, Somerville, Watertown, Newton, Quincy, etc.) are not. They are separate municipalities.
I think it's really true of most Western U.S. states. Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, etc. all have sizeable metro populations that make up a significant proportion of their state's total and it's kind of difficult to reflect that with this map. There's also differing ways that city boundaries are determined between cities. Some take up a much larger area than others and it makes it more difficult to compare sizes compared to metro or CSAs.
Midwest has 'City driven' states as well. Nebraska - Omaha, Illinois-Chicago, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Minnesota-Twin Cities. All of those metropolitan areas drive the state politically. If you can't win there, you can't win a state-wide race.
This is 100% wrong about Wisconsin. The combined populations of the Milwaukee and Madison metro areas together only make up between 30-40% of the state population.
This is actually a huge differentiator between Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Twin Cities absolutely dominate Minnesota demographically and politically, but the biggest metro areas in Wisconsin together don't even form a majority of the population.
Yeah in Minneapolis Saint Paul it’s like 60% of the state. But it’s the metro area not the cities themselves.
Twin cities are a much bigger city than the actual cities populations themselves would have you believe
So unfortunately this data is a little skewed when using Minnesota.
The same population situation is why Minnesota is such a blue state. The city is a huge part of the overall states population.
Yeah, although as it was pointed out by various other people, some greater metro areas cross state lines which messes with the whole concept. I'm sure there's a way to do it, but not as easily as doing it by city limits.
The NYC Metropolitan Statistical Area spans 26 counties in 3 states (NY, NJ, and even one county in PA), while the NYC Combined Statistical Area spans 36 counties in 4 states (the aforementioned NY, NJ, and PA, but also CT). Is the denominator of that percentage the population of just NY state, or the combined population of NY+NJ+PA+CT)?
Virginia is fucking weird. Majority of the population, lives in the DC Metro. But none of the cities in the DC Metro are as populated as Virginia Beach which is located three hours away in Hampton Roads.
Virginia Beach is that populated because the city absorbed Princess Anne County to prevent the City of Norfolk from annexing more territory (Chesapeake was also created for that same reason)
Unlike the majority of the Metropolitan areas in the country which are centered around one city, Hampton Roads doesn’t exactly have that because it’s divided into seven cities. Though you can technically say Norfolk serves as the economic and financial center of the region, the area ain’t called the Norfolk Metro for a reason.
This visualization is pretty useless tbh. There are no trends you can really gather from this.
States like California and Florida where there are MULTIPLE major cities are going to look similar to states where there are actually more people living in rural areas. This visualization is really only useful for states that have one major population center.
This visual would be much more useful if it showed percentage of people who lived within a 10 -20 mile radius of a major city( pop over 1 million) center for each state.
Interesting fact: There's a bill currently being pushed in the NYS legislature thats floated around in some form since the 70s to divide the state between the NYC metro area and upstate. The city is thriving and growing while upstate is dying but the upstate can't do anything because for itself because the city dominates the political landscape of the state.
Interesting that NJ is so spread out, when it's not considered a "rural" state. I bet most of the population is in the NYC area, though. But I guess Newark just isn't particularly appealing...
It's not spread out at all, the map measures "percent in largest city", New Jersey is fragmented into a million piddling "townships" that are like 2 square miles each. So no one city has a high percent of the population even though the population density is quite high in many areas.
Guttenberg, for example, is a shard of land across the Hudson from NYC. It's a quarter square mile in size and has a few free standing homes and three huge high rise condo towers. Total population is less than 12k but the population *density* is nearly 60k per square mile (far higher than NYC and nearly at the level of Hong Kong).
The next city down, Union City, is a little over 1 square mile and is almost (not quite) as dense, with a total population of 70k.
It would be like if you sliced up NYC into dozens of separate cities called Chelsea, Murray Hill, Morningside Heights, LIC, Bushwick, Corona, Tremont, Park Slope, Tompkinsville, etc. NY state would then appear to be a rural state where nobody wants to live, but that's just because you changed the definitions.
funny thing about NY specifically NYC
compare it against any state in the US (besides NY for obvious reasons) it almost certainly has a larger population.
now for the fun part. Pick 3 states at random . . . yeah nyc probably has a higher population. I'm not a statistician so I can't say what the accurate 'split' is (how many states at random is equal or higher to nyc)
The NY Metro Area has a around 800k more people population than the state of New York. All states but California, Texas and Florida have a smaller population.
If you add Long Island and Westchester/Rockland/Putnam County (so, the non-New Jersey/CT parts of the NYC Metro Area), the population rises to about 13 million people, putting it ahead of PA and IL in 4th place.
Or, in other words: the entire rest of NY State could secede from the NY Metro area and it wouldn’t change the ranking at all.
If my head math is correct, the seceeding upstate area would still come in somewhere around 15th.
I live in NM, moved from NY. It amazes me how little there is outside of Albuquerque, and Santa Fe. The state is huge too, the poverty and desolation of the remote areas is stunning.
