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It's hard to say how "old" a certain metro is.. as everyone knows the founding date of the central city isn't going to tell you very much. Population milestones also don't really tell you much across cities since cities have multiple boom cycles: City A and City B could reach a certain population in the same decade, only to have City B grow much faster in subsequent decades, giving B a "newer" feel.
I don't think this is a perfect system, but I'm proposing one so that we can potentially discuss/arrive at better ones:
I've taken the current top 20 metro areas in the US, and have estimated the year in which they reached 10% of their current population. This may seem like a kind of arbitrary exercise, but the results are compelling. To me, this pretty neatly portrays how "old" I think each metro is (save for a few, like DC), with the year representing a time when visiting that city would feel like you are there during the City's "establishing" or "coming onto the scene" era--when the City was first starting to resemble the city we know today:
1 Philadelphia 1860
2 St. Louis 1863
3 Baltimore 1865
4 Boston 1865
5 New York 1876
6 Chicago 1886
7 Minneapolis 1888
8 Detroit 1905
9 San Francisco 1910
10 Washington 1917
11 Seattle 1919
12 Denver 1921
13 Los Angeles 1925
14 Houston 1941
15 Atlanta 1941
16 San Diego 1941
17 Tampa 1942
18 Dallas 1943
19 Miami 1949
20 Phoenix 1951
I chose to focus on this "establishing moment," but it might also be interesting to calculate an initial "coming of age" moment, which could somehow capture NYC's 1920s/30s era and maybe Los Angeles's 1950s/60s moment.
It's hard to find consistent estimates of metropolitan populations, so for this exercise I used the following sources:
Interesting, but curious why you chose 10% as opposed to a different %. St. Louis is an interesting outlier. I'd be curious in seeing some smaller rust belt cities that used to be in the top 20 (Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cleveland, etc.)
^^ arbitrary. You could choose any other percentage, it just seemed to be an easy round number to start with and seemed to correlate pretty well in my opinion to the age when the metro first started to be "itself."
^^ Just curious on the source. I am actually pretty surprised in looking at some of these, I find it difficult to understand the significant core difference between Boston and Philly. If core is the city, 60+% of Philly would have been built out by that time. I know there are new adds but this seems odd to me. Actually Chicago with an older core on the 1940 is odd too though maybe a timing thing with the 1940 date.
Interesting stuff though, thanks for posting
Buffalo is crazy, like the city just frooze in time in a way
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