SCALES #75: planted by the water
Hello!
It’s been a while, sorry I haven’t posted, &c., &c.
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In the spirit of the extended holiday weekend, some thoughtful reads about American history and how avoiding “uncomfortable” or “irrelevant” topics often is a tool of misdirection used to serve the interests of those with power: “The War on History is a War on Democracy”; “In Hudson, Ohio, Whose History Matters?”.
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Trivial geography
A thought that has been rattling around in my head for years: one foundational part of the Twin Cities Experience™ is its isolation from any urban center of comparable size. There’s a certain pride, a certain go-it-aloneness, and maybe a certain parochialism, from a city (okay, cities) being—to use a confusing figure of speech—the only game in town. The only... town in town. The big city, Chicago, is a full day’s drive away, far enough to be a separate culture. In points East, to rehash the obvious, cities are relatively stacked up on top of each other.
I’ve always wondered: how unique is this? How geographically isolated is Minneapolis–St. Paul compared to other reasonably large U.S. cities?
I pulled together (courtesy of Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap) the current population estimate for each U.S. metropolitan statistical area, per the Census Bureau, and the corresponding location.
Then, I calculated: for each metropolitan area, how far is the closest city that is its “peer” or larger? I decided a peer metro area didn’t need to be strictly as large in population; I went full stereotypical coastal elite and based the threshold on maintaining the New York–Los Angeles dyad. A metro area counts as a city’s “peer” if it is at least half as large in population. This means the only peer metro for New York–Newark–Jersey City (19 million) is Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim (13 million). Chicago–Naperville–Elgin (9.4 million) misses the cut.*
If you plot the distance to the closest peer city, by population, for the largest U.S. metros, you see the expected general trend that the larger the city, the further it is to a peer, with New York as the extreme, followed by Los Angeles and then Chicago. I'm pasting a plot below that includes all metro areas with population above 1 million, with the exception of New York and L.A. (way off up and to the right). You can also check out an interactive (but not phone-friendly) version I hacked together with every MSA.
So to answer my question: for its size, Minneapolis is relatively far from a peer metropolitan area. But it’s not the most extreme outlier: Denver is both a smaller MSA and further from a peer city.
Some other surprises to me:
- Betraying my ignorance of southern geography: Miami and Atlanta (its closest peer) are pretty far away from each other!
- Betraying my ignorance of western geography: the Inland Empire MSA of Riverside–San Bernadino–Ontario CA is notably large and not isolated! (Arguably a quirk of the choice of statistical measure—all gets lumped in with greater Los Angeles at the combined statistical area level.)
- Minneapolis to Chicago is almost the same distance as San Francisco to Los Angeles.
- Despite all the declining Rust Belt narrativizing, Metro Detroit is big! And has ever so slightly grown according to 2010–2020 estimates. (A further aside: Cleveland, not Detroit, is now estimated to be the mid-to-large-size city with the highest poverty rate.)
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Music
An extremely me thing to enjoy is watching an artist hone their craft, examining the incremental changes or improvements around the edges. Rhiannon Giddens’ They’re Calling Me Home, released in April, rewards that kind of attention: a little bit warmer sound this time around, some more backing vocals, further integrating the folk European-rooted percussion of Francesco Turrisi. Makes me think about what it takes to make a successful career, a successful research program: finding a lane that’s focused enough to reward careful continued study, but capacious enough to allow for growth. One all-American highlight is her cover of “I Shall Not Be Moved”.
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Thanks for reading! You can always forward to a friend/reply and say hi/subscribe.
—Adam
* There’s also the whole separate question of what level of aggregation to use. “Metropolitan statistical areas” can be combined into, well, “Combined statistical areas” (CSAs) or broken down into subregions. I chose to keep everything at the MSA level—this means separating Baltimore from DC, San Jose from San Francisco, Akron from Cleveland—but is there an obviously correct way to handle this? I don’t think so! And this choice does impact the results somewhat: the Cleveland–Akron–Canton CSA (3.6 million) would count as a peer of the Detroit–Warren–Ann Arbor CSA (5.3 million) but the Cleveland–Elyria MSA (2.0 million) doesn’t cut it as a peer of the Detroit–Warren–Dearborn MSA (4.3 million). I also note the Riverside case above.