Talk:List of United States urban areas

2020 Census

It looks like 2010 data was available by this point in 2011 - anyone have ideas about how things are going for 2021? Is it already possible to do something with the urban area definitions that they have already posted (https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/02/19/2021-03412/urban-areas-for-the-2020-census-proposed-criteria) and the redistricting data that just got released?

Would like to reiterate this question, I would love to see 2020 Urban areas list, and if it doesn't exist this census would wonder why.

2010 Census

Does anyone know the schedule of when the 2010 urban area information will be released? --Criticalthinker (talk) 11:26, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

It's been available for awhile in Excel format I think. http://www2.census.gov/geo/ua/ua_list_ua.xls. I'm going to try my luck at writing a script to auto-generate the new values. I'm thinking it would be useful to keep the census 2000 pops in the new table and show a percent change over the 10 years. Good idea? Mdawgmike (talk) 04:05, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

A Mess

This is a mess. It shows LA as being more dense than Chicago or NYC or SF? The area is in KM but the density in miles? 99.53.171.95 (talk) 07:29, 24 March 2009 (UTC)eric

I reduced the article to Urban Areas over 100,000 not only to conform with other list pages (see List of United States cities by population), but also so that the page will easiler to access in case a user has a slower PC. The list was entirely too long. --Moreau36; 2313, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

Utterly outrageous. The list of U.S. cities page is limited to those over 100,000 because this is the only thing that we have 2005 estimates for, as far as I'm aware. Since UA definitions are based on the 2000 census, we have full listings, and there's no reason not to give them somewhere. If you wanted to remove them, you should have created a new page for them. I have, for now, restored the list for all UAs (i.e., those with population >50,000.) But, really, there's no good reason not to have a full list. I'd be happy to divide such a list among several pages, but it certainly shouldn't be removed entirely. john k 07:20, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Area in Sq KM, but Density in Sq Miles?!

Hillsboro 18:19, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

This article needs to be deleted and fact checked. I do not feel comfortable about the credibility of any of the facts presented here. Outdated, pathetic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.22.28.253 (talk) 03:25, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

your correct it does have mistakes. infact for the smallest Urban cluster of del rio texas the density figures are wrong dividing the 40 something thousand people by its only a couple square miles it should have the higest density on the list even more then los angeles urban area.there could be other mistakes on the list of urban area densitys as well. 69.221.168.185 (talk) 05:18, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Ah

I knew there was a reason I left the thing in my user space after putting all that work in. Merging seems appropriate, although I don't particularly want to actually do the manual merging... john k 18:39, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Motion to Update!

I love looking at this page and think it's underrated compared to city populations. However, the numbers have changed quite a bit, for my metro 70%! I'll start the donations at $15 for a new one. Message me at http://myspace.com/iloveziva

69.230.102.210 19:06, 19 January 2007 (UTC)Aron

The page is based on the 2000 census.

 Most of the urban areas will have grown since then, some of them considerably. john k 07:20, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

The United Nations World Urbanization Prospects report has 2005 estimates and 2010/2015 projections for U.S. urban areas with over 750,000 population. --Polaron | Talk 15:23, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

But that would mean limiting ourselves to those over 750,000. I'd rather just stick to the 2000 numbers. john k 16:01, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

However, the 2007 estimates are up to date, as these are now 8 years old.Polis4rule (talk) 02:00, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Not sure if this is the right place to comment, but I noticed a discrepancy in the rankings... It appears to *mostly* be in descending order according to urban population, but Minneapolis/St. Paul is anomalously placed at #16, although it is #14 according to that metric. Everything else seems to be in place. Does anyone know the reason for this? AvidDismantler (talk) 15:51, 14 September 2019 (UTC)

Urbanized Clusters

Ought we add them? The largest are bigger than the smallest urban areas. john k (talk) 15:51, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

• They either ought to be added, or the "Type" column ought to be removed. jSarek (talk)

Populations don't match with city articles

Why do city articles that have an urban area population listed have different numbers than on this list? For example, New York City has 18,498,000 listed for urban area in its article, and 17,799,861 here. The Richmond, Virginia article has an urban area population of 1,045,250, while this article puts it at 818,836. In fact, every article I've checked has this problem. What is the source for this discrepancy? Was different data used for this list than the city articles, and if so, what is the source for the urban area populations in the city articles? Thanks. 12.218.153.85 (talk) 21:42, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

The UN World Urbanization Prospects report utilizes Census-defined urbanized areas for tabulating populations of U.S. cities. They have estimates for five year intervals only. That report is what has been used for some of these cities. Also, the report has had several revisions, which retroactively update some estimates so some of the figures you see in city articles might not reflect the latest revision. --Polaron | Talk 22:05, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Up dates needed and pronto(fast)!

