US Cities Over 100,000 (latest estimates)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

In case you missed it, here is a list of the latest population estimates by the US Census for July 2008. (Yes, it’s 2008 it’s always a year behind)

US Census Population estimates for cities over 100,000

I thought it might by interesting for everyone to see where you city comes in.

Note: These are population estimates for the number of people living within the city limits not the metro areas. For instace Chicago has about 9.5 million in the metro area and only 2.85 million living with the city limits.

Atlanta is an excellent example. It only has about half a million in the city limits but it has 5.8 million in the metro area.

So is it about what you expected?

2

Springfield, Illinois
117,352
210th place (down from 206th in 2000)

Yeah, about what I expected.

3

Boise, Idaho-- 205,314, ranks at 100 on the list.

4

Living in the Phoenix area, I knew it was in 5th place, but expect a lot of people will be surprised by that.

5

It surprises me that there are only 9 cities over a million. I really would have guessed more. Also I’m a bit surprised that Chicago actually declined in size, I wonder if that’s people leaving the area for warmer climes or just vacating to cheaper suburbs.

6

Chatanooga has a little over 170,000 people. I assumed it would be somewhat smaller.

7

Remember these are only for the population within the city limits.

A lot of relatively small cities like, Orlando and Salt Lake City have well over a million people in the metro area but not even 200,000 in their city limit population.

You can see a reverse of this as San Antonio is way up on the list at over a million and 1.6 times bigger than Atlanta (in terms of city limit population), but Atlanta is 75% larger San Antonio in metro area populaton

8

What’s up with McKinney, Texas? It has a pop growth rate as 122%

9

Akron, Ohio. 207,000. 97th. About what I would have guessed. When I moved here in 1971 or so, it had about 250,000+ population, but like much of the older mid-West, you lose population.

Irony, in that Arlington, Virgina, where I grew up and my Mom still lives, is now 96th at 209,000. But a $125,000 house in Akron costs about $600-900,000 in Arlington.

10

It’s a suburb of Dallas near Plano, that area is just booming (they call them boomburgs :))

11

I believe the number is now actually 10. There was a thread here a little while ago about how San Jose has recently passed the 1 million mark.

Also, it’s all sort of pointless, given the rather arbitrary nature of city boundaries. San Francisco has only 808,000 people, but its population density is second only to New York. San Francisco crams 800 thousand people into about 47 square miles, while Phoenix needs over 500 square miles for its one and a half million. If you calculated 500 square miles of land around the city of San Francisco, you’d encompass all of Oakland and Berkeley and some more distant parts of the East Bay, as well as areas like San Mateo to the south and Marin to the north.

12

Jackson, MS
-5.6% still shrinking

No surprise there.

13

Actually I was surprised to see Los Angeles at Number 2 - for some reason I thought that the city itself was smaller.

Costa Mesa is 230, about what I expected. I was amazed to see that Victorville (California) has moved ahead of Costa Mesa.

14

Very misleading.
It shows Las Vegas at about 558,000.
That’s like saying NYC is just Manhattan.

Metropolitan Las Vegas (including Henderson, North Las Vegas etc.) boost that number to over 1.5 million people. Driving through, or flying over, Las Vegas - you will never figure out where those city limits are. 99.9% of the people who live here who couldn’t tell you where the city limits of Las Vegas start and end.

For instance, even though my official mailing address and zip code is Las Vegas, in reality I live in “incorporated Clark County” - a fancy name for “whothefuckknows” Nevada. The vast majority of people who “live in Las Vegas” are in the same boat - they just never got around to incorporating our neighborhoods.

Having lived in LA, I can’t complain about the traffic here, but if you drive in Las Vegas, you will most certainly notice traffic a hell of a lot more congested and far worse than in a city with barely half a million.

15

McKinney, TX grew 122% in 10 years?!? What, are they giving out hookers and blow there, or something?

16

According to the California Dept of Finance, San Jose passed the million mark, but that dept uses 2009 as a figure and the Census estimates are 2008 and a year behind.

I agree the figures do mislead a bit. San Francisco, Boston, Baltimore and Washington DC are very small compact cities. Indeed Los Angeles is twice as big as Chicago in terms of area.

Statistics can mislead. Even LA is misleading because while it’s density isn’t big, it covers a lot of hilly regions and such, if you remove that, LA gets dense. The census also classifies parts of LA, Houston and Phoenix as rural. That is because the western cities were smart enought to annex unoccupied land to provent being encircled by suburbs like Chicago.

But it’s fun to see. I reckon in about 10 or 20 years Houston will pass Chicago, in terms of city limit population.