NE metropolitan area populations (USA Today)

[portlandneedsnewarena]

Metro Populations for New England Cities according to today's USA Today.

Portland, ME 513,667
Manchester, NH 402,789
Burlington, VT 206,007
Providence, RI 1,612,989
Hartford, CT 1,188,841
Boston, MA 4,455,217
Worcester, MA 784,992
Springfield, MA 686,174

[Patrick]

Metro Populations for New England Cities according to today's USA Today.

Portland, ME 513,667
Manchester, NH 402,789
Burlington, VT 206,007
Providence, RI 1,612,989
Hartford, CT 1,188,841
Boston, MA 4,455,217
Worcester, MA 784,992
Springfield, MA 686,174

This is interesting, thanks. but it is also misleading.

Portland is often times included in a CMSA with Lewiston-Auburn, for a combined total of 622,000 people.

Boston is often times included in a CMSA with providence for close to 6,000,000.

Burlington is in a county with approx. 200,000 people and it is the only city in VT, meaning it draws on more than just its immediate surroundings.

Manchester is normally included in Boston's metro, too, and when its not, it is right next to Nashua, which IS in the boston metro, so the manch metro excludes hundreds of thousands of people in the immediate area.

Also, i believe Hartford is a larger urban area than providence, and thi smay have to do with its position along a chain or urbanness between new haven and springfield, whereas most of the other urbanness around providence gravitates toward boston.

Interesting nonetheless. 513,000 sounds about right for portland. that would be cumberland county (295,000, and most of york and some of androscoggin).

[12345]

Boston's CSA is 5 largest in the country and is comprised of Worcester, Providence, Manchester, and Nashua for a total of 7.4 million.

[Patrick]

source? I would think the boston MSA does not consist of worcester/nashua etc...those would be included in the general regional CMSA, of which boston is part. You wouldnt see boston msa: 7.4 million people. rather you would see boston-worcester-fall-river-providence-nashua, for example, as a combined metro area, or cmsa.

[12345]

Boston-Worcester-Manchester, MA-RI-NH 7,427,336

http://www.census.gov/population/www/estimates/Estimates pages_final.html

The CSA is the new CMSA.

[Patrick]

So that is the boston-worcester-manchester-providence metro...I think the metro listed above excludes the other cities. Still a very populated area.

[M. Brown]

So that is the boston-worcester-manchester-providence metro...I think the metro listed above excludes the other cities. Still a very populated area.

yeah the new Boston CMSA figures just came out a few weeks ago. I kinda feel like Boston is cheating a lil bit by picking up providence, but as I look at other cities, they do the same thing. Look at SF-San Jose-Oakland, and Washington-Baltimore.

I wonder where USA today got their info from?

[Patrick]

So that is the boston-worcester-manchester-providence metro...I think the metro listed above excludes the other cities. Still a very populated area.

yeah the new Boston CMSA figures just came out a few weeks ago. I kinda feel like Boston is cheating a lil bit by picking up providence, but as I look at other cities, they do the same thing. Look at SF-San Jose-Oakland, and Washington-Baltimore.

I wonder where USA today got their info from?

CMSA's are not the metro areas of the central city, they are urban areas that blend in to each other, so it's wrong to say the Boston metro has 7.4 million people or whatever the figure is. The Boston-Providence-Worcester (MA-NH-RI) metro has that population. Boston just happens to be the central and largest city.

[tocoto]

The populations of all the big metros in the country are quoted in metro numbers. No one says new york, newark, islip for example. It's just a standardized way of comparing metro populations. We all know there are others and none are perfect.

[Patrick]

The populations of all the big metros in the country are quoted in metro numbers. No one says new york, newark, islip for example. It's just a standardized way of comparing metro populations. We all know there are others and none are perfect.

Yes I realize that, but more people than you would think are not that familiar with the difference between a cmsa, which represents a region, and an msa, which just applies to one city and its suburbs.

[tocoto]

The populations of all the big metros in the country are quoted in metro numbers. No one says new york, newark, islip for example. It's just a standardized way of comparing metro populations. We all know there are others and none are perfect.

Yes I realize that, but more people than you would think are not that familiar with the difference between a cmsa, which represents a region, and an msa, which just applies to one city and its suburbs.

And that's the reason we keep hearing that places like Houston and Atlanta are bigger metros than Boston. If you think they are, please go visit for yourself.

[Patrick]

exactly....isn't boston the fourth densest metro area? Im thinking after NY, Chicago, and SF.....?

[a630]

The city of Boston is dense, with around 12000 per square mile. New York, SF and Chicago are all denser, and several smaller municipalities are too, including somerville, but mostly ones in New Jersey and southern California.
The densest metropolitan area is Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, by far.

[Patrick]

Do you have a source, because I have doubts that area would be denser than NYC, which was settled far earlier, and remains the country's principal city. When i was in socal it all seemed spread out and sprawled.

