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  #1  
Old Posted Oct 24, 2019, 11:37 PM
jd3189 jd3189 is offline
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What if Houston or Dallas eventually became the largest cities in the US?

I thought that the LA thread would foster more discussion specifically on the OP. But in order to prevent that thread from being locked up for going off topic, I’m giving a certain topic its own home.


But in all seriousness, I’m curious about it as well. Texas seems to be the fastest growing of the top 3 Sunbelt states (which also happen to also be the top 3 most populous states in the country). California seems to be slowing down and Florida might be seen as a goner to climate change. It doesn’t seem like the growth of Houston or Dallas will change, especially as their economics continue to diversify.

So, what if either of them, in maybe the next 20,30,40, etc years, become the largest cities in the US?

Let’s not question whether or not it will happen, but consider the ramifications of such an event if it one day becomes a reality.

Y’all can argue to your heart’s content on that. As before, I don’t think it would make much of a difference besides giving some more clout to Texas, but who knows....
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  #2  
Old Posted Oct 24, 2019, 11:42 PM
Obadno Obadno is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jd3189 View Post
I thought that the LA thread would foster more discussion specifically on the OP. But in order to prevent that thread from being locked up for going off topic, I’m giving a certain topic its own home.


But in all seriousness, I’m curious about it as well. Texas seems to be the fastest growing of the top 3 Sunbelt states (which also happen to also be the top 3 most populous states in the country). California seems to be slowing down and Florida might be seen as a goner to climate change. It doesn’t seem like the growth of Houston or Dallas will change, especially as their economics continue to diversify.

So, what if either of them, in maybe the next 20,30,40, etc years, become the largest cities in the US?

Let’s not question whether or not it will happen, but consider the ramifications of such an event if it one day becomes a reality.

Y’all can argue to your heart’s content on that. As before, I don’t think it would make much of a difference besides giving some more clout to Texas, but who knows....
I dont really understand how any of this would matter.

Unless you live in NYC/Houston or Dallas and one becomes "the biggest city" and one becomes the former "biggest city" that is more of a local cultural issue not really a concern nor matter for anyone living in the countless other cities and towns in America.

The world didnt end when Virginia stopped being the most populace state, and it didnt end when New York stopped being the most populace state.

Nothing happened when the 2nd place city prize flipped from Chicago to LA
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  #3  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 12:03 AM
iheartthed iheartthed is online now
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If that happens before all of us reading this in 2019 are dead, then something really, really bad must have happened.
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  #4  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 2:30 AM
Crawford Crawford is offline
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Something catastrophic would have happened.

Dallas has 7-8 million people, LA has 18-19 million, NYC has 23-24 million. So not happening in our lifetimes unless some cataclysmic event like WW3 happens. And basically all of North TX and a good share of OK would be barren, endless sprawl.
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  #5  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 3:50 AM
ThePhun1 ThePhun1 is offline
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Not necessarily. New York could split amongst itself (unlikely but hardly impossible), LA has had some home rule/deannex votes before and Houston keeps growing. Dallas has been stagnant, so unless the Southside becomes more affluent, it may not even catch San Antonio (let alone Houston) within Texas, never mind the really big boys.

It's really a big pile of who cares anyways, as evidenced by the fact San Antonio has entered the conversation.
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  #6  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 5:16 AM
llamaorama llamaorama is offline
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It won’t happen because neither city can grow enough. US demographic trends are slowing. People move less domestically. Birth rates are falling. The long term immigration trend is downward due to political realities.

Also both cities have to compete with places like Austin and Nashville and Charlotte and Orlando and so on..,
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  #7  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 5:24 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ThePhun1 View Post
Not necessarily. New York could split amongst itself (unlikely but hardly impossible), LA has had some home rule/deannex votes before
Can you explain how this would affect Census-based metro population counts? If NYC split into say, 50 mini-cities, how would that change the population?
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and Houston keeps growing. Dallas has been stagnant
No, Dallas is faster growing than Houston. I didn't even mention Houston because it's smaller and slower growing, and its prospects for adding 18 million people even more ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by ThePhun1 View Post
so unless the Southside becomes more affluent, it may not even catch San Antonio (let alone Houston) within Texas, never mind the really big boys.
San Antonio is about 1/4 the size of Dallas. What does the relative affluence of southside Dalas have to do with regional growth rates? And now you think San Antonio could be larger than NY and LA? Why not throw in Lubbock and Amarillo while you're at it?
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  #8  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 7:01 AM
austlar1 austlar1 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ThePhun1 View Post
Not necessarily. New York could split amongst itself (unlikely but hardly impossible), LA has had some home rule/deannex votes before and Houston keeps growing. Dallas has been stagnant, so unless the Southside becomes more affluent, it may not even catch San Antonio (let alone Houston) within Texas, never mind the really big boys.

It's really a big pile of who cares anyways, as evidenced by the fact San Antonio has entered the conversation.
I do believe the person who created this thread was referring to metro areas.
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  #9  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 12:09 PM
jtown,man jtown,man is offline
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Let's be more realistic than, lets say in 150 years Dallas becomes to largest city in the country.
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  #10  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 12:58 PM
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Texas has potential to become the most populated state a long ways down the road. That would require California to continue it's long trending slow down and it would require Texas to maintain it's high rate of growth for decades to come.


Texas is a state of 28,701,845 [2018] the next population milestone will be 30 million, which will happen in a few years considering the state will have added about 4 million residents by the 2020 census since 2010.