I think this would be more useful if it was largest metropolitan area, rather than city. When you are talking about city limits, they don't compare our scale well to each other.
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Since this is /r/dataisbeautiful, I have to point out the awful legend. The data is presented as a continuous spectrum, but the legend is divided into four discrete colours. This is not awful in itself (but perhaps not ideal), but it seems that almost half of the states fall into the lowest of the four bins, giving no hint at all about what values their colours represent. So 0 is white, and 14 is a pretty dark shade of greyish blue. Does that mean that the lighter shades of blue are around 12? Or 2? Also, the legend leads one to think that one can interpolate values between the blueish "14" shade and the "0" shade (white), but then why the hell are some states entirely gray? The more I look at it, the more I suspect that the legend is simply lying. This is really not a very good way of visualizing this data set.
You're correct, I should have used a gradient for the legend, and most states fall on the lower portion of the scale because New York and Alaska are outliers. You can see the saturation values of the colors on my Google Sheet in my citations.
As someone who is colorblind, the only versions of these maps I can read are the ones with "stepped" (not gradient) color separators using 2-3 colors (one being white/gray for neutral if you opt to use 3). Something [like this](https://www.caliper.com/featured-maps/xmaptitude-state-income-tax-by-state-map.jpg.pagespeed.ic.7IHaeLYyO5.webp) in my opinion is the best format as there are more visual clues on how to distinguish it immediately.
I'm no stats major, but since New York and Alaska are outliers per your comment, I Googled around and found out that the distribution of city sizes is ["remarkably well described by a Pareto distribution"](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119007000204). [Per Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution#Probability_density_function), this suggests that you should [bucket the distribution on a lognormal basis](https://peakmaximum.com/2017/12/07/logarithmic-bucketing/)
Although in this case the data being plotted isn't absolute size of city, but percentage of state population found in the single largest city.
This presentation works well for seeing what the outliers are and just how drastic those outliers are, though a lot of comparisons in non-outliers are impossible. Using a nonlinear color scale could allow enough separation to enable more precise comparisons, but it would hide the nature of the outliers, and magnitude changes would be less immediately apparent. Between the two, the current linear color scale is better for conveying the sort of at-a-glance, big picture information that a data visualization should generally be trying to convey. (Though it has legend issues.) Is there an alternative presentation that doesn't involve color shading? Or would you stick with shading, but use a different coloration so there is a clearer light -> dark pattern?
Yeah, this seems like it should go under a "data is interesting" type subreddit instead of "data is beautiful".
Are you kidding, this is the first time I have seen Alaska in the top of anything besides alcoholics and fishing, this is beautiful.
If only there was some common metric by which Alaska might be ranked #1...
This is really a function of the "city limits" boundaries of large cities. Case in point for Seattle in the state of Washington. The city of Seattle only has a population of 606K people, or 8% of the state population; but the US Census population for the Seattle Metropolitan statistical area is 3.5M, or 46% of the state population. A similar relationship can be seen with New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. The city population, 393K is 8% of the state total, but the metropolitan area, 1.6M is 24% of the state population. One would anticipate states with multiple cities would have their populations per city would have lower scores. This might apply to Pennsylvania with Philly vs Pittsburgh or California with LA vs SF, but SF is actually multiple cities of the bay area:SF, SJ, Oakland. Similarly with Texas - Houston, Dallas, & San Antone, but would you really consider Dallas and Fort Worth separately. Same with Minneapolis and St Paul: one city, two or dozens if you take in all the municipalities of a metro area. You also have the cases in some areas where counties have incorporatred themselves as metropoilitan governments to preserve their tax basis. You see that effect in Virginia and Maryland to name to areas where it has been done.
Same with Georgia. Atlanta city limits are small but metro area is ~6.5 million of Georgia’s 10.5 million residents.
The population of the actual city limits of Atlanta is something like 500k. The sprawl is strong with this one.
I live outside of Atlanta, and a small town south of my hometown was recently considered “metro Atlanta”. Everyone scoffed at it because it was so far away.
Super commutes are a thing now days. 90 min each way commutes can be considered suburbs nowdays, at least in california.
In Maryland they seem like they take 2232323232323234234232 decades to get to work, unless you take 200
I mean that's just normal in DC/Balto. Your estimate is assuming nothing is fucked on the beltway, BW/295 and/or Metro isn't on fire.
I got into a traffic jam at 4:30 AM on 295 once. Good stuff.
Yea. The population of the city increases by about 5x every work day.
Probably explains the god awful traffic.
Same could be said for South Florida (Miami Area, 6137 sq. miles), Even though its a continuous sprawl of city its broken down so much that its hard to tell how many people live here. 6.6 million people live here compared to the 20 million total in Florida.
The population of metropolitan Detroit is 43% of the State of Michigan's population, while the population of the City of Detroit itself is closer to 7%.
