What differences do you think there are between midsize cities (population 100,000 to 400,000) and large cities (population 400,000 and upwards)?
It could be any experiences, statistics, anecdotes, or facts that you know.
FYI: I’m not moving anywhere or looking for advice. just share your experience.
Large cities have professional sports teams, midsize cities do not.
Large cities have skyscrapers, midsize generally do not.
Large cities have ethnic districts, midsize cities do not.
Large cities have vaguely esoteric specialty stores (Ikea, american girl) that smaller cities do not.
Large cities are more democratic in their politics than midsize cities.
On an unrelated note, I’ve always wondered what anemities tend to go up roughly in line with population.
Example: In my experience if a city has more than 1,000 people it usually has a family dollar or dollar general. More than 5,000 people and it has a walmart. More than 30,000 and it has a mall.
To me, the difference is large cities have major league sports teams and international airport flights across the ocean. I would put the line more like two million metro. No way would I put places like Fresno, Colorado Splrins or Tulsa in the samed class with Atlanta or Boston.
Mid-size cities (Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, etc) may have ONE skyscraper or a small cluster of skyscrapers in a central business district. New York City they might build half a dozen 40 story buildings at any time and you wouldn’t notice. New York is building a couple of neighborhoods (Hudson Yards, Lower Manhattan) that would be the entire central business district of a mid-sized city.
I find that mid-sized cities, the smaller scale gives you a better sense of “place”. Like you feel like you’re downtown, at the big park, somewhere near Home Depot or by the museum or whatever. Large cities, unless you know them well, can make you feel like someone just dropped you in a giant maze of buildings or urban sprawl as far as the eye can see.
Movies or TV shows that take place in large cities, often the city itself is almost another character - New York, Chicago, Boston, LA, San Francisco. IOW, often those films or shows could only take place in the city they take place in.
Mid sized cities, not so much. Mid-sized cities are often used as locations when your location is meant to be generic (or you want an inexpensive downtown shooting location to stand in for your much larger city.) Like there are a bunch of films that take place or are filmed in Pittsburgh, which I mostly notice because my family is from there. But it’s not like one of the characters attending Carnegie Mellon or a foot chase through the US Steel building are ever critical to the plot. She’s Out of My League could have taken place in any city with a mid-sized airport, Striking Distance only needed a city with a Police River Patrol (which would be presumably any city with a river) and Pittsburgh is only notable in Groundhog Day as the nearest major city to Punxsutawney where a hot-shot reporter might work).
I can’t think of a difference between mid-sized cities and large cities. I don’t have a category for mid-sized cities in my mind, I think of small cities, large cities, and metropolises. The difference between a large city and a metropolis in my mind is dedicated mass transit. The qualitative difference between a small city and a large city is that cultural attractions are de rigeuer in a large city, but often absent in a small city. But cultural attractions are always present in a medium city too, so I can’t think of a difference.
There are some edge cases that are exceptions to this: I think of Buffalo as a large city rather than a metropolis even though it technically has a subway, and I think of the Melbourne area as a small city rather than a large city because even though the area has a larger population than Buffalo and has at least 2 performing arts venues, its downtown area is only as large as your typical small town up north.
Buffalo, NY puts the lie to almost all of your points.
Only a New Yorker would call Cincinnati a midsize city, It’s not, it’s a large city. There are fewer cities in the USA as large as Cincinnati than there are states.
New York City is not a large city; it’s way bigger than that, in its own class entirely. Even in the USA there is no city like it in terms of size. I believe “Megacity” is the current term of art. I am from Toronto, which is absolutely a large metropolitan city by any standard, and New York is ludicrously bigger than Toronto.
It’s uncanny how accurate this is: I can’t think of any exceptions in either direction. Of all the places I’ve spent more than a few months at or around, the ones in the margins, Dunkirk/Fredonia which has 20,000+ people and does not have a mall, and Jamestown and Ithaca which have slightly more than 30,000 people in their areas and do have malls, both fit the pattern, as well as all the areas I can think of that are much larger or smaller than this cutoff.
I suppose it depends on definitions. I’ve always considered my home town of Springfield, Illinois (130,000 - ish) a small- to mid-sized city. YMMV.
