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ckhthankgod mentioned Wilkes-Barre in a similar fashion one post further up. It's one of the three core cities of the Wyoming Valley (Scranton/Wilkes-Barre/Hazleton) MSA, and it has 44,000 inhabitants, so it is fair game for this discussion.
Scranton is also a case against white flight (not AC, lmao) they lost half their population and never had much of a black population. But I imagine Scranton was back then a dirty coal filled industrial that people didn’t want to live in; idk.
The Anthracite fields in NEPA got played out decades before coal elsewhere, which is why growth basically ceased in the 1920s. Even weirder than the cities are the little boroughs like Mahanoy City. You have a dense urban environment which looks like it would be a city neighborhood, complete with a walkable main street and wood-framed rowhouses...and then nothing. No suburbs, nothing until you get to the next town, which is built in exactly the same way. Possibly the only part of the U.S. built like part of Europe (minus the lack of transit).
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Originally Posted by GeoffD
I don’t know where that number came from. It sounds like Fall River which is still heavily Portuguese/Azores. New Bedford is 58% white/non-Hispanic using current census data. 23.1% Hispanic.
You see it out in the wild, too. At Market Basket, it’s heavily 4’11” people speaking Spanish. I’m 6’2”. I’m constantly fetching things off the top shelf for people. It seems like it will cross over to more Hispanic than Portuguese in the next decade. The middle class businesses are still heavily Portuguese-owned.
Scranton absolutely has potential as a city, and It's certainly a plus that there aren't really depopulated ghettos to speak of (though really none of the cities in question other than Atlantic City have those on the list).
Scranton is close enough to NYC I suppose that it could be "discovered" as a satellite city, the way that the Hudson and Lehigh valleys have been. It has the bones to be something better, but it needs an influx of new people to revive it.
The Anthracite fields in NEPA got played out decades before coal elsewhere, which is why growth basically ceased in the 1920s. Even weirder than the cities are the little boroughs like Mahanoy City. You have a dense urban environment which looks like it would be a city neighborhood, complete with a walkable main street and wood-framed rowhouses...and then nothing. No suburbs, nothing until you get to the next town, which is built in exactly the same way. Possibly the only part of the U.S. built like part of Europe (minus the lack of transit).
Sorry, looked at Wikipedia, and the last editor seems to have ****ed up, changing the 2010 census numbers to say 2020, but not updating them.
Mahanoy looks fascinating. No shortage of towns like that in so called "Appalachia" Pennsylvania/West Virginia. I have lineage in that small town WV type communities, the types of places where it was so isolated that even back then you had black/scotch-irish...."relations".
Small dense town with a main-street like you say. Row houses, some victorian, some three story, on a hillside or in the middle of farmland. Its beautiful and special in its own way....and like you say, no sprawl, til the next town, further down the river/road, its own center of gravity (maybe a mill or something), built the same way....then the next town. Extremely British, if you Streetview GB that country is built exactly this way....places in the more hilly N. England/S. Scotland/Wales....small row-home/terrace filled towns.....cept many of those places hasn't declined in the same way. Some have.
But these places are weird in the way, its urban enough to have a cohesive "community" with its plusses and negatives...but so many of them have a problem with drugs/alcohol...due to the lack of economy/prospects but i'm sure the "urbanism" contributes to that problem as well, in a way I can't really articulate.
Another city that hasn’t been mentioned and that fits the criteria is Waterbury CT. It is in the same metro as New Haven and has about 114,000 people.
Pittsfield MA meets the city proper population criteria as well.
You also have a metro like the Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown NY metro that meets the metro population criteria, but the cities are under the population criteria.
But these places are weird in the way, its urban enough to have a cohesive "community" with its plusses and negatives...but so many of them have a problem with drugs/alcohol...due to the lack of economy/prospects but i'm sure the "urbanism" contributes to that problem as well, in a way I can't really articulate.
I've felt for a decade the Coal Region towns really should be discovered as the next artist haven. Dirt-cheap houses, urban fabric, beautiful natural scenery, and not too far away from the major cities of the East Coast. The best part is that they're all around 10-15 minutes by car from the next one over, meaning if even one of them managed to recover, it would pull the rest up as well eventually.
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Originally Posted by ckhthankgod
Another city that hasn’t been mentioned and that fits the criteria is Waterbury CT. It is in the same metro as New Haven and has about 114,000 people.
Pittsfield MA meets the city proper population criteria as well.