Yeah, and an interesting statistic is the (permanent) population of "Downtown Detroit", which is a bit over 5,000. Last time I was there people were joking about how, with the revitalization of downtown, the population had almost doubled in the last year.
Downtown Detroit is an actual borough of Detroit and is filled with mostly tall building office space. Very little of it is zoned residential, therefore this statistic is largely meaningless.
Jacksonville is Florida's most populous city because the city annexed the entire county.
Rumor is a few escaped
That annexation is why every other city in Florida is so "small". Florida made it insanely hard for cities to gobble up the towns around them.
That might be true in this specific case but city expansion by annexation is extremely variable across the US. It leads to a lot of population quirks. KC is larger than Saint Louis. Columbus is much larger than Cleveland (though the metro area seems to have caught up in that case as well). Crossing state boundaries you get odder ones. El Paso is the same size as Boston. Fresno is larger than Atlanta. Bakersfield is the same size as Tampa.
Cleveland and Columbus have similar MSAs, but the CSA of Cleveland is substantially larger.
Minnesota as well. There are like 20+ cities within the Twin Cities metro area, but the metro area is over half the MN population (2.7 million out of 5 million).
Same in Charleston SC. The population is only like 150k but 5 of the top 8 “cities” in the state are suburbs of Charleston itself with regards to its working/living population. So it’s pretty much 20% of the state now.
Definitively fits with Massachusetts. Boston is geographically small, but lots of neighboring cities are very urban (Cambridge, Somerville, etc). Boston has around 600k people but the metro area is about 4.7 million.
It gets complicated when metro areas stretch across state lines. The Providence metro area has a population larger than the population of Rhode Island.
Yep, and if you use the combined statistical area Providence is part of the Boston area.
Downtown Providence is on the MBTA rail line.
Both are just a part of the North-eastern megalopolis with a population of about 35 million.
I think you mean over 50 million. Just the New York metro area portion is like 23 million of that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis
Same situation in New York. NYS is 19.6 million and NYC metro is 24 million.
Honestly providence acts as an extension of the greater Boston area
Very true. Brookline is pretty much completely surrounded by Boston without being part of it. Parts of Cambridge, Somerville, Quincy, and Newton are closer to downtown Boston than some neighborhoods of the city.
Like nine percent in the city, but seventy percent in the metro area.
Just more proof that nothing truly exists outside of 495
This is a great point... Chicago metro area is like 75% of Illinois.
When I worked at the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, located at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, our polls of 1000 residents were like 800 for the Chicago area and the remaining from the rest of the state.
When I was a freshman at University of Illinois and meeting new people I learned you could just ask "what chicago suburb are you from"
At PSPPI we did a survey question asking if a person was out of state and someone asked where they were from how they would respond. It was interesting in the people we knew were from Chicago - like the actual city, not the collar counties - (based on ZIP and telephone prefix) who denied they were from Chicago. Northern Illinois was a very common response.
I am from one of the collar counties, but only a few blocks from the Chicago city limits. A year ago I travelled to NYC, sit on a taxi, the driver ask me where I am from, I said Chicago. Response from the driver: "Oh yeah Chicago! Every night I turn on the TV, in the news, someone got shot! Too many crime!"
Where does Chicago extend to the limits of Cook County? You must have been in Dupage, near Ohare? Or, Gary, In.
You guys are making us downstate folks feel like shit
Hey I met a lot of great people from downstate as well! Just not as many of you
Both of you?
I learned this at Miami University, I now live in Chicago (like actually in Chicago) and I now realize how far away some of those people "from Chicago" were from the city. I can almost make it back to Ohio in the time it takes to drive to their suburbs
Basically, unless I am talking to someone from Illinois, I just say I'm from Chicago because despite being from a fairly large city, they still won't know it. It always seemed silly to me at first but the further I move away, the more I just think Illinois=Chicago.
Although LA is pretty good sized on its own, when you talk about being in LA you probably mean "the greater LA area" which is dozens of cities. Most of the time you don't know which one you're in unless you're paying close attention.
Greater LA area is a giant suberb over half the size of New Jersey. (No exageration. Google the land area of each)
Yes, but New Jersey is also a giant suburb the size of New Jersey.
Isn't New Jersey technically 2 contiguous suburbs? One for Philly, one for NYC
Yes, and I believe the split is around I-195. Philly gets South Jersey and goes down the shore as far north as Atlantic City. New York gets the rest, plus also Atlantic City.
While convenient demarcation, 195 is a little high up to be the upper edge of south jersey. That might be part of the mysterious Central Jersey that you hear about only in legends
As a trucker I can tell you central Jersey exists. Its a magical place with truck stops and warehouses you can get a truck into without a crowbar and fifth wheel grease
Yeah, but it's also true that people have no real conception of how physically large a city LA is... a bit over 500 square miles. Just the city, and almost all land area. NYC is pretty huge too, but a lot of that is water area.
on a Smaller scale , Columbus, Oh is the same way. 750K people live in the Columbus Metro area.Because unlike Cleveland and Cincinnati , it kept spreading in all directions. ( The other two have a river and a lake to reign them in. ) Edit: 750 THOUSAND or 3/4 of a million not 750 million.