[a630]

http://demographia.com/db-ua2000pop.htm

but they are being tricky. if you go by CMSA (which includes all of san bernadino and riverside counties, an area probably as large as maine, and largely desert or agricultural), of course LA's density falls alot. However, if you include only incorporated areas, LA is by far the densest. I think that's what demographia is using here. LA metro is consistently dense. There may be 6000 people per sq/mi in any direction two miles from downtown, and you will find the same density 20 miles from downtown in any direction (except north, then you're in the mountains). Hence the lack of centrality. Or maybe everywhere is the center here. It has to do with water, it has to do with geographical barriers, history, and it has to do with the amount of immigration and overcrowding of housing units. No two-acre lot zoning in southern california.

[Bobby Digital]

southern cali has 20 times as many people especially if you include an area as big as manchester, to worcester, to p funk... im a little sick of people saying they are from boston when they live in NH. thats not boston, i hate to tell ya, nobody down here will recognize your from boston.

[Patrick]

I know what you mean....Even people in Portland at times act as if they are from Boston. But I think the city should take it as a compliment.

[12345]

Los Angeles is actually one of the least dense metros of the top 5, it's spans over 33,000 square miles, the second largest is Dallas at 12,360, then New york at 11,842. Boston is 7,227 one of the densest.

[a630]

12345,
33,000 square miles ... of mostly nothing. numbers like these continue to lend to a great misunderstanding of the country's second biggest city.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles_Area
sure it's very low density, if you include vast areas of literally nothing.
the area that has been watered (thankyou colorado river, which doesn't even make it to the pacific most of the year), is "so thoroughly cultivated so as to result in an urbanized area with a relatively high density of 7,070 people per square mile (2,730/km?) according to the 2000 census. However, the L.A. sprawl reached its geographic limits around 2000, and future expansion of the sprawl will involve leapfrogging across whole mountain ranges." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles_Area)
Hopping over more mountain ranges (as happened when the san fernando velly, "the valley", was built up in the 50s and 60s) is unlikely to happen, because as you know from the news, the west is going dry. No more rivers to drain with huge aqueducts. It will be interesting to see what happens to the places that are still growing quickly, including parts of San Bernadino/Riverside, Phoenix, and Vegas, especially as we start to get even less rain and snow in the region as forecasted by scientists.
The problems with being the densest metro in the country but with few large nodes of high density? Too many people for everyone to have cars (worst congestion) but with the worst imaginable form (such even distribution of population) for effective public transit. Everytime I visit Boston I marvel at how quickly you can get around. New Englanders need to stop being so cynical, they have it pretty good. Minus the weather.

[12345]

Yes Los Angeles includes vast amounts of nothing but in between these nothings is some forms of housing which is included in the metro statistics, many cities have huge areas of forests or lakes, etc which also cuts down on their population densities, If the global warming is not stopped it will be hard for people to live in interior sections of the southwest because most of the water will go to California, even if some sections get enough water it will be like living in an oven when temperatures frequently pass 120 and you have to go outside for longer than 10 minutes.

[a630]

do you think it's fair to say that the people of needles, CA, (200 miles from LA), should be included in the same metropolitan area as the people of ontario, CA (40 miles from LA), just because they're in the same county? (San Bernadino county, the largest county in the country, larger than MA, CT, and RI combined). Do you think it's fair because the census bureau produced the number of >33,000 sq mi, based on political boundaries, even if these boundaries have nothing to do with what actually constitutes the metropolitan region of Los Angeles? Don't these boundaries merely contain it?

[12345]

a630, you have a point but there are many places in the country that have the same problem such as Houston, some counties in it's metro have more cows than people, I'm not trying to degrade Los Angeles metro but many other places have farm land, desert, water bodies, etc which are included in the metro statistics and bring down the densities of metro areas. Also i do not believe that areas 200 or 300 miles away should be included in metro areas unless there is a connection to the metro such as residents that commute to the city or people from the metro work there.

[a630]

Either visit southern california or take your argument to Brookings:
http://www.brookings.edu/es/urban/publications/fulton.pdf

And I was wrong, Honolulu is number 1. LA is second.
And this is not about Los Angeles, it's about people throwing the term sprawl around without having any idea what it is. The bottom line is all cities sprawl, and in different ways, and this creates different problems. Those of Los Angeles are well-publicized. Northeastern metros however consume far more land per person. Northeastern metros are full of municipalities that impose huge minimum lot sizes or resist additional housing development, forcing development further and further outward. And we should consider why this even is a problem. The LA metro afterall is one of few metros in the US (perhaps in the developed world?) that is actually increasing in density, and nobody in California I know is too happy about that.

[Patrick]

Read: Cities Without Suburbs: Census 2000 Update. It has a good comparison of northeast and southwest city sprawl.

Outside of New England, Metro areas are not officially defined by commute patterns, they are simply taken to be the entire county. In new england, it is different. So, to compare densities of Boston and L.A., you would need to introduce an element of similarity. I propose this should be comparing the L.A. county with Suffolk county (that's the county Boston is in, right?). Well, which one is denser...then you have your answer. Of course Boston will be denser right now, as things are currently considered, because its metro encloses a primarily urban area, but in L.A. it is different due to different regional census rules, so large areas of wilderness that have nothing to do with the city are included. Just the urbanized section of L.A. and its surroundings is probably denser than Boston, if only because of the poor and rushed planning and development characteristic of an area like So Cal that has more people coming in than leaving.

