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Originally Posted by Crawford
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And Paris is a pretty terrible comparison to Chicago, because A. The City of Paris is a tiny geography that only encompasses the city center and B. It's impossible to build anything in most parts of the city proper. It would be like if the City of Chicago were only downtown and environs, and then you banned new construction.
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I agree that Paris is a poor comparison. I've compared Chicago and Paris in a few, specific ways, but they're not similar at all in general.
Paris proper is only 40 square miles, more comparable to San Francisco, except nearly three times as many people as San Francisco. Really, in the US only Manhattan can compare to Paris and even then it's not a very good comparison due to the radically different built environment.
Because of the density differences, even comparing subsets of Chicago to Paris is problematic. I mean if you cut out a part of Chicago that was between the Lakefront, Irving Park Rd at Kedzie, and 47th Street at Ashland, you'd have approximately the land area of Paris, but less than 1/3 of Paris' population. Even if you changed that to be from Congress to Howard and 4 miles west of the lakefront in order to pull in more dense neighborhoods, you'd still be only a little over 1/3 of Paris population.