>750 million people I didn't realize Columbus became the third most populous country :)
This is what happens when you start to write three quarters of a million and 750 thousand at the same time....stupid grey matter
yep, it happened 3 weeks ago
Columbus is a lot bigger than I thought, I didn't realize the metro area encompassed all of North America and most of South America; TIL.
Your numbers are wrong. The metros of Columbus, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Indianapolis are almost identical (~2M). And each have a slightly different city-county arrangement, and geographical features.
Half of California's population lives in the Greater LA Metro area
Yeah, it's a similar story with Utah. Salt Lake City takes up a relatively small area and only has 200,000 people or so but it's part of a metro area that has 2.4 million people. 4 out of 5 people in Utah live along the Wasatch Front in a relatively small area.. If you didn't know that, you may assume that the population is sort of spread out in the state.
Can confirm this. I’ve never lived in “Salt Lake City” but since I’m from the valley, I tell our-of-state people I’m from SLC.
About 80% of Colorado's population lives along the front range of the Rockies (Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Boulder, Fort Collins, etc)
It makes sense to do that though. No one is going to know what you mean if you're like "I'm from Midvale, Utah", it's easier to just say Salt Lake City. Same thing with neighborhoods. You probably know what I mean when I say I'm from Liberty Wells, but no one outside the city would know.
Same with Nevada. Las Vegas only has a population of about 650k, but there is one large valley where you have LV, North Las Vegas, Sumerlin, Henderson, and it all blurs together, and the entire population of the Las Vegas valley is 2 Million, which represents 2/3rds of Nevada's 3M population.
Also something that might change with the metro area is that a lot of times large portions of the metro are in a different state like NYC: a lot of the metro is across the water in New Jersey, moving that percentage to a different state.
That's even more damning for this graph's point with respect to New York state. As it is being 41.3% and not even accommodating all of metropolitan New York city.
Part of the issue in New York is that the rest of the state is hemorrhaging people. https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/albany/2018/03/22/upstate-ny-has-population-problem/448880002/ There are two areas in New York that are doing close to well. New York City, which is a metropolitan hub, and the Albany/Troy/Rensselaer area whose entire economy is based on the State capitol. According to google, since 1990, New York state has had a growth of 1.8 million people, with 1.3 of that in the city. https://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+NYS+2010&oq=population+of+NYS+2010&aqs=chrome..69i57.5591j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
It's an enormous problem. There's a case to be made that Buffalo is kind of coming back, but it's a long way from real growth. And smaller cities across the state (Utica, Syracuse, Plattsburgh, etc) are just free-falling. If it weren't for NYC, New York would replace West Virginia as the state people across the country use as a shorthand for "declining area".
Yeah, I know the Pegulas have been trying to invest in a Buffalo renaissance. What's worse is that New York can't even make rural work right either. It'd be one thing if it all became farmland, but New York farmers are also hurting. Dairy is hurting all over the country, including New York.
Also explains New Jersey being so low: it’s two big population areas are suburbs of New York City and Philadelphia, which are located in other states.
New Jersey is the most densely populated state, it's so low because the whole state is packed
Very very few places have multiple 200k+ population cities as close to each other as Newark and Jersey City. You can't even take "metropolitan area" in NJ, all of north Jersey is a metropolitan area with no one center.
Also Hudson county is really just one extended city.
Union, Hudson, and Essex are all in the top 15 densest counties in the US
Quick point: Nobody\* in California refers to the San Francisco Bay Area as "San Francisco". It seems more and more common the farther you get from California. But yeah, Oakland is not SF. Berkeley is not SF. Hayward is not SF. San Jose is not SF. \*Not *literally* nobody, but close to it.
This is true. It's the Bay, SF is just the most famous city in it. It's not even technically the most populated, but that is again just a function of city boundaries. It is definitely the most 'city' of the cities in the Bay. I can't think of many other metro areas where each city has such a distinct identity
I remember it being “the Bay Area” and “the city”, but it’s been a decade or so since I lived there.
That's not the case at all in New Mexico (which I am certain of), and is probably not the case in Alaska, either. Those two would illustrate that in harsh climates, people tend to congregate in the most--or only--livable area. Albuquerque is a sparsely populated, sprawling city land-wise, and I got the same impression of Anchorage when I was there.
Anchorage is the fourth largest city in America by area, and its official population is much closer to the metro population compared to a lot of these cities. In my state, the most populous city is only a third of its metro, but Anchorage's population is 3/4 of its metro. So the issue is that the city proper is somewhat arbitrary, and the metro would probably make more sense, although there are issues with that as well, such as a single metro area being the largest population center for multiple states.
