Quote:
Originally Posted by jbcmh81
The Census doesn't leave out Akron. It just doesn't meet the standards of MSA inclusion, no matter how close it is.
Columbus grew faster as a city than Austin did 2016-2017, the most recent year available, even with Austin having much larger city limits.
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The "how close" standards for MSA inclusion for Cleveland and Akron is a technicality of about 0.5 percent away from meeting the set (yet still arbitrary) commuting standards. But I think Summit and Portage counties (the Akron MSA, and both contiguous counties to Cuyahoga) will be reclassified with the Cleveland MSA the next time around anyway.
This is anecdotal, but for one, the traffic from Summit County into Cuyahoga in the morning (or Cuyahoga to Summit in the evening) seems to be as bad as it ever has been and that's despite hundreds of millions spent to widen I-77 to the Summit border and adding that skyway exit from I-271 to Route 8 in Macedonia (Cleveland suburb that is considered Akron due to it being in Summit County).
Secondly, the Cleveland MSA is growing a lot faster than Akron MSA and its at the point where it seems like that ball has tipped where it's not going to go down any time soon. So, it will only take a relatively small number of people who live in either Portage or Summit counties that also work in Summit or Portage counties to find a new job 15 or 20 minutes to the north/northwest in the Cleveland MSA for it to again combine. And the reason the metros split to begin with was because cities like Macedonia and Twinsburg (for all intents and purposes are Cleveland suburbs located in Summit County) have seen hundreds of housing subdivisions built in the last 20-30 years and both cities also built up sizable suburban like industrial parks (jobs). The housing allowed people from say Bedford or Maple Heights (Cuyahoga County) to move a city or so south into Summit. The industrial parks allowed enough of those to then also live and work in Summit County, thus breaking off Akron into a separate metro because metros are based on county lines. At the same time, those industrial parks also allowed "core" Akron people to more closely link to Cleveland (Summit's growth is mostly in the northern portion).
People from outside the area seem to understand how close in miles Cleveland and Akron are, but don't really understand the dynamics. Yes, it's sprawl, but a huge reason that both Summit and Portage counties are growing (albeit at a slow rate) are due to the people moving there from "Cleveland." It caused the metros to split, even though, at the same time, it actually brought them closer together. Plus, sprawl is mostly why outside counties are being added to an MSA anyway, across the country.
I'll also add that Akron is situated nicely in the broader Northeast Ohio region (4-plus million). It's within 45 miles of the downtowns of three different metros (Cleveland-Canton-Youngstown), plus its own. On top of that, it's within 20 miles of a Fortune 500 company (Smuckers) that is in Wayne County (Wooster micropolitan area), so it disperses enough of the population to keep the commuting number lower than what is needed to have a combined region.
But if you look at it in land size instead of county commuting patterns, Northeast Ohio (four metros, and three micropolitan areas, with the centers almost all being within 60 miles of each other) has double the population as the Columbus MSA in a similar land area.
Part of the reason I moved to where I did (Wadsworth, a city that on the other end of the spectrum is actually considered in the Cleveland MSA but is an overwhelmingly Akron suburb) is due to how centrally it is located. Moved there because at the time the job market in all the NE Ohio metros was soft so figured I could be within an hour of pretty much any job in the region. But now with Cleveland being on a surge, we're considering moving back to the city (or at least Cuyahoga County) to get back within 15-20 minutes (instead of 30-60 minutes) of most of my friends and family.
With all that, I'll say that Columbus has indeed jumped into that tier group of the 2-plus million metro range. But Cleveland still is closer to the Detroit-Minneapolis metro tier, than it is to Columbus. And if you include all of Northeast Ohio (which is similar in land size to Minneapolis' MSA), it is definitely in that tier.
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