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Originally Posted by scrapp
But, compared to Pittsburgh's suburbs, the DC suburbs are more affluent, have significant retail/dining presence in their own right, and are well connected to DC's top cultural and entertainment amenities via mass transit (e.g. the Red Line Metro goes all the way out to Shady Grove). I think the amenities of a city like Bethesda, MD totally dominates anything that a place like Monroeville could offer.
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Well, first that is a loaded comparison. Pittsburgh's most affluent suburbs are places like Sewickley, Fox Chapel, and so on, not Monroeville. Moreover, we are now getting into a different topic by comparing suburbs as opposed to central neighborhoods. I think it is true that the inner suburbs of DC tend to have more of certain kinds of amenities (see below) in their own right than inner suburbs of Pittsburgh. However, they are also much more expensive, and in part for the reason we discussed above--more people in DC means more demand for inner suburbs, the supply of which is again more or less fixed by geometry, which contributes to higher prices. What this means is that for a given amount to spend on housing, in the Pittsburgh suburbs you can either get much closer to the center city, or get a much nicer house/lot, or a bit of both, than you could get in DC. But you will be sacrificing that density of local amenities of a certain kind ... a topic to which I will now turn.
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In fact, I would say that the retail/dining amenities of the Bethesda-Rockville corridor of Montgomery County MD dominates anything Allegheny County, including City of Pittsburgh, has to offer. And that doesn't take into account DC itself or the rest of the DC suburbs.
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It is true that the number of retail and dining options is something that does tend to scale up with population (small-scale entertainment venues, like music and dance clubs, is another such example). And there is some benefit to this effect for any given individual insofar as you are likely to get somewhat more total variety the more options there are in a given market, although in practice I believe surveys have found most people end up frequenting a relatively low number of favorite places. Anyway, the upshot is that if maximizing the variety of such options is your goal, it does indeed make sense to seek out a higher population area. But you will likely pay a price for this preference, again because you are likely to pay more for otherwise comparable housing, have reduced access to the sort of amenities which don't scale up with population, and so on.
All of this is part of why I would never suggest it is necessarily a mistake to prefer bigger cities over medium-sized cities (or, conversely, smaller cities, towns, or rural areas over both). It really is just a matter of tradeoffs, and the question for a given individual should just be what makes the most sense given their particular preferences and resources. That said, all that is consistent with the proposition that housing in centrally-located neighborhoods is likely to be less expensive in medium-sized cities, and some (but not all) sorts of city amenities do not scale up with population. So, you really need to be clear on what amenities you will truly value when making such a choice.
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Yeah, I see that. I guess MSA just isn't a kind of unit I find useful in these discussions.
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When exclusively discussing the central parts of MSAs and not the farther out suburbs and exurbs, I think the Census-defined "Urbanized Areas" are more useful. The Census defines these in terms of density regardless of political boundaries, and the upshot is they tend to capture most of what people would think of as the "central city" of the MSA in the broader sense.
Anyway, for comparison, the Washington UA had about 3.9 million people in 2000, good for #8, and Pittsburgh was at about 1.8 million people, good for #22. As previously noted that does virtually nothing to change Pittsburgh's ranking by MSA, nor for that matter does it change Washington's ranking by MSA, so both count as relatively typical cities in terms of population balance between UA and the rest of the MSA.
For a couple examples of cities that do vary a bit, Boston is #10 by MSA but #7 by UA, which implies Boston has a relatively large portion of its population in its urban core--something that makes sense given my experiences with Boston. Conversely, Houston is #6 by MSA but #10 by UA, which means it has a relatively low portion of its population in its urban core--again something that makes sense given what I know about Houston.
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07-10-2008, 08:24 PM
wow, we actually agree on something!
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