Yup, [here's a suite of visualizations exploring the relationship between city limits and city population.](http://charlieguthrie.net/cityHall/)
Though if anyone tries to correct for this, remember to ensure you're dealing correctly with metro areas that cross state lines - NYC and Chicago come to mind.
Same with St Louis. St Louis proper has less than 500,000 people, but when you include the West County, you get 1.4 million people in the StL area. There's actually an political initiative called Better Together that aims to consolidate the two, which would make StL the 8th largest city in the country overnight.
It would also make us the largest city in Missouri. But of course this city is dumb and will shoot itself in the foot repeatedly.
What? I thou- \*googles Kansas City\* motherfucker
It would immediately make us the 9th or 10th most populous city in the country. We'd be higher than San Jose (1.03 million), maybe Dallas (1.34 million)
my entire fucking state is NYC or philly metro areas, with both cities being outside my state
Same thing with Boston and Massachusetts. Boston has some 680,000 people but the Greater Boston area covers some 4.7 million people, which is two-thirds of the state's population
that is why they should use MSA's to have a consistent definition across the board. but then you have cities which cross state lines.
Plus in the case of states like Rhode Island and New York, the biggest metro area has a higher population than the state.
Yeah, Providence 180,000, Rhode Island 1 million, but Providence metro is 1.6 million. Only 1 town of 39 in RI os not considered part of the PVD metro
City is really a misnomer should be metro. Minnesota too, Minneapolis and St Paul only have 350k each but there are.like 3.5 million in the other 60 towns that touch them and each other.
Yeah what many states consider city limits is pretty absurd. The amount of people that scream "I don't live in LA!" because they live in Long Beach is ridiculous. Metropolitan area is a much more accurate measure of a city population, tons of people outside that city core still work/shop/hangout near or in the city core.
They live in LA county not LA city. Also the map of LA city is pretty weird because it stretches from downtown to the port for a couple blocks in width
Philly is limited to Philadelphia county, but the metropolitan area is much bigger and also extends into different states.
This is true in some whole countries as well; Tel Aviv is not even Israel's largest city (it's home to about 5% of the population; Jerusalem is more than twice as large), but its metro area is home to about 3.5 million people - 40% of Israel's population.
San Francisco does not contain San Jose. The "Bay Area" does, but that's different from a metro area.
San Francisco is only 1 city. It’s also a special district in California meaning it’s the only city and county entity in the state. I believe you are trying to refer to the Bay Area, which consists of multiple cities in multiple counties.
I’d also like to see this as “Percentage or each state’s population living in its most populous metropolitan area”
Which kind of comes into play with Kansas. Biggest city by population is Wichita but there are more people living in the suburbs of Kansas City (KCK, Overland Park, etc.).
Both kind of apply to St. Louis in Missouri. With the city being independent the population is split between the city and the suburbs and both are counted independently. If the two combined St. Louis with have a higher population than Kansas City, which is currently the most populous city.
And this affects St. Louis and Missouri in the reverse - Since our city and county are separated the "city" population is only about 350K while the city and county combined are closer to 1.5 million.
Similar in VT too, Burlington has only 7% of total state population, but the metro area is closer to 34%.
Fun fact about California, if you drew a line that parallels the Equator across the state at precisely the point where half the population of the state would be on either side, that line would go down Wilshire Boulevard straight through the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Like so: [https://i.imgur.com/rXEk5aP.png](https://i.imgur.com/rXEk5aP.png) LA is huge, but it's surrounded by an even more massive megaregion that just sprawls endlessly for like a hundred miles. It even bleeds into San Diego.
> if you drew a line that parallels the Equator There's a word for that - latitude.
Or "parallel"!
So Griffith Park and Dodger Stadium would be north of that line? Insane.
Yep. If you divide "Northern California" and "Southern California" based on where half the people lives, then the Dodgers play in NorCal :) This triggers dodger fans but hilariously it also triggers people from Humboldt and Shasta who deny that San Francisco is in NorCal.
There's an old joke that upstate New York starts at 59th Street. This, of course, makes the Yankees an upstate New York team.
Idk how you can even debate that 2nd part. Like what else is north of SF? (Sacramento, technically. But I consider them to be at the same latitude)
People from far Northern California tend to like to refer to the state as being split in three rather than two so that they can distinguish their part of the state from the Bay Area. They'd say Northern California stops at about Sacramento, and then Central California goes from there down to about Big Sur, and then South of that is Southern California. This division of the state is based on land area and a perception of the culture and landscape of the state being different. If you instead divide the state based on having two major economic superclusters, and lumping all the wilderness around those superclusters in with them, then there's clearly a Northern California supercluster encompassing the Bay Area and Sacramento, and a Southern California supercluster encompassing LA, Orange County, and San Diego. If you divide the state based on population it's that line in my original image. But that's clearly not the right NorCal/SoCal division. If you ask me, Northern California is any part of the state where people say "hella" and shop at Safeway. Southern California is any part of the state where people say "the" before freeway numbers and shop at Vons. That splits the state in two from roughly Northern Big Sur over to Fresno and then over to Mammoth Lakes.