The list is all wrong the population dosent match of each urban area we really need to up date it! Salcan (talk) 21:42, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Madison, Wisconsin is too high

Madison is not 56th, please remove the numbers and rankings and verify the area (I have found the population: around 330,000), the metropolitan area and the urban area are not the same thing! Pogo-Pogo-Pogo (talk) 23:43, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Recommended source for updates

If anyone feels for it, there's actually an official source that can be used to update this list. The American Factfinder section at the U.S. Census Bureau has some updated data about the population of urban areas here (select 'urban area' in the 'geographic type' menu). My own appraisal is that the population estimates are generally underestimated, but still, it's an authoritarian source and can of course be used for updates. I don't have the time to go through all areas, one by one, to update this list myself. But, perhaps anyone else has some time to spend?--Pjred (talk) 17:56, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Central Places Clutter

I want to know what you all think of the addition of the "central places" category to the chart. My opinion is that it makes the chart excessively cluttered. I don't like it one bit, and I hope we can bring it back to a more simplier form like we originally have. Too much scrolling is involved with including every last damned "central place". --Criticalthinker (talk) 11:56, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Anyone? --Criticalthinker (talk) 07:41, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

NYC

When comparing any place to Nyc (specifically manhattan) isnt everything SUBURBAN in these terms? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.202.78.47 (talk) 18:45, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

What do you mean exactly by "suburban"? Urban areas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, are defined using population density as the primary criterion. Whether or not the resulting areas are primarily residential or not does not affect this. --Polaron | Talk 19:25, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Sq km and Sq mi

Guys, we really need to keep this consistent. There is absolutely no reason why we should have the land area listed in sq km, but the density listed as people per sq mi. There has to be consistency, and we need to decide to put it all in one measurement or the other. --Criticalthinker (talk) 10:06, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Those are the units used by the U.S. Census Bureau. --Polaron | Talk 15:14, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

That's not an excuse. This article needs a standardized measurement. --Criticalthinker (talk) 06:22, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Dayton, Oh

Why isnt Dayton, Ohio on the list? The population of Dayton, oh is 166,179. It needs to be added.Texas141 (talk) 20:43, 26 January 2009 (UTC) Dayton, Ohio is on the US Census Urbanized areas list, http://www.census.gov/geo/www/ua/ua2k.txt so it should be on this one too.

Dayton is very much on the list. It's number 52. Please do understand that this is the population for urban areas no municipal boundaries for cities. I think you're confused, or don't understand what a UA is. --Criticalthinker (talk) 03:31, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Clean up

A note on why I have tagged this article. We generally do not use abbreviations, and this uses them throughout for states. This creates a problem in that this is a world-wide encyclopedia and not everyone around the world knows what AK/AZ/TX etc. means. Sure they can click on the link, but then why not abbreviated every term possible in the article and we can then let people click through evrything, that way it will be like a puzzle and everyone will have fun! Aboutmovies (talk) 12:11, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

While a good point, that proposal is not without some challenges. These are the names of the urbanized areas as used by the Census Bureau, providing consistent criteria for naming the UAs (which is necessary, considering the complexity of multiple-core, interstate UAs.) Unless completely new criteria for naming is agreed upon, I don't see how writing out all the state names would be suitably clear enough to world-wide viewers -- as you call for -- to see instead names like "Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Delaware-Maryland" or "Weirton-Steubenville, West Virginia-Ohio-Pennsylvania." Either way people are going to have to click through something to find out what these names mean! 24.127.247.2 (talk) 11:54, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

So, 1) you are advocating going against the manual of style in general, which should keep this list from ever making FL status. 2) you are advocating to give the reader less information. 3) the vast majority of the UAs have a single state (52 out of the first 70).

