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I currently live in Portland, Oregon. I recently visited Phoenix for 5 days. Admittedly, I really didn't know anything about Phoenix except the weather, sprawl, and desert terrain. I was shocked at the level of urbanity, cleanliness, and logistical ease the city operates. Phoenix doesn't get the respect it deserves. Transportation. Check. Urban network. Check. Housing diversity. Check. Logistical agility. Check. I believe Phoenix is a Top 10 US city in terms of livability, culture, economy, and urbanity. I would include it amongst the 3rd tier cities if we're counting the following 10 cities in groups of 3:
1st Tier: NYC, LA, SF
2nd Tier: Chicago, DC, Houston
3rd Tier: Atlanta, Dallas, Philadelphia, Phoenix
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* Yes, I would rank it ahead of Boston, Seattle, and Miami based on urbanity, cleanliness, and logistical ease.
Not sure what your criteria are here. BTW Chicago should be a tier one with those criteria, and if your criteria are cleanliness, definitely.
But I digress. Phoenix is a top ten for its size (5th) and its liveability, except in the summer when the heat is unbearable. Also in high end shopping if you count Scottsdale. But honestly, not really anything else. Culturally, definitely not.
How could Fort Worth be ranked behind places like Little Rock, Omaha, Peoria, Tulsa, Wichita, Buffalo, Youngstown, Baton Rouge, Grand Rapids, etc? Heck, I could name just about every city on the 2-AA list.the list goes on.
I think all of the 2-AA cities are secondary nodes in their own metros. They aren't suburbs per se as they have their own distinct identities, but are second (or even third) fiddle in their own metro. Long Beach, Tacoma, and Virginia Beach (yeah I think it's officially the largest in the greater Hampton Roads area, but I guess it has a different feel than most 'primary' cities) should be on this list.
Not sure what your criteria are here. BTW Chicago should be a tier one with those criteria, and if your criteria are cleanliness, definitely.
But I digress. Phoenix is a top ten for its size (5th) and its liveability, except in the summer when the heat is unbearable. Also in high end shopping if you count Scottsdale. But honestly, not really anything else. Culturally, definitely not.
At least the dry heat in summer makes Phoenix's hotness in the summer a little more easier to deal with, vs. the humidity you'd have to deal with in say like Miami, Orlando, Atlanta, etc. Phoenix is a city(and metro) I wouldn't mind revisiting, one day.
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Originally Posted by fezzador
I think all of the 2-AA cities are secondary nodes in their own metros. They aren't suburbs per se as they have their own distinct identities, but are second (or even third) fiddle in their own metro. Long Beach, Tacoma, and Virginia Beach (yeah I think it's officially the largest in the greater Hampton Roads area, but I guess it has a different feel than most 'primary' cities) should be on this list.
I agree with buzzpost's earlier comment, that there's no way I'd rate Fort Worth behind say Wichita, Peoria, Omaha, Youngstown, and Baton Rouge for example. To me FW is more desirable, than those mentioned cities IMO.
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Originally Posted by tmac9wr
Boston's economy is quite a bit larger than Atlanta's from an MSA perspective and even larger from a CSA perspective. On top of that, outside of NYC, Boston is by far the largest asset manager in the US. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago are #3,4, and 5...and Boston almost matches all three of them combined.
And that doesn't count the economic impact of things like management consulting, medical/biotech research, etc.
Overall Boston has quite an edge on Atlanta economically.
Atlanta definitely beats Boston, when it comes to affordability. Maybe the affordability gap is less in favor of Atlanta now vs. in the early 2010s, though? And to me I'd say there's a reason more people have been moving to the Atlanta area, vs. the Boston area in more recent years. I won't deny Boston is more of a legacy city and has more of a headstart vs. Atlanta for amenities and etc, but the cost of living issue holds Boston back.
Atlanta definitely beats Boston, when it comes to affordability. Maybe the affordability gap is less in favor of Atlanta now vs. in the early 2010s, though? And to me I'd say there's a reason more people have been moving to the Atlanta area, vs. the Boston area in more recent years. I won't deny Boston is more of a legacy city and has more of a headstart vs. Atlanta for amenities and etc, but the cost of living issue holds Boston back.
And there's the weather factor also. And probably the fact that it gets dark so friggin' early in winter in Boston. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my trip there some years back in mid-December (with a side jaunt to NYC).