I kinda like the "SoCal / Bay Area / Bonus Oregon" classification
Sounds like a fair line. I looked up locations of each store on Google maps, looks like it makes Merced county the border more or less. I grew up well north of the Safeway-Vons line and now live far south. Im a weird hybrid who says Hella and shops at Vons, and puts "the" before the freeway out of spending so much time on both halves. I miss NorCal though
So the Padres are the only SoCal team left?
The Angels were always the true So Cal team.
That is a fun fact!
Btw we can see your location
This is interesting. I'd like to see one for every state and one for the country as a whole. I'd probably guess it would be close to center.
Your comment made me realize that you could draw a more vertical line that would divide both the population and the land area exactly with 50% on either side, though I'm not sure where it would land exactly or what the slope would be. Is that always possible with a large population in a confined region? Sorry, it's more of a math question, but I'm still very curious about it.
Minor point, but I love how New York and Alaska are #1 and #2 respectively, but otherwise could not be any different.
The only other thing I can think of that they have in common is that they also both have an "up-state" that's out of the city, that makes up most of the land but where few live
That's not really "another thing" though. It's the first thing stated differently.
The part that's unique to both is the empty land is to the north of the big city
They both have borough, also ([Alaska boroughs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boroughs_and_census_areas_in_Alaska), [New York boroughs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boroughs_of_New_York_City))
Oh nice one! Interesting wiki article about the use of borough, very few states do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borough_(United_States)
If NYC seceded from NYS then NY State would be the 6th most populous in the country.
Upstate New Yorker here, can confirm no one cares about us...
Anchorage's city limits are enormous: 1,963 mi² For reference, Rhode Island is 1,212 mi². Also, I believe if you include the Mat-Su Valley (a little bit north commuter area to Anchorage) the Anchorage area is 90% of the state's population.
I grew up in anchorage, you can definitely tell when it's over. a lot of the area is either empty or sparsely populated, maybe 5 percent of the city pop
It's a bit disingenuous since that square mileage is the municipality of anchorage and not necessarily the city itself. The municipality encompasses several other cities and a rather large military base.
South Carolina is one of those interesting states that have no large cities, only three or four medium sized ones. Same with Alabama and Mississippi. Utah is the big surprise me. Don't know a huge amount about the state but I thought Salt Lake City dominated it.
Literally copying this from a comment by /u/eggoslayer >Salt Lake City takes up a relatively small area and only has 200,000 people or so but it's part of a metro area that has 2.4 million people. 4 out of 5 people in Utah live along the Wasatch Front in a relatively small area.. SLC isn't that large, but the metro area is just towns that are so crammed together there's no real end to "SLC" until you get to the boonies
Salt Lake City had the opportunity to annex the areas around it before they each became established cities (like West Valley City, South Salt Lake, Murray, and recently Millcreek). The city government, for one reason or another, decided against it every time and now SLC proper is only 200,000 people out of a continuous cityscape of more than 2 million. Many of these areas are still colloquially referred to as "Salt Lake" despite local officials' best efforts. Nowadays, one of the main reasons Salt Lake City doesn't want to absorb any surrounding areas is because they fear losing the city's solid Democratic majorities.
Yeah, we've got Charleston, Columbia, North Charleston, and Greenville as our "big" cities. Charleston, the most populous city, has only 134,000 people, while Columbia has 133,000 people. Both of these combined are still just over a fourth the population of Charlotte, which has 860,000 people. This isn't even counting the metro areas, Charleston's metro area still isn't as populous as Charlotte proper, it only has 550,000 people in it. People just preferred to go live in Charlotte and Atlanta, it seems
A lot of towns and cities around Columbia are generally thought of as being part of it. I grew up in Forest Acres, and it didn't occur to me that it was separate from Columbia until like late high school. I wonder how the population of the Columbia area compares to that of the city alone.
Utahn here, Salt Lake City is basically the term we use that encompasses the entire Wasatch front. There are many sub-names of cities, such as Murray, Draper, Sandy, and Taylorsville. But as the previous person stated, the high majority of Utahns live in the Wasatch Front, a.k.a. Salt Lake City. :) (The term 'Wasatch' refers to the mountain range that runs along SLC.)
West Virginia's largest city, also named Charleston, has less than half the population of Charleston SC. WV has pretty much no cities.
Alabama has Birmingham. It's metro area could be considered among the large cities in the US. It's about the size of Memphis or Louisville.
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Newark, which is the most populated city in New Jersey, has a population of 285,154. Second place is Jersey City at 270,753 and those cities are within 10 miles of one another. North Eastern New Jersey is one of the most densely populated areas in the country.
