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Many on this forum say that Dallas and Atlanta are similar in many ways. To me they make for an interesting comparison. I have opportunity to move to either one in the very near future. Overall, which city would you say offers more in terms of opportunity, culture and big-city amenities? Dallas felt to me a little larger than Atlanta when I visited mostly becuase of the stretch from downtown up though I-75 to Plano is pretty much built up and interesting to me.
Since this thread is about what "feels" bigger, it's obviously subjective. My subjective opinion is that density wins in determining what "feels" bigger. The detached housing and suburb-like layout of Atlanta doesn't "feel" big or urban, regardless of population figures or square footage of the urban area. Aside from when you are in a high place, you can't see how far out the city sprawls. The vast majority of Atlanta feels like a suburb, and from street-level I think most people would have a hard time knowing they were in a true city had they been brought there blind-folded. Cities like Boston with their density, row-houses, lamentable lack of private green space, "feel" much bigger to me.
I like that picture right there; I drove by that house so many times. I think it's cool to describe Atlanta as a 'suburcity' type of place because it's different to other people.
Many on this forum say that Dallas and Atlanta are similar in many ways. To me they make for an interesting comparison. I have opportunity to move to either one in the very near future. Overall, which city would you say offers more in terms of opportunity, culture and big-city amenities? Dallas felt to me a little larger than Atlanta when I visited mostly becuase of the stretch from downtown up though I-75 to Plano is pretty much built up and interesting to me.
Sorry. I posted this in the wrong place. I was inspired to write a new thread after this "feels bigger" thread but posted in the wrong place.
Those pictures with the little country houses right next to the skyscrapers are so bizarre to me.
Those little "country houses" next to the skyscrapers are million dollar homes in the Ansley Park neighborhood of Midtown Atlanta. One of Ansley Park's boundaries is Peachtree Street (see High Museum of Art on the map), which is where you see the Midtown cluster of towers. The homes aren't actually next to the highrises, but the neighborhood is. When you turn off of Peachtree Street, Ansley Park begins and continues over to Piedmont Avenue/Piedmont Park.
The "old house" in the photos above is Fort Peace, built in 1913 and one of the many mansions that formerly lined Peachtree Street...there are only 3 still standing that I know of - Fort Peace, the 1906 Wimbish Mansion, and the 1904 Rhodes Hall.
The Wimbish Mansion, now The Atlanta Woman's Club
:: The Atlanta Woman's Club /exterior1.jpg :: (http://www.atlwc.com/photopreview.shtml/exterior1.jpg - broken link)
Yeah Ansley Park is a very nice area. The neighborhood was created about a century ago and many of its houses are between 70 and 100 years old and cost a couple million on average. Not exactly country living. Typical historic homes in the neighborhood:
There are many homes in Buckhead that are extremely close to skyscrapers too, for example the Phipps Tower on Peachtree Dunwoody is right in the middle of a historic neighborhood.
I'm going to have to go with Atlanta. The city is getting huge so quickly. Then with the Buckhead(awesome name BTW) and ATL skyline, they will probably merge at some point. Some mega-tall skyscrapers could be popping up in that city in the very near future. If the United States doesn't fall apart, and the world doesn't go crazy, Atlanta is going to pass up a lot of cities. I don't think the chances of Atlanta passing up Chicago are out of the question. i think that could definitely happen. To the north of Atlanta is awesome mountains. The city could start extending in to the area very easily if its growth keeps up. Its a unique place that is surging more than any place I have ever seen. Ive been through Atlanta many, many times since 1986.
I think of the city as the Hollywood or LA of the east. Thats what it reminds me of. A lot of glam, very expensive homes, the hills surrounding it, and all of the different people it is attracting.
At the rate at which Atlanta is growing, at some point it will likely make little sense to compare these two cities, because they will be very different in population. There was an earlier post which stated that density does not make a city feel large, then proceeded to give the example of Portland and Los Angeles, saying that LA feels much larger than Portland even though Portland is more dense. There is a problem with that comparison, the problem being that LA is so much larger a city than Portland that it's really on a completely different level. In order to test whether "dense" or "sprawling" feels bigger in a city-to-city comparison, the only true test of this is to compare a dense city and a sprawling city with similar populations. Comparing Los Angeles to NYC makes sense. Comparing Portland to sprawling cities with similar populations, like Charlotte or Nashville makes sense. A Portland-LA comparison does not. As the Census Bureau figures below indicate, the current populations of Boston and Atlanta are similar, enough so that the original question of this thread makes sense. With current trends, this will no longer be the case at some point in the future. At some point the comparison, in terms of which city feels, or seems, larger, not which one people like better, will be about as meaningless as a comparison between Portland and LA. For now, though, it does mean something.
Still, as I've pointed out a couple of times earlier in this thread, this really seems to be completely a matter of personal perception. Read enough of the posts here, and you begin to see the same two ideas being bounced back and forth, maybe with slightly different wording each time: Atlanta seems bigger because you drive and drive and drive before you get to the end of the sprawl and into the beginnings of rural countryside; Boston feels bigger because it's densely packed and urban, with much activity on the street level. This could go on forever, because it's obvious that different people have different perceptions of which kind of city seems larger, and that's not going to change no matter how long this thread goes on. All these pictures on here are nice, though.
METROPOLITAN AREA (2007 estimate)
Table 1. Annual Estimates of the Population of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2007 (U.S. Census Bureau)
Atlanta city limits population is 519,000 now according to Census Bureau. source
You're right about Atlanta's rate of growth. Atlanta added almost a million people since 2000, more sheer quantity than any other metro in America. Considering that high rate, with the fact that the suburbs have finally reached the point where they are not really expanding outwards any more, the new people are going to slowly make it denser. And Atlanta city limits itself has been getting more and more residential population, especially in Midtown and Buckhead. Downtown on the other hand... during the day, crawling with students, suits, tourists, and panhandlers, sun goes down and boom. Crackhead infested ghost town.
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Atlanta or Dallas