And there's the weather factor also. And probably the fact that it gets dark so friggin' early in winter in Boston. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my trip there some years back in mid-December (with a side jaunt to NYC).
I strongly believe if the median house in Metro Boston was say 345,000. It would be growing extremely fast.
Afterall it’s growing faster than the nation as a whole when housing was ~80% more expensive than the country.
Although that’s a bit misleading because a bunch more of the housing isn’t SFH.
I find it odd to see anyone mentioning Atlanta as somehow more economically important than Boston. I'm very familiar with both, and it's really not all that close. Boston is a world class juggernaut of asset management, education, biotech, venture capital, consulting, and healthcare. To me, the top economic cities in the US on a world scale are pretty cut and dry:
How did this thread get revived after lying dormant for eight years?
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Originally Posted by john_starks
i would think LV would at least be a tier higher
and i don't see a huge difference between the 2-BB and 2-AA cities. they should have been lumped together..
Economically and culturally speaking, Las Vegas is a one-trick pony, even more than Orlando in that department. Nor does it really have a "hinterland" surrounding it. (I think one of the things Rand McNally used in determining how to group cities besides their economics, culture and media presence is whether there are other smaller territories around them that tend to use them as a "market town" or cultural hub.
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Originally Posted by buzzpost
But how does being "overshadowed" by Dallas impact the city's importance as a business center. If anything, since it's sitting right next to Dallas, that should be more of a boon than a bust to the city. Fort Worth has far more business centers, fortune 500 companies, etc. than any of those cities. It's home to American Airlines, D.R. Horton, BNSF Railway and XTO Energy; all fortune 500 companies. Then there are many major employers in the area as well. This isn't a "homerism" post; I'm just really scratching my head. I don't by the "overshadowed" scenario, although it's much appreciated. Just because a city is overshadowed by another (in this case, Dallas), that shouldn't impede it's ranking on how important it is.
Fort Worth has more people in its city proper than the entire metropolitan area of Little Rock, and most of those other cities in the tier above it. And let's not forget this is a "Business" ranking; I just can't see Little Rock, Tulsa, etc. being more important as a business center than FW. FW is sitting in a 6.5 million population metropolitan area, the fact that it is sitting in that size of a market alone should make it a more important business center.
The point was that all the 2-AA cities were "satellite cities" of another nearby city; their populations really didn't factor into the equation (St. Paul is nearly the same size as Minneapolis, for instance). Some may have their own suburbs (Wilmington, Del., for instance), but all of them sit in the shadow of the other city (yes, even St. Paul, as the sports franchises, major media outlets and major financial institutions are all either located in or associated with Minneapolis, and the University of Minnesota is in Minneapolis rather than St,. Paul; the main thing the latter has is the state government).
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Originally Posted by ATLLIVE
(Bolded statement above) Many people read the local papers on the internet now. Why pay for a newspaper when you can have it for free on the net?
Because journalists need to eat, too!
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Originally Posted by BlackOut
No kidding. I'm somewhat surprised they (Rand McNally) use newspaper circulation as one of their criteria.
It may be true that digital circulation has become a greater indicator of importance than print circulation, but since print newspapers largely circulate within their own metropolitan areas, they remain a better measure of the importance of local media to a local region. (Of course, with Alden Global Capital cutting the heart out of newspapers large and small, local legacy newspapers are losing their ability to speak to and about a region, and the new digital would-be replacements haven't yet scaled up to fill the void).
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Originally Posted by GoneNative
Denver is only significant in that it's a regional hub and a national transportation hub. But in terms of other cultural and economic indicators, Denver is actually quite low. I've always considered it a sister city of Kansas City in so many ways.
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Originally Posted by Scott5280
I am not bashing KC in anyway but it has miles to go before it eneters the liberal, progressive,cultural atmosphere of Denver proper..they are not even in the same hemisphere with respect to vibe. Denver has much more of a draw from the coasties. KC doesn't really share the Western feel or the hard core extreme outdoor sports thing. Denver has more in common with Seattle than say KC. Suburbs like Castle Rock are polar opposites of Denver proper neighborhoods like Rino as much so as Colorado Springs is to its neighbor Manitou.