Now, I would actually be in favor of the large metro areas that have articles (i.e. Portland metropolitan area) have links to the metro pages that would give some actual context concerning the metro area, as a link to Portland, Oregon only gives you about a sentence or two about the actual topic the reader might be expecting. Plus, with the larger cities, people from around the world might be a bit familiar with and a state name or even abbreviation is less needed, but the vast majority of the UAs are for relatively small cities given in the context of the world and should have that little bit extra info. Aboutmovies (talk) 22:25, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Also to the owner of this page who continually reverts people's edits, how come the first 261 entries are links that are not to the postal code redirects, but those after are? Kinda screws up any thoughts of consistency. Aboutmovies (talk) 22:34, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

The use of two letter postal abbreviations for the states in this case is acceptable, as these are the official names of the UAs and UCs provided by the Census Bureau, and this is a list. MOS guidelines call for using the full state name in article main text but abbreviations are acceptable in infoboxes and tables, which this is. However, I don't think WP:R2D should be applied for this list to avoid redirects. [[Philadelphia]] is the stable, agreed upon article title and maintaining a piped link to [[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania|Philadelphia]] is not necessary to "indicate possible future articles", and removing the pipe to the redirected title leaves the visible link unchanged. In fact, per WP:R2D, "Non-piped links make better use of the "what links here" tool, making it easier to track how articles are linked and helping with large-scale changes to links." The links can all be direct to the agreed upon, stable article titles for U.S. locations which were defined beginning with the discussion here; all other locations use the "comma convention" as outlined in WP:NCGN#United States. Sswonk (talk) 00:16, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

That may be that they are the official names (odd that the Bureau goes postal codes for UA/UCs, but state names for MSA/CMSA etc., but that's government for you), but we don't have to follow that. Many times we go with something else, not what is official, such as Bill Gates is not officially Bill Gates (William Henry Gates III). Now, that it is a table carries some weight, but (and I cannot find the page that covers how in tables it is sometimes OK) the caveat for tables was that it is OK to abbreviate if needed for space. Here, that would not really be a problem as the table takes about 60% of the usable area, so moving the image up and expanding the LEDE to keep the image from interfering with the table would free up a lot more space (as would reducing the column widths for the rank and type). So there is room for it. But at this point I just don't care anymore, as the linking is inconsistent within the list and it is less friendly to foreign readers when it could easily be more friendly (and actually with the poor performance of US students in geography we hear about it might even be less friendly to domestic readers). Aboutmovies (talk) 08:05, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

The main MOS, at WP:MOS#Acronyms and abbreviations, mentions the use of abbreviations in tables and infoboxes. My opinion is that, since it is a table and not the article main text, and the data in the census lists is abbreviated, using abbreviations is a good choice. I added a footnote linking to a list of abbreviations for readers that need further information. Sswonk (talk) 19:16, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

The Census Bureau uses postal codes for MSAs also, for example: New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA. See Table of United States Metropolitan Statistical Areas where official Census Bureau naming conventions are used again. 24.127.247.2 (talk) 03:45, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Comment

Good Article and more representative of how the rest of the world caculates the true size of a city. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.53.157.212 (talk • contribs) 04:23, November 22, 2009

Question About South Bend / Elkhart Indiana

I noticed they weren't on the list. Are they somehow linked with the Chicago numbers? I tried finding information on it but couldn't find anything. Be very strange if they did include South Bend Indiana / Elkhart with Chicago's combined numbers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.201.146.164 (talk) 04:25, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Individually South Bend (113) and Elkhart (208) are listed. But if you mean both of them combined into a single area, it seems that the government doesn't classify them as a single urban area. Elockid ^(Talk) 04:36, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Got it, thanks :) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.201.146.164 (talk) 04:41, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Update 2010 census

Don't we have to update with data from the 2010 census? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.25.175.58 (talk) 09:16, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that does need to be done. 08OceanBeach^S.D. 01:05, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

It seems that the new figures for urban areas will be published in October 2012.--Pjred (talk) 12:07, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

It seems that information was released a few days ago. --Criticalthinker (talk) 03:05, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Is anyone working on putting the new numbers into the table? --Criticalthinker (talk) 06:22, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

No one has the time to do this? I'd update the numbers, but I'm not even sure about how to even begin to go about it. Why won't the person that updated the MSA numbers do this one, as well? --Criticalthinker (talk) 05:35, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

I went ahead and took the plunge. The table is updated with the 2010 Census values. It is the direct output of a script I wrote, so there may be a few red links that need correcting. I decided against keeping the 2000 values (and showing a percent change) due to potential misrepresentation of the data. I recall reading that the US Census has changed the way they classify urban areas. In addition some urban areas have been merged and/or split. Thus, showing a percent change could be very misleading in many cases. Thoughts? Mdawgmike (talk) 00:32, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

Not sure whether keeping the 2000 data is necessary, either, but it is my understanding that the criteria that changed was so miniscule as to not make a considerable difference in comparisons if we wanted to keep the previous data. Also, from my understanding, even with the new criteria, I don't think they had to split any UAs. Again, I'm not 100% sure of this, but I don't believe any major changes were made. BTW, I'd put the ranking back to the left of the urban area names. --Criticalthinker (talk) 04:42, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Separate column for state