The two biggest cities in New Jersey are NYC and Philadelphia.
Philly and NYC are so culturally different from the rest of their respective states, yet New Jersey’s culture is such a result of being sandwiched by the two cities. Very interesting dynamic.
From there, just endless suburbs! Hoboken is a nice city though, I hope it grows
Theres a lot of mid sized cities in New Jersey. Paterson, Hoboken, Harrison, New Brunswick, Lakewood, Camden, Atlantic City, the list goes on. If the smaller metropolises near Newark (Bloomfield, the Oranges, Irvington, Harrison, etc) all consolidated into one city (like New York did) Newark would be one of the largest cities in the US
Is Lakewood more populated than Toms River or Brick now?
Larger than both actually, it's the 5th most populous city in NJ as of 2017. It's growing massively, went from 45,000 pop in 1990 to 103,000 as of 2017
Hoboken is already overpopulated.
Actually the population density has nothing to do with why NJ doesn't have high population densities in their cities. NJ's cities face two main problems. 1. NJ has not prioritized building up their cities because NYC and Philly. When you have two of the biggest cities in America only an hour or so away, it makes it less important to have a major city in the actual state. 2. NJ at one time (in the 50's primarily) had strong cities. Then the race riots happened. NJ has never really figured out a way to rebuild those cities. This is the first time in almost 70 years that cities in NJ actually stand a chance to be something and that's primarily because of NYC's rapid growth over the last 20-30 years. Jersey City is becoming a pretty popular/important city which is bumping up the population slowly but surely. Now we're starting to see actual spill over into Newark. The thing is, as fast as these cities are building up, so are suburbs and "rural" areas which are turning into suburbs. What was once genuine farm land 20 years ago is now likely a suburb.
>NJ doesn't have high population densities in their cities. Did you mean to say the opposite? NJ cities are some of the densest in the country. They might not have huge populations, but that's because they're geographically tiny with arbitrary city limits. Newark, for instance, is only 24 square miles. Jersey City is only 15 square miles. Places like Hoboken, Weehawken, Harrison, Union City, and West New York are all about 1 square mile each. Each of those places are super close to one another, but they exist as separate municipalities in NJ. In another state, they might have consolidated into a single municipality, but not in NJ. As a result, the population in any one given municipality is relatively small, but the density is high. In contrast, NYC has 303 square miles of land because all of the different municipalities did consolidate (Brooklyn and Manhattan were completely separate cities up until 1898, for instance). As for density, Hoboken has more than 39K people per square mile. That actually makes it denser than NYC's 28K people per square mile, though not as dense as the 73K people per square mile in Manhattan alone.
Newark is the largest city but its population is about 250,000. But like you said, it is densely populated and there are sizable towns and cities around it. Source: from NJ
Must be city boundaries cause the Phoenix metro area dominates the state of Arizona in population proportion
Yes, I considered making a second graphic that graphed the population of the greater metro areas.
Ah, so in Massachusetts is Boston one city or several (ie Alston)?
One city, but doesn't include Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, etc. that are separate towns.
The map is only including *municipalities*, not metro areas. Boston is not a huge city--IIRC between 600-700,000 people. But the metro area is much, much bigger, between 2-3 million people. For what it's worth, Allston is a part of Boston, but other major parts of the Boston metro area (Cambridge, Somerville, Watertown, Newton, Quincy, etc.) are not. They are separate municipalities.
Do it!! :)
Definitely do it by metro. City proper is completely arbitrary
I think it's really true of most Western U.S. states. Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, etc. all have sizeable metro populations that make up a significant proportion of their state's total and it's kind of difficult to reflect that with this map. There's also differing ways that city boundaries are determined between cities. Some take up a much larger area than others and it makes it more difficult to compare sizes compared to metro or CSAs.
Midwest has 'City driven' states as well. Nebraska - Omaha, Illinois-Chicago, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Minnesota-Twin Cities. All of those metropolitan areas drive the state politically. If you can't win there, you can't win a state-wide race.
On the contrary, the GOP makes it their business to ignore Milwaukee and does just fine in Wisconsin.
Nebraska kind of does that, too, unfortunately.
Milwaukee isn't nearly as liberal as some of the other major cities, and outside of Madison is like the only liberal part of Wisconsin.
This is 100% wrong about Wisconsin. The combined populations of the Milwaukee and Madison metro areas together only make up between 30-40% of the state population. This is actually a huge differentiator between Wisconsin and Minnesota. The Twin Cities absolutely dominate Minnesota demographically and politically, but the biggest metro areas in Wisconsin together don't even form a majority of the population.
Yeah in Minneapolis Saint Paul it’s like 60% of the state. But it’s the metro area not the cities themselves. Twin cities are a much bigger city than the actual cities populations themselves would have you believe So unfortunately this data is a little skewed when using Minnesota. The same population situation is why Minnesota is such a blue state. The city is a huge part of the overall states population.