Denver may have the crunchy-granola, progressive, outdoorsy image, but Kansas City is hardly conservative or a cultural backwater. The city was the first large city in the country to commit to making mass transit free citywide. Its principal art museum — which, I learned on my most recent visit three years ago, had a bigger endowment than any other museum in the country save New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art when it opened in 1931 — is usually ranked among the nation's 20 best, and it too is completely free to attend (except for special traveling exhibitions in its new east wing, built and endowed by the H in H&R Block — that company's headquartered in KC, too.
It has a deep musical legacy dating to its years as a center of jazz, and it strives mightily to preserve what remains of that legacy. (Charlie Parker >>>>> John Denver, and Parker has company.) It has surpassed St. Louis as a regional banking center mainly because its two largest banks, controlled by two branches of the same family, remain independent and are now the largest and third-largest banks in the Central Plains region (both KC and St. Louis also have Federal Reserve Banks; Denver has a branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City).
The company that helps you express your sentiments through greeting cards is also a patron of the arts — its employees (and also you, thanks to the Web) have access to one of the best corporate art collections in the country, and the company also transformed the rundown area around its headquarters into a mixed-uase urban center surpassed in scale only by Rockefeller Center in the 1970s. (Oh, I forgot to mention that the banking family has one of its members running the city public library system, and that guy's father and mother also endowed Missouri's first and largest museum of contemporary art, opened in 1994. It's also free to attend.)
Kansas City is on its third Black mayor, who directly succeeded the second, who was quite popular citywide. The first now represents the older part of the city in Jackson County in Congress. Blacks make up about one-fifth of the city's population. I don't know whether Denver's elected one yet.
And since we've touched on newspapers: in its heyday in the 1950s, The Kansas City Star was the most influential newspaper in the state next door — its weekly edition was the only newspaper that circulated all across Kansas, and it played an outsized role in Kansas politics (which, I will grant, were heavily Republican then and remain so now, though Democrats routinely trade places with Republicans in the governor's office in Topeka). It's drifted leftward editorially since then — it endorsed the move to make mass transit free citywide, for instance (edited to add: and last fall, it ran a front-page apology to Black Kansas City for largely ignoring or misreporting on it for most of its existence [the paper was founded in 1880]). (Full disclosure: the first reporting job I held was as a summer intern at The Star in 1976, before I went to college; I was the first and only summer intern the paper hired out of high school.)
I will, however, note that KC's suburbs (including the suburban territories within the city limits north of the Missouri River) have not drifted leftward as suburbs of most other large cities have, at least not yet.
And Denver does have it all over Kansas City when it comes to outdoor recreation. But on the other scores, it may not be all that bad if someone said Denver reminded them of Kansas City.
Last edited by MarketStEl; 10-28-2021 at 07:47 PM..
I find it odd to see anyone mentioning Atlanta as somehow more economically important than Boston. I'm very familiar with both, and it's really not all that close. Boston is a world class juggernaut of asset management, education, biotech, venture capital, consulting, and healthcare. To me, the top economic cities in the US on a world scale are pretty cut and dry:
The point was that all the 2-AA cities were "satellite cities" of another nearby city; their populations really didn't factor into the equation (St. Paul is nearly the same size as Minneapolis, for instance). Some may have their own suburbs (Wilmington, Del., for instance), but all of them sit in the shadow of the other city (yes, even St. Paul, as the sports franchises, major media outlets and major financial institutions are all either located in or associated with Minneapolis, and the University of Minnesota is in Minneapolis rather than St,. Paul; the main thing the latter has is the state government).
I think the metropolitan division category is quite useful for actual 2-AA cities. Minneapolis and St. Paul are more like one city split into two municipalities so the latter doesn't really fit the bill in the same way as Ft. Worth and others. Ft. Worth's MD population is similar to Charlotte's MSA population and it has a distinct history, culture, and identity as a bona-fide city in and of itself that wasn't too far from another and they grew together over the years. For a time when metropolitan areas were first delineated mid-century, Ft. Worth and Dallas were separate and weren't combined into one until around 1980 or 1990 I believe. I think it's even easier to make cases for 2-AA cities with their own MD's AND which play prominent roles in their respective states that neighbor that of the regional alpha city. Wilmington does get overshadowed by Philadelphia but more akin to how Hartford is within NYCs shadow (without being in its MSA or CSA) or Providence is in Boston's (same CSA) and less like Newark being in NYC's shadow. Personally, while I know Wilmington is part of metro Philly, I think its own metropolitan division population of ~700K is equally as meaningful and substantive. Its influence extends to Chester and Dover also which are not within its MD.
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