Will Chicago possibly become more populated then Los Angeles

[williepotatoes]

Originally Posted by edsg25

Sure, LA is bigger than Chicago. But, just like NYC, LA's parts are not stuck to the whole nearly as strongly as is the case in Chicago.

Excellent point, Chicago is truly a uniform, uninterrupted and dense urban mass. No hills, bays, islands or peninsulas separate the population. NYC is a collection of different cities flying under one flag.

[Drover]

Well, L.A. has a lot fewer zombies engaged in population control, so they have that to their advantage.

[Tex?Il?]

Originally Posted by williepotatoes

Excellent point, Chicago is truly a uniform, uninterrupted and dense urban mass. No hills, bays, islands or peninsulas separate the population. NYC is a collection of different cities flying under one flag.

Chicago and Chicagoland may not have hills, bays, islands, and peninsulas separating, yet the differences between attitudes and lifestyles vary just as much.

The lack of natural boundaries may lead people to THINK there is all this cohesiveness, but in reality different parts of the city and suburbs of Chicago have lifestyles and attitudes, and the same amount of interaction between the "towns" that make up Chicago and Chicagoland as there are between the five burroughs of NYC, Jersey, and Long Island.


Check out this link: It separates different neighborhood types.

Each group of contiguous census tracks that fall into a certain neighborhood type in reality acts as its own town in a way.


http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/map...types2000.html

[Alacran]

What does all that mean?

[edsg25]

Originally Posted by williepotatoes

Excellent point, Chicago is truly a uniform, uninterrupted and dense urban mass. No hills, bays, islands or peninsulas separate the population. NYC is a collection of different cities flying under one flag.

thanks, willie. all your geographic features are key.

also key: no San Fernando Valley or Staten Island. no harbor stuck on with a shoe string as far south as Long Beach and no Queens. No Hollywood Hills or the Bronx. No Beverly Hills dropped into our middle, nor any Brooklyn, that still seems like the independent city it once was.

and that "collection of different cities flying under one flag"....Chicago had a hand in that too. Chicago was the miracle growth city during the second half of the 19th century. The move to create Greater New York had, among reasons, a strong desire to keep New York (at that point restricted to all of Manhattan and adjacent portions of the Bronx) the largest city in the nation instead of Chicago. Greater New York brought the rest of the Bronx as well as Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island into the fold.

The rest, as they say, is history.

can't hate you for living in Schaumburg, Willie; just worried about all your lonliness there. With the summer heat too great, my outdoor walking spot (Lake Arlington) is just too uncomfortable so Wednesday morning I did some inside walking in Woodfield. At 11:00 am, it was virtually empty (even with back to school sales going on). If anybody has any doubt how bad things are in this economy, just walk through Woodfield. And Woodfield is THE BIG LEAGUES. I'm walked through Hawthorn at times, and that might as well be a ghost town.

[edsg25]

Doesn't the importance and power of San Francisco and Boston prove how totally unimportant municipal population is?

Isn't metropolitan population a much more relevant number? And don't the Bay Area and Metropolitan Boston prove just that?

All this talk about Houston, BTW, makes me wonder:

Isn't D/FW every bit as formidable a place in Texas as Houston is?

something else to consider when Chicagoland's population gets compared to Metro Houston? At some point Chicago will (IMHO) show an enormous spike in population that Houston cannot match. I think that will come when Chgo and Milw become one metro area (sort of an elongated Bal/Wash). I reallly do see that one happening at some point.

[williepotatoes]

Woodfield still does big business on week-ends, but it is no longer the crown jewel of the mega-malls. In fact I think we're seeing the end of the mall era. More retailers want to be out in the open on main roads where they can hang their shingle and their customers can park nearer the door.

[mas23]

Q: Will Chicago possibly become more populated then Los Angeles
A: no

[chicago103]

Barring a catastrophe in LA or some kind of succession movement like what almost happened in the San Fernando Valley I don't think Chicago would surpass LA considering the latter now has almost 4 million people.

What is more realistic over the next few decades is Chicago surpassing its 1950 peak population of 3,620,926. All indications are that it is growing, census estimates were wrong throughout the 1990's projecting a loss but in reality we gained 112,000 people in the 1990's. The 2000 census put us at 2,896,016 so we would only need a gain of 103,984 to pass the 3 million mark for the 2010 census. That would be a more modest growth than in the 1990's and yet all indications are that Chicago actually grew more in the 2000's.