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As other people said, it depends on the situation and city. If you're speaking about a city, you can honestly say that Santa Monica is an LA attraction, but to say Baltimore is a DC attraction sounds ridiculous.
Location: That star on your map in the middle of the East Coast, DMV
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Originally Posted by Tex?Il?
Many both here on this board and IRL, would agree with you but its still wrong. Even when you simply look at urbanized areas, there is no "big three" then a gap.
3 million between Chicago and the next metro is a significant gap, especially considering that you have 6 metros between 4.5 and 5.5 million urban area. I also believe urban area has some inaccuracies when over extending or under counting out the population just based on development patterns dependent upon the Metro. Miami is not 1 million people greater than Metro DC, but due to the high density coastline development these are the numbers you get. This all goes back to my premise of how CSA IMO is more accurate in most scenarios.
Again I'm not calling these cities small, but by world standards and only speaking on actually true size and "feel" like many others have stated, you cannot compare them to Seoul, Sao Paulo, Lagos etc.
People will more often correlate a city's size to its MSA.
Is New York City a city of 8 million people? 19 million people? Or, Heaven forbid...23 million people as the CSA indicates?
Combined statistical area sometimes includes cities and towns that are almost 100 miles from the principal city.
MSA seems more indicative of a city's true size because it includes the city itself and all of its surrounding suburbs, not other towns that are somewhat close to the suburbs. If I had to wager a guess I would say that CSA only shows how far out the city's commuters sometimes live, because there are people who will commute 1 hour to work each day.
When determining things like GDP influence of a region or population of the area CSA is the best to use. My thing is all MSA's are not created equal, therefore making it almost impossible to tell the whole story by an MSA definition which quite frankly is an imaginary border in the middle of a big metro region. If we went by MSA definitions for some cities, the numbers would look as if you fall off a cliff once you hit the end of the MSA, which certainly is not true. I would say CSA is much more reflective overall in terms of the scale of a metro region, but MSA serves a good purpose of showing how interconnected and close knit a city and it's most immediate suburbs interact.
No, and thats only because the BEA doesnt release GDP data for Micropolitan Areas or counties and since many CSAs have Micropolitan Areas, its not possible, but dont worry, Im delighted to calculate partial CSA gdps for C-D as Ive been doing for the past 3-4 years
As other people said, it depends on the situation and city. If you're speaking about a city, you can honestly say that Santa Monica is an LA attraction, but to say Baltimore is a DC attraction sounds ridiculous.
And many people don't think it is separate. I plead ignorance and did not know that when I first went... Santa Monica/Venice etc was actually the first I explored when I went to LA the first time and I stayed in a hotel in Marina Del Rey.
As far as DC/Baltimore vs SF/SJ ... while I had no reason to go to SJ really, the area around the bay definitely seems more developed consistently than DC Baltimore, no question about it. It's certainly more connected than cities like Santa Rosa, Sonoma, Napa that are in the MSA.
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