Could we add an extra column to the table, so that you can sort by state? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.239.55.192 (talk) 18:49, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

2010 Urban Agglomerations

Just another request, but since the 2010 numbers for this page have been added, you don't have to use the 2006-2008 estimates for the "2010 Urban Agglomerations" section. This section should either be updated with the propper population figures, or removed altogether since it appears the Census Bureau didn't ever adopte the idea of "urban agglomerations" (i.e. combined urbanized areas). --Criticalthinker (talk) 10:40, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

Does this section even have any sources? I can't find a reference for it. Unless someone opposes I am just going to remove the unsourced section. Eopsid (talk) 22:17, 11 May 2020 (UTC)

I found a reference: Table 2 from https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/reference/fedreg/fedregv75n163.pdf. I'll add the section back in. One could potentially dispute its relevance, but I think it's interesting because one may wish to compare urban regions at a lower level of granularity, and these were identified by the census bureau, rather than just a wikipedian. 24.7.24.119 (talk) 05:46, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

Population errors...still confused...

I'm still confused about the population numbers. Baltimore is #19 as of 2014. During my lifetime we consistently had 600,000-700,000 residents. Why is it above 2M on this list? Strange since we always lose residents to the suburbs or surrounding states...the only time we've ever been close to 1M was in the 50's when it was 900,000 or so...according to this wiki page's 2010 census info, apparently Baltimore gained 1.5M residents in 2-3 years since the last record...don't tell me it's because they combined Baltimore City (1) with Baltimore County (2). Even combined, the population would only be around 1.5M...so what's up with this inaccurate information? If it is a metro area calculation, add the other cities in so it makes more sense... Chic3z (talk) 18:03, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

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Updated every one or ten years???

Hi! Quick question - are these urban area numbers updated every year (estimate) or every ten years (official census) by the Census Bureau ;o ??? Thanks in advance ^^ !!!~ Hanyou23 (talk) 21:20, 29 May 2017 (UTC)

Central Cities

I'm going to add the Central City numbers to the table for comparison. I'll source the numbers from their Wikipedia pages, but only the Data cited from the 2010 census, so it should match.--J intela (talk) 07:51, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

I think having the population numbers for central cities is interesting, having the cities' area as a % of the urban areas' area is misleading, since many cities have territory that is not included in the urban area. For example, over 40 square miles of the city of San Jose's 177.5 square miles is rural mountains or wetlands and are not included in the San Jose urban area. (See http://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/dc10map/UAUC_RefMap/ua/ua79039_san_jose_ca/DC10UA79039.pdf for that example.)

I'm happy to hear a discussion, but I think those columns should be removed from the table. Dtcomposer (talk) 22:37, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

Bay Area

Why is Bay Area divided up into it's composing cities? This seems incoherent with the rest of the page. In my opinion an estimation should be done for the whole of Bay Area, which would put it around 7M. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Iskube (talk • contribs) 20:25, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

These urban areas were defined by the census bureau, so blame them. Also, note that the Bay Area isn't quite divided up into individual cities; urban areas are named after the largest city or cities in them; e.g. "San Francisco-Oakland" includes the peninsula all the way to Menlo Park, everything from Fremont to the Carquinez bridge in the East Bay, and the populated part of Marin county; "San Jose" includes its suburbs through Palo Alto; "Concord" is the whole East Bay portion of the I-680 corridor; etc. 24.7.24.119 (talk) 06:03, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

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MAJOR ERRORS in Table ??

If you click on the reference for the table you go to https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/reference/ua/ua_list_all.txt

This gives San Francisco-Oakland, CA like so:

San Francisco--Oakland, CA 3281212 1338437 1356171095 523.62 24162411 9.33 6266.4 75

We consult the Wikipedia table and it's systematically different to the above in population and area terms, what is up with this?

Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim, CA; Spokane, WA–ID; and Waterbury, CT are also off.

I haven't checked the areas properly; it's possible there's rounding/conversion issues

Vonvorx (talk) 06:28, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

San Francisco--Oakland and San Jose's populations were merged because they are usually considered to be the same urban area. Same with Los Angeles and San Bernardino. Not sure if this is a good reason though.

Not sure what's up with Spokane, WA–ID and Waterbury, CT; might be best to redo it again in case there's a big error?

Itooaminuit (talk) 17:43, 31 January 2022 (UTC)