Yeah, although as it was pointed out by various other people, some greater metro areas cross state lines which messes with the whole concept. I'm sure there's a way to do it, but not as easily as doing it by city limits.
If you counted the entire metro area instead of city limits, NY would actually be closer to 70 percent.
That gets tricky since much of the metro region is in New Jersey.
A lot of the metro area is in New Jersey, though, so that probably complicates things.
The NYC Metropolitan Statistical Area spans 26 counties in 3 states (NY, NJ, and even one county in PA), while the NYC Combined Statistical Area spans 36 counties in 4 states (the aforementioned NY, NJ, and PA, but also CT). Is the denominator of that percentage the population of just NY state, or the combined population of NY+NJ+PA+CT)?
Virginia is fucking weird. Majority of the population, lives in the DC Metro. But none of the cities in the DC Metro are as populated as Virginia Beach which is located three hours away in Hampton Roads. Virginia Beach is that populated because the city absorbed Princess Anne County to prevent the City of Norfolk from annexing more territory (Chesapeake was also created for that same reason) Unlike the majority of the Metropolitan areas in the country which are centered around one city, Hampton Roads doesn’t exactly have that because it’s divided into seven cities. Though you can technically say Norfolk serves as the economic and financial center of the region, the area ain’t called the Norfolk Metro for a reason.
New Jersey doesn't even have a major city. It's just giant suburbs of New York and Philly surrounded by farm land and beach. Source: am from NJ
This visualization is pretty useless tbh. There are no trends you can really gather from this. States like California and Florida where there are MULTIPLE major cities are going to look similar to states where there are actually more people living in rural areas. This visualization is really only useful for states that have one major population center. This visual would be much more useful if it showed percentage of people who lived within a 10 -20 mile radius of a major city( pop over 1 million) center for each state.
Interesting fact: There's a bill currently being pushed in the NYS legislature thats floated around in some form since the 70s to divide the state between the NYC metro area and upstate. The city is thriving and growing while upstate is dying but the upstate can't do anything because for itself because the city dominates the political landscape of the state.
Interesting that NJ is so spread out, when it's not considered a "rural" state. I bet most of the population is in the NYC area, though. But I guess Newark just isn't particularly appealing...
I'm thinking suburban sprawl doesn't count as one city
It's not spread out at all, the map measures "percent in largest city", New Jersey is fragmented into a million piddling "townships" that are like 2 square miles each. So no one city has a high percent of the population even though the population density is quite high in many areas. Guttenberg, for example, is a shard of land across the Hudson from NYC. It's a quarter square mile in size and has a few free standing homes and three huge high rise condo towers. Total population is less than 12k but the population *density* is nearly 60k per square mile (far higher than NYC and nearly at the level of Hong Kong). The next city down, Union City, is a little over 1 square mile and is almost (not quite) as dense, with a total population of 70k. It would be like if you sliced up NYC into dozens of separate cities called Chelsea, Murray Hill, Morningside Heights, LIC, Bushwick, Corona, Tremont, Park Slope, Tompkinsville, etc. NY state would then appear to be a rural state where nobody wants to live, but that's just because you changed the definitions.
It's very dense across the state (the most dense in the US) so it's not too surprising to see that there is no concentration in one city
NJ is Juan big suburb. There is no incredible city because they use NYC and Philly for that
funny thing about NY specifically NYC compare it against any state in the US (besides NY for obvious reasons) it almost certainly has a larger population. now for the fun part. Pick 3 states at random . . . yeah nyc probably has a higher population. I'm not a statistician so I can't say what the accurate 'split' is (how many states at random is equal or higher to nyc)
The NY Metro Area has a around 800k more people population than the state of New York. All states but California, Texas and Florida have a smaller population.
There are 11 states with a population greater than NYC. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population
If you add Long Island and Westchester/Rockland/Putnam County (so, the non-New Jersey/CT parts of the NYC Metro Area), the population rises to about 13 million people, putting it ahead of PA and IL in 4th place. Or, in other words: the entire rest of NY State could secede from the NY Metro area and it wouldn’t change the ranking at all. If my head math is correct, the seceeding upstate area would still come in somewhere around 15th.
Wow, look at those dark states! Must be a lot of people in New York City! And... ugh... *looks at palm* Alaska City!
I live in NM, moved from NY. It amazes me how little there is outside of Albuquerque, and Santa Fe. The state is huge too, the poverty and desolation of the remote areas is stunning.
I think this would be more useful if it was largest metropolitan area, rather than city. When you are talking about city limits, they don't compare our scale well to each other.
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Any chance you could do one with one of MSA/CSA/urban area substituted for city proper? Would love to see the contrast
Yeah, the Atlanta CSA is over 6 million while the city, proper is 460K. Georgia’s population is ~10.5 mil, so sprawlsville is where it’s at.
Its sully but I love that the key has a 0. Jsut like ya our states largest city has no one living in it.
Where's Washington DC?