California is about to cross 40,000,000 by the 2020 census.
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  #11  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 1:32 PM
IrishIllini IrishIllini is offline
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It’s not unrealistic that LA passes NYC, but Dallas or Houston

Dallas will probably end up about the size of Chicago and Houston a bit smaller. I don’t see how Dallas or Houston grow at 100k+ per year consistently for the next decade. Houston’s already slipping. There are only so many jobs to buy/poach, housing becomes unaffordable, traffic becomes a nightmare, perception of crime increases, perceptions of increasing taxes for fewer services...
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  #12  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 1:55 PM
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I recently opened a thread asking how much a city could grow keep its cohesion. Something like a dying star getting bigger and bigger before its collapse:


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Originally Posted by yuriandrade View Post
I thought of this thread more as a reflection about present urban areas and whether there is a physical limit on how much a (monocentric) city can grow and still working as a same labour market.

World's largest city is Tokyo, a "monocentric" metro area. In the future, it could be surpassed by Jakarta or New Delhi, both with the same characteristic. Emerging Chinese metropolises, on the other hand, would work differently, be it on the Pearl River Delta ou on the metro areas around Shanghai. Both regions work more as a big Rhein-Ruhr area, a collection of metropolises instead of a gargantuan metropolis.

In South America, São Paulo is transitioning from this Tokyo-model into a Pearl River Delta one:



The "Macrometropolis" (a term more and more common) has about 33 million people and growing at a 10% decade rate. Even though São Paulo is the star, it's not big enough to turn Campinas metro area (3 million people) into a mere suburb, even though they touch each other by continuous urban development through Jundiaí and its suburbs and working on a complementary way (Campinas-Jundiaí-Sorocaba triangle absorbing São Paulo's manufacturing and logistic flight, stopping them to move to other parts of the country avoiding a Rust Belt phenomenon).

New York and Philadelphia might be a similar case, even though, they are distinct and have their own worlds. At least in São Paulo's case, all the areas are inside the same state and share the same cultural traits.

Anyway, can we have a 50 million, a 60 million "monocentric" urban area or Tokyo's 38-40 million is a physical limit for it? What are your thoughts?

Bringing this concept here, if cities were to have an universal size limit, I guess that I would be much lower in places like Dallas, Houston or Atlanta.

A 20 million people Dallas, with current densities or ever a bit higher, would function as a regular metro area? Or simply as a state region with its several nodes acting as independent mid-sized cities, without reaching the critical mass to work as a single metropolis?
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  #13  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 2:01 PM
pm91 pm91 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jd3189 View Post
I thought that the LA thread would foster more discussion specifically on the OP. But in order to prevent that thread from being locked up for going off topic, I’m giving a certain topic its own home.


But in all seriousness, I’m curious about it as well. Texas seems to be the fastest growing of the top 3 Sunbelt states (which also happen to also be the top 3 most populous states in the country). California seems to be slowing down and Florida might be seen as a goner to climate change. It doesn’t seem like the growth of Houston or Dallas will change, especially as their economics continue to diversify.

So, what if either of them, in maybe the next 20,30,40, etc years, become the largest cities in the US?

Let’s not question whether or not it will happen, but consider the ramifications of such an event if it one day becomes a reality.

Y’all can argue to your heart’s content on that. As before, I don’t think it would make much of a difference besides giving some more clout to Texas, but who knows....
OP literally said not to question if it will happen or not. I think they're talkin about how would the country feel different. There's a lot of stigma with the Coasts having the population, cultural, media centers that supposedly represent the middle part of the country. Imagine if the #1 and #2 cities in the US are in the middle of the country and in this case both in a single state. What would that entail.
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  #14  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 2:34 PM
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if california secedes dallas has a shot at number two. i don’t think houstons growth is sustainable.
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  #15  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 2:48 PM
iheartthed iheartthed is online now
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Originally Posted by IrishIllini View Post
It’s not unrealistic that LA passes NYC, but Dallas or Houston

Dallas will probably end up about the size of Chicago and Houston a bit smaller. I don’t see how Dallas or Houston grow at 100k+ per year consistently for the next decade. Houston’s already slipping. There are only so many jobs to buy/poach, housing becomes unaffordable, traffic becomes a nightmare, perception of crime increases, perceptions of increasing taxes for fewer services...
CSA LA, maybe. Not MSA LA. But if NYC and Philadelphia were ever merged into a single CSA, there would be no chance.
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Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 3:02 PM
galleyfox galleyfox is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by IrishIllini View Post
It’s not unrealistic that LA passes NYC, but Dallas or Houston

Dallas will probably end up about the size of Chicago and Houston a bit smaller. I don’t see how Dallas or Houston grow at 100k+ per year consistently for the next decade. Houston’s already slipping. There are only so many jobs to buy/poach, housing becomes unaffordable, traffic becomes a nightmare, perception of crime increases, perceptions of increasing taxes for fewer services...

There's also no giant population pool to supply the growth anymore. Immigration from Latin America is slowing, immigration from overseas always favors New York and California first, birth rates in the Western Hemisphere are rapidly falling, the rust belt is tapped out with its population stabilizing, retirees favor other destinations, ect.

Population growth peaked in Houston and Dallas a few years ago, and has been steadily falling ever since.
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  #17  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 3:19 PM
Obadno Obadno is offline
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Originally Posted by galleyfox View Post
There's also no giant population pool to supply the growth anymore. Immigration from Latin America is slowing, immigration from overseas always favors New York and California first, birth rates in the Western Hