San Francisco (and other U.S. cities) and the 1 million mark

[memph]

Originally Posted by jd3189

What I'm trying to concentrate on is the built area, not the geographically size of a city so much. I want this thread to concentrate of density patterns within SF and other cities. I probably should mention NYC as an example. Aside from Manhattan (which cannot be compared as it is at another level ), the outer boroughs are pretty much lowrise/midrise (like SF and a few other cities) but 3 of them (Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens) have higher densities than any other city in the country. What makes them so dense and what makes our older large cities different from our younger ones?

I want to know about the development patterns that causes places to reach these types of densities and perhaps photos detailing it. Land area doesn't matter since certain cities have already proven it worthless, but I am curious about the development pattern, building types, etc, because it is the most important factor in the density of an city. By looking at that, we can see how other cities can densify without losing their character. SF is an interesting case because it and those three outer boroughs are possibly the best models of urbanism for many U.S. cities, but what does that consist of?





Annexation can be discussed, but it doesn't add too much to density as it takes away.

I think a lot of it has to do with historic size and the transportation modes available throughout a city's growth. Geography can play a role but imo it's not always that important.

First you have the pre-gunpowder cities. Typically they were built with city walls, which were expensive, and so often relatively small. If you wanted to be safe from enemy armies, you had to live inside the walls, so densities there were quite high. Some people took the risk to live outside the walls to have more space/lower costs, and probably eventually some of these suburbs outside the walls would get surrounded by another outer layer of walls. The walls also often impeded travel to areas outside them, which was probably another reason why it was more desirable to be inside them (if you worked/traded with those on the inside a lot).

Eventually gunpowder made those city walls obsolete, and you had walking cities where the size of the city was limited by how far you could walk. Because you could walk in any direction with equal ease, I think these sorts of cities tended to be dense but somewhat decentralized. I think Midtown/Downtown Manhattan was initially like this in the mid-19th century.

Later, public transportation started to get built, with steam railroads, horse drawn trolleys and eventually streetcars and electric railroads. This greatly expanded how much space a city could take up and also made them more centralized as the transit (and freight trail) typically consisted of radial networks. I'm not sure if that would have continued to be the case indefinitely, but at least at first, you had the dense walking core and the lower density transit suburbs, and the transit suburbs were probably not dense enough to warrant much transit between them.

Eventually, it's likely that the cities would have reached the size limit set by transit, and I think New York was started to get to that point, which is why its transit suburbs got to be denser than those of smaller American cities. Probably eventually more suburb to suburb lines would have been warranted, with a city dense throughout and that was more decentralized, but American cities didn't really get big enough for that to happen. Tokyo is more or less like that though.

Finally you have the automobile that sped up travel even more and allowed cities to expand further. The capacity of roads is not as high as transit, but they are faster and decentralized. The automobile opened up huge tracts of land that were now within commute distance, and although there was a lot of housing demand in American cities at that time, there was so much land available that the land could get filled up at low densities. Also because it's relatively cheap to build roads that can take you from suburb to suburb, you had more decentralization and jobs shifting to suburbs.

I think that eventually, American cities will be reaching the point where in order to function as a cohesive whole, they can't expand out further much more because they're approaching the size limit set by roads and highways. That's probably happening with the biggest American metro areas right now.

Small towns are different - because they didn't reach the size limit set by various transportation modes, they didn't really have to densify. As a result, they have more moderate densities, maybe not super low density sprawl densities but definitely a long way from New York too.

Geography still matters, but only as far as how it affected how much the city could expand at each transportation stage of its history. For example, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Montreal are all less geographically constrained than San Francisco, but had similar (if not higher) densities in 1950.

[jd3189]

^^^ Interesting read. Aside from historical patterns, building styles also have a part in density.