Pittsfield is probably the grittiest of the Western Massachusetts cities after Springfield and Holyoke, but it's still fine. I do feel like the downtown is a lot less intact than a lot of other nearby small cities, so it's a bit lacking in the charm department.
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Originally Posted by ckhthankgod
You also have a metro like the Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown NY metro that meets the metro population criteria, but the cities are under the population criteria.
I've felt for a decade the Coal Region towns really should be discovered as the next artist haven. Dirt-cheap houses, urban fabric, beautiful natural scenery, and not too far away from the major cities of the East Coast. The best part is that they're all around 10-15 minutes by car from the next one over, meaning if even one of them managed to recover, it would pull the rest up as well eventually.
Pittsfield is probably the grittiest of the Western Massachusetts cities after Springfield and Holyoke, but it's still fine. I do feel like the downtown is a lot less intact than a lot of other nearby small cities, so it's a bit lacking in the charm department.
Middletown also has a pretty strong black middle class in the city and surrounding area, with some coming from NYC. Newburgh and Poughkeepsie both have a lot of potential and does have some stable parts of town. Union Street in Poughkeepsie also has a lot of families with long time roots in the neighborhood and plays a part in its stability.
Pittsfield does seem to be forgotten about within MA and perhaps some of that could be due to its proximity to the Albany area.
Waterbury does have a nice Downtown and I didn't know about the Orthodox Jewish migration to the city.
The PA Coal towns have seen some people move in from the NYC area, but that looks to be due to being priced out and the region is very affordable. Some other places that are intact are Mt. Carmel: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7975...7i13312!8i6656 and Shamokin: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7912...7i13312!8i6656 Places like Sunbury, Bloomsburg(has a state university), Berwick and Hazelton are some with companies close enough for employment.
Pittsfield does seem to be forgotten about within MA and perhaps some of that could be due to its proximity to the Albany area.
I dunno. The Berkshires has a solid reputation, but it's more for idyllic small-town living. There's other options, like Great Barrington, Lee, or North Adams if you want a smaller downtown with more vitality.
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Originally Posted by ckhthankgod
The PA Coal towns have seen some people move in from the NYC area, but that looks to be due to being priced out and the region is very affordable. Some other places that are intact are Mt. Carmel: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7975...7i13312!8i6656 and Shamokin: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7912...7i13312!8i6656 Places like Sunbury, Bloomsburg(has a state university), Berwick and Hazelton are some with companies close enough for employment.
In general Eastern PA's smaller cities have been being transformed by a migration of NYC-area Latinos (mostly Puerto Ricans; to a lesser extent also Dominicans). Hazleton has been majority Latino for nearly a generation now, and Shenandoah is clearly headed in this direction as well. So far they have not migrated west of Sunbury/Lewisburg/Milton though. At least in NEPA - further south there are large Latino populations all the way to Chambersburg (which is pretty much the last of the "flatland" south-central PA cities).
It's an interesting question whether Eastern PA or the Hudson Valley has the best collection of smaller-scale cities in the country.
I dunno. The Berkshires has a solid reputation, but it's more for idyllic small-town living. There's other options, like Great Barrington, Lee, or North Adams if you want a smaller downtown with more vitality.
In general Eastern PA's smaller cities have been being transformed by a migration of NYC-area Latinos (mostly Puerto Ricans; to a lesser extent also Dominicans). Hazleton has been majority Latino for nearly a generation now, and Shenandoah is clearly headed in this direction as well. So far they have not migrated west of Sunbury/Lewisburg/Milton though. At least in NEPA - further south there are large Latino populations all the way to Chambersburg (which is pretty much the last of the "flatland" south-central PA cities).
It's an interesting question whether Eastern PA or the Hudson Valley has the best collection of smaller-scale cities in the country.
You get some black people that have migrated out to those PA cities/towns from NYC/NE NJ as well.
How can Annapolis not be in the conversation?
Did it somehow run afoul of one of the OP's criteria?
It is part of a big metro area, but certainly isn't the 'lead city' in that metro.
As other already mentioned, it's b/c Annapolis is well within Baltimore MSA. Places where Annapolis workers live in also has a bunch of people that work at Baltimore (or even DC) anyway - i.e. The MD-2 corridor (Severna Park/Arnold/Pasadena/etc.) or places like Crofton/Odenton.
If you want a Maryland city that's within DC or Baltimore MSA, Frederick would fit the OP's criteria more as at least Frederick is a separate Urban Area and definitely has its own suburban areas along with economic base, even though many FredCo peeps commute down to MoCo (and DC).
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