Which city is becoming less relevant as its population increases? (California, development)
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They seem like potentially legitimate options here. Just wanted to see what others think.
None of them are relevant right now
fresno is a government and agriculture town. Not industries that cause excitement.
Tucson is a college town and retirement town. I like using tucson as a pit stop while trekking out east. Its a beautiful pitstop, but a pitstop nevertheless.
Memphis was perhaps relevant in the past, but it seems to be on the decline. Pretty sure the city is losing population right now.
Your premise doesn’t really make sense? How does city limits correlate to relevance? Most of the cities on the poll have had some level of annexation, Charlotte, Austin, Jacksonville etc. Also Phoenix and Charlotte look to be the only cities currently in the poll with some sort of light rail, though I don’t get how that makes a city more or less relevant either. Why single out Columbus and Nashville? Both cities are growing in their core and city limits so your point doesn’t hold here. In Nashville’s case in particular, the city consolidated with Davidson County in the 60’s (same as Jacksonville) so any city population growth is fixed, so no annexation in over 50 years.
A city has a dense, compact footprint.
The city increases that footprint 15X through annexation so a few hundred thousand can be added to the population.
The original city limits, where civic showpieces and amenities are overwhelmingly concentrated, loses over half its original population.
This massive annexation has increased the population of the city while creating new cityscapes such as this:
Miami is smaller than Omaha population-wise and is lacking several amenities other cities have (like an airport) if we are looking only at city limits. But few people actually discuss cities and only look at the city limits. We usually look at the region as a whole. Yonkers gets lumped with NYC, Alpharetta with Atlanta, Pasadena with LA.
That said on one hand you are correct. Some cities merge, consolidate, annex their way to relevancy. Jacksonville being the largest city for 800 miles is a nifty trivia question. But most everyone knows that when we say Atlanta is more relevant than Jacksonville, we aren’t looking at the city limits.
I think this shows a city increasing its population while decreasing its character (which relevance is often tied to).
Do we have any evidence that Nashville has recovered its core city population? I believe that would have been close to 180,000 in 34 square miles.
San Jose has 42 miles of light rail.
Why do you keep harping on city limit population? Just about every city in America has used annexation to increase population or do you believe there’s a major city that hasn’t? If you know one please let me know because every city on this poll has. Nashville, Jacksonville, Louisville etc have all consolidated city and county. City limits has absolutely nothing to do with how relevant a city is unless you have a skewed definition of what defines relevance.
Nashville’s not unique in expanding its city limits and if you knew what you were researching you’d know Nashville’s original city limits mainly included just downtown and parts of East, West and South Nashville. Heck if you wanna go way back the original city limits only consisted of just downtown. So are you saying we should only count cities that use the limits of their original settlement? Lol. At one point New York just consisted of Lower Manhattan, did they all of a sudden lose relevance once they expanded to include other boroughs? (Most of which contain suburban areas) Your point makes no sense.
Also, I’ve already mentioned Phoenix and Charlotte, good to know San Jose has light rail also but you specifically singled out Nashville and Columbus to make your point on light rail. Sounds like you have an axe to grind against those two in particular cause your points make no contextual sense as each city on the poll would disqualify according to your standards.
Why do you keep harping on city limit population? Just about every city in America has used annexation to increase population or do you believe there’s a major city that hasn’t? If you know one please let me know because every city on this poll has. Nashville, Jacksonville, Louisville etc have all consolidated city and county. City limits has absolutely nothing to do with how relevant a city is unless you have a skewed definition of what defines relevance.
Nashville’s not unique in expanding its city limits and iff you knew what you were researching you’d know Nashville’s original city limits mainly included just downtown and parts of East, West and South Nashville. Heck if you wanna go way back the original city limits only consisted of just downtown. So are you saying we should only count cities that use the limits of their original settlement? Lol. At one point New York just consisted of Lower Manhattan, did they all of a sudden lose relevance once they expanded to include other boroughs? (Most of which contain suburban areas) Your point makes no sense.
Also, I’ve already mentioned only Phoenix and Charlotte have light rail as of now in this poll. Sounds like you have an axe to grind against Nashville and Columbus cause your points make no contextual sense.
In the post you responded to, Losfrisco IMO is actually talking about something far different from the thread topic, which is about cities gaining population but losing relevance, which could also be interpreted as "losing their relative influence or standing among cities" at the same time.
What Losfrisco is focusing on is cities expanding their territory to take in land that lacks urban form. That is a tragedy indeed but not the tragedy we're talking about here.
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