Looking at the built environment of each of the top densest cities would also be interesting(ex. amount of apartment buildings, rowhomes, single family homes, housing projects, mixed-use buildings, etc)

[jg6544]

Originally Posted by toddguy

*Columbus will celebrate this event if it occurs by constructing a giant concrete cow that will complement the concrete field of giant corn in the suburb of Dublin.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_Corn

Which is exactly why San Francisco has nothing to be concerned about!

[chris08876]

I'd like to see the SF city limits breach the one million mark by 2025.

Austin probably is close to a million if not exceeding it in 7-8 months.

If Austin passes a million, which is soon, the U.S. will have 11 cities over 1 million (city limits).

If i had to bet on the next city to make it number 12, I'd say Fort Worth in time due. Its growing pretty fast.

[H-town guy]

Originally Posted by dc_denizen

A list of US cities: SF has 3.3 million people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...es_urban_areas


1 New York--Newark, NY—NJ—CT 18,351,295 8,936.0 3,450.2 2,053.6 5,318.9
2 Los Angeles--Long Beach--Anaheim, CA 12,150,996 4,496.3 1,736.0 2,702.5 6,999.3
3 Chicago, IL—IN 8,608,208 6,326.7 2,442.8 1,360.6 3,524.0
4 Miami, FL 5,502,379 3,208.0 1,238.6 1,715.2 4,442.4
5 Philadelphia, PA—NJ—DE—MD 5,441,567 5,131.7 1,981.4 1,060.4 2,746.4
6 Dallas--Fort Worth--Arlington, TX 5,121,892 4,607.9 1,779.1 1,111.5 2,878.9
7 Houston, TX 4,944,332 4,299.4 1,660.0 1,150.0 2,978.5
8 Washington, DC—VA—MD 4,586,770 3,423.3 1,321.7 1,339.9 3,470.3
9 Atlanta, GA 4,515,419 6,851.4 2,645.4 659.0 1,706.9
10 Boston, MA—NH—RI 4,181,019 4,852.2 1,873.5 861.7 2,231.7
11 Detroit, MI 3,734,090 3,463.2 1,337.2 1,078.2 2,792.5
12 Phoenix--Mesa, AZ 3,629,114 2,969.6 1,146.6 1,222.1 3,165.2
13 San Francisco--Oakland, CA 3,281,212 1,356.2 523.6 2,419.5 6,266.4
14 Seattle, WA 3,059,393 2,616.7 1,010.3 1,169.2 3,028.2
15 San Diego, CA 2,956,746 1,896.9 732.4 1,558.7 4,037.0
16 Minneapolis--St. Paul, MN—WI 2,650,890 2,646.5 1,021.8 1,001.7 2,594.3
17 Tampa--St. Petersburg, FL 2,441,770 2,478.6 957.0 985.1 2,551.5
18 Denver--Aurora, CO 2,374,203 1,730.0 668.0 1,372.4 3,554.4
19 Baltimore, MD 2,203,663 1,857.1 717.0 1,186.6 3,073.

I can tell you as a fact, that these statistics are incorrect and outdated. First of all, these are population statistics referring to the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward MSA, not San Francisco alone. As of July 2014, approximately 850,000 people lived within the city limits.

[kcexpress69]

Originally Posted by chris08876

I'd like to see the SF city limits breach the one million mark by 2025.

Austin probably is close to a million if not exceeding it in 7-8 months.

If Austin passes a million, which is soon, the U.S. will have 11 cities over 1 million (city limits).

If i had to bet on the next city to make it number 12, I'd say Fort Worth in time due. Its growing pretty fast.

I dunno....Charlotte and Jacksonville are growing pretty fast. It could be a horse race, between the three of them.

[dc_denizen]

Originally Posted by H-town guy

I can tell you as a fact, that these statistics are incorrect and outdated. First of all, these are population statistics referring to the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward MSA, not San Francisco alone. As of July 2014, approximately 850,000 people lived within the city limits.

