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Streetcar suburbs can be urban. South Minneapolis has a large swathe of streetcar suburbia that has densities in the 15,000 to 20,000 ppsm range which is comparable to some of the rowhouse neighborhoods on the east coast. It just takes a lot of apartment buildings and duplexes on each block to get there.
For me its the lack of brick buildings, idk why but its strange going to other midwesten cities and seeing so many brick buildings, its pretty cool. plus they are politically similar and the hipsters.
I'm confused...You are saying the lack of brick buildings in Minneapolis makes it similar to the Pacific Northwest? Or are you making a different comparison. There's a fair amount of old commercial brick and apartment buildings in the larger Pacific NW cities.
I think the problem with some of these analogies is that people are taking one subset of the population in one city in one region and comparing it to a subset of another city in another region and saying that city is closer to that other entire region altogether. The Pacific Northwest isn't full of hipsters--inner Portland and Seattle are full of hipsters and liberal transplants--but the suburbs and a good deal of the rest of the Northwest are as far from being hip as one could imagine. So the comparison that the young liberal populations in Austin and Minneapolis and Madison make them more like the Pacific Northwest is untrue--it simply makes them similar to Portland and Seattle but not the entire region. Austin is nothing like Spokane or Salem or Greys Harbor. Minneapolis is nothing like Spokane or Coos Bay or Eugene or Vancouver, Washington.
Since Portland is basically a island of urban liberalism surrounded mostly by moderate politically suburbs and more conservative rural areas, you could say that Portland is the anomaly that fits in less with the rest of the Northwest.
Austin would fit well in the west coast, Indy and Columbus feels like a sunbelt city, New Orleans could be in the North East and San Francisco could be some where along the Meditterean.
Austin maybe like Sacramento in a lot of ways, but its nothing like NorCal or SoCal.
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