Lastly, L.A. is not the only metro in the world increasing in density. Any metro area that adds population yearly gains density. I believe this includes boston.

[a630]

But most metro areas are gaining area very quickly ie people consuming more land per person at the edges. This includes most in Europe, where many central cities eg Paris and London are losing population as rural areas suburbanize, though not nearly at the rate of many American cities after WWII. I dont know about the developing world. And the point is (again) that most of LA county (north county) is unincorporated and barely populated (with the exception of Lancaster and Palmdale). The urbanized area is all in the south, and contiguous. This is why any realistic measurement of the area's population density does not include the entire county.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/22/LA_in_LA_County_map.png

[Patrick]

But most metro areas are gaining area very quickly ie people consuming more land per person at the edges. This includes most in Europe, where many central cities eg Paris and London are losing population as rural areas suburbanize, though not nearly at the rate of many American cities after WWII. I dont know about the developing world. And the point is (again) that most of LA county (north county) is unincorporated and barely populated (with the exception of Lancaster and Palmdale). The urbanized area is all in the south, and contiguous. This is why any realistic measurement of the area's population density does not include the entire county.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/22/LA_in_LA_County_map.png

I know what you mean, my city has 53 sq. miles but only 18 of them are actually part of a built environment. the rest is composed of water and uninhabited islands that dot the surrounding water. But if we only include the densest parts of a metro, then we would have to go to the census maps and see which metro areas had the densest cores. But this may be unfair, too, because Portland, Maine is denser than Providence, RI if you take this stance. our West End has 23,000 people per square mile. The catch is, though, that its not even one square mile. this is misleading. the only things that is truly not misleading, is personal perception from actually being there and observing. Ask someone who has been to both L.A. and NYC which place is denser and you'll have the most credible source. My guess is that NYC density dwarfs that of L.A. if only the urbanized parts are considered.

[Patrick]

NYC densest population per sq. mile is 235,000/mile. That's like fitting the entire residential population of Boston into two and a half miles.

The same maximum density figure for L.A. is only 93,000/mile.

[a630]

235,000 per square mile? yikes! you're off by a power of 10 with both those figures. The city of new york has 23,500 per square mile. The city of LA has 9,000. Metropolitan LA, by every responsible count made by every think tank, academic, and publication I know, is the densest metropolis in the United States. The census bureau's assumption that LA's metro is 33,000 square miles because it is located within some of the country's largest counties is absurd. I'm sure the people of Blythe, on the AZ border 200 miles away, would be shocked/are shocked to be considered part of the LA metro just because the western edge of their county (which is bigger than southern new england), includes places that are part of greater LA. Read my previous posts. It's a fact. I'm sorry that it upsets your worldview. And I'm not from LA, I'm from Cambridge.

[Corey]

Nothing beats some good density.

[Patrick]

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ThematicMapFramesetServlet?_bm=y&-geo_id=16000US3651000&-tm_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U_M00090&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U&-_MapEvent=displayBy&-_dBy=140&-_lang=en&-_sse=on

follow that link and read the maximum density on the left side of the page. It says 235,000. its from the census website. Los Angeles is only 90,000 at its densest.

[a630]

oh sorry you weren't wrong you were just off topic. the issue here is metropolitan density, not the densest census tract. yes, of course new york city has the densest census tracts in the country. and yes, of course new york is the densest municipality in the country. overall metropolitan density is the issue here.

[ChunkyMonkey]

... im a little sick of people saying they are from boston when they live in NH. thats not boston, i hate to tell ya, nobody down here will recognize your from boston.

Can you then explain Manchester-Boston Regional Airport. Let's face it souther New Hampshire is really the exburbs of Boston. If you go abroad or to the west coast and say you're from Manchester, New Hampshire, nobody will have a clue. They'll think you're from the U.K. It's about time that Providence is included in the Boston CSA. Providence has already recognized it, selling itself as the affordable suburb of Boston. Also, they are extending the MBTA to T.F. Green Airport. So, it makes sense to me.

[Patrick]

The quote and your following statements don't conflict with eachother. Regionally and locally NH is not part of boston, nor is RI. in cali ti might be. If you ask me, manchester and providence are both heavily dependent upon the Boston area...Imagine either area if they were located more remotely.

[12345]

Metro numeric increase(2000-2006)

Boston 62,877

Worcester 35,019

Springfield 6160

Portland 26,099

Manchester 21,946

Providence 29,992

Hartford 40,223

Burlington 7,118

[Patrick]

wow those numbers surprise me. I would have thought both southern NH (manchester) as well as Providence would be growing faster than portland in terms of added population.

[M. Brown]

Here is a neat map I found.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Greaterboston2.png

[Patrick]

Providene metro has a larger population than the state of R.I., meaning more people than live in the state have to commute into the city. So I wonder why Providence would be included in Boston's metro. Clearly, more people commute in than out.

[12345]

Yes, but at least 15% of providence metro commutes to Boston metro for work, which is how the government determines it.