They're actually urban areas, not metros or CSAs. Urban areas are the most accurate of city populations in the US, since they ignore the arbitrary municipal boundaries. They are defined by a population density threshold of around 1000 ppl/sq mile and much smaller than MSA/CSA definitions.

[ThePhun1]

Originally Posted by dc_denizen

A list of US cities: SF has 3.3 million people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...es_urban_areas


1 New York--Newark, NY—NJ—CT 18,351,295 8,936.0 3,450.2 2,053.6 5,318.9
2 Los Angeles--Long Beach--Anaheim, CA 12,150,996 4,496.3 1,736.0 2,702.5 6,999.3
3 Chicago, IL—IN 8,608,208 6,326.7 2,442.8 1,360.6 3,524.0
4 Miami, FL 5,502,379 3,208.0 1,238.6 1,715.2 4,442.4
5 Philadelphia, PA—NJ—DE—MD 5,441,567 5,131.7 1,981.4 1,060.4 2,746.4
6 Dallas--Fort Worth--Arlington, TX 5,121,892 4,607.9 1,779.1 1,111.5 2,878.9
7 Houston, TX 4,944,332 4,299.4 1,660.0 1,150.0 2,978.5
8 Washington, DC—VA—MD 4,586,770 3,423.3 1,321.7 1,339.9 3,470.3
9 Atlanta, GA 4,515,419 6,851.4 2,645.4 659.0 1,706.9
10 Boston, MA—NH—RI 4,181,019 4,852.2 1,873.5 861.7 2,231.7
11 Detroit, MI 3,734,090 3,463.2 1,337.2 1,078.2 2,792.5
12 Phoenix--Mesa, AZ 3,629,114 2,969.6 1,146.6 1,222.1 3,165.2
13 San Francisco--Oakland, CA 3,281,212 1,356.2 523.6 2,419.5 6,266.4
14 Seattle, WA 3,059,393 2,616.7 1,010.3 1,169.2 3,028.2
15 San Diego, CA 2,956,746 1,896.9 732.4 1,558.7 4,037.0
16 Minneapolis--St. Paul, MN—WI 2,650,890 2,646.5 1,021.8 1,001.7 2,594.3
17 Tampa--St. Petersburg, FL 2,441,770 2,478.6 957.0 985.1 2,551.5
18 Denver--Aurora, CO 2,374,203 1,730.0 668.0 1,372.4 3,554.4
19 Baltimore, MD 2,203,663 1,857.1 717.0 1,186.6 3,073.

As another poster stated, San Francisco has to be bigger. The census be damned, San Jose is just another part of the metro area.

Originally Posted by toddguy

More in the doesn't mean much category.

Jacksonville Florida city and San Francisco city have almost identical numbers of people

San Francisco is 47 square miles of land, Jacksonville is 747 square miles of land.

Now which is the larger more important city?

There's a lot of people that can't tell, unfortunately. I know of plenty of people that take the ranking of a city at face value, meaning they actually think Houston is the fourth largest city, San Antonio is the seventh largest city and San Jose is the 10th largest city.

That San Francisco is about to hit the 1 million mark is both impressive and meaningless: impressive given how small it is but ultimately meaningless because I'll still look at it with the same respect I had for it before hand, just as I look at San Jose as, in some ways, an overgrown suburb despite being larger.

[chris08876]

I'd like to see San Jose become much denser. I think it has an awesome layout. I'm assuming though its probably just as expensive as SF if not more being the tech capital and the wealth that's in that area.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by dc_denizen

They're actually urban areas, not metros or CSAs. Urban areas are the most accurate of city populations in the US, since they ignore the arbitrary municipal boundaries. They are defined by a population density threshold of around 1000 ppl/sq mile and much smaller than MSA/CSA definitions.

San Francisco gets shafted by this measure. I believe it's because the strip of land connecting the core city with the southern suburbs (a pretty dense area) is too narrow. SF functions as far larger than the amount shown.