I always described Springfield as having all of the disadvantages of a large city (crime, traffic, urban blight) but none of the advantages. Similarly, it has all of the disadvantages of a small town (nosy neighbors, uptight church people all up in your business, getting stuck behind some jackass driving his tractor) and none of the advantages.
Imagine the South Side of Chicago, only with feed stores.
I’m using the OP’s definition. Cincinnati has a population of around 300,000. It’s also the 65th largest city in the US according to Wikipedia.
Megacity or megalopolis are the terms I’ve heard. In China or India they call them “small suburbs”.
Actually I can think of a marginal counterexample: Estes Park CO which has only around 10,000 people, has an indoor location with multiple retail businesses and restaurants which I would admit is a mall, it just doesn’t have a large anchor store or places to sit and hang out. So I’d call it a kinda-sorta mall: if it had either of the two then I’d say it’s a real mall.
Buffalo is part of a larger metro area with more than 1 million total people in it. I don’t know if it counts as a stand alone midsize city.
I think the relevant criteria is the size of the whole urban area, not the size of a particular city within it.
A major difference is traffic jams–while the urban area of 400,000 may slow down some in rush hours it doesn’t reach the extremely annoying very slow stop and go traffic of the larger urban areas.
Are we going by city population or metro area population? Our city (Huntsville AL) has a population of ~180,000 but the metro area is ~450,000, so I guess we’re either borderline or midsize.
Advantages compared to larger cities are:
Much less time spent in traffic. Mainly because typical travel distances are shorter.
Lower cost of living.
Easy access to countryside (though some large cities have that too).
Disadvantages:
Less choice in specialty stores & businesses. Even in this age of internet shopping, there are many businesses that have to be brick & mortar: restaurants, food markets, etc.
Less choice in live entertainment. You couldn’t go to a classical concert every weekend, for example.
Limited number of employers, especially for those with specific skills or advanced degrees, leading to the Two-body problem. This may be especially bad for our city because it has major high-tech & academic employers (NASA and aerospace/defense industry). What do you do if you are offered a job here by NASA, but your wife is a marine biologist?
Direct flights only to hub airports.
Back in the days before online shopping, we used to have a saying in my little town.
“You can get anything you want in New York City, 24 hours a day, from a bunch of different stores. You can get anything you want in Chicago from a bunch of different stores, but not 24 hours a day. You can get anything you want in St. Louis, but maybe only from one store. And you can get anything you want here, but you have to order it from New York.”
Yeah, we need to go by metro area, not city size. Madison, WI and Buffalo, NY have roughly the same population, but Buffalo’s metro area is 1.2 million vs Madison 560K.
The differences? How much is offered, how long it takes to get there, and how often you will go.
Big cities offer more. More restaurants, more shopping, more museums, more entertainment, etc.
But… They are harder to get to. In a mid-sized city, you can probably get everywhere in under 30 minutes, including finding parking. In a big city, make that an hour plus, and you better know where the parking ramps are.
A really great Thai restaurant isn’t very useful, if you decide it isn’t worth the hassle to get there.
I would like to point that what we now know as New York City was formed in 1898 when New York City (Manhattan), the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island were consolidated under one government. At that time, New York City (Manhattan) was the most populous city in the United States and Brooklyn was the fourth most populous city.
You mean professional sports teams in the “major” league of their sport? Most midsize cities have at least a minor league baseball team.
Depends on what you call a skyscraper. Wikipedia defines a skyscraper as a building with over 40 floor. By that definition, Omaha has one skyscraper.
Depends on what you mean by an ethnic district. Again, Omaha has a reasonably well-defined Black neighborhood (roughly two miles north of downtown) and a reasonably well-defined Latin neighborhood (roughly three miles south of downtown). Historically, there was an Italian neighborhood between the Latin neighborhood and downtown, but that is more or less a thing of history. Still some good restaurants down there, though.
Omaha does not yet have an Ikea or an American Girl. I guess we struck out there.
You’re almost certainly right about large cities being Democratic strongholds. Omaha is more Democratic than most of the rest of deep-red Nebraska (though University and state-government headquarters Lincoln may be a little more blue these days), but it’s more Republican than any of the larger cities (outside of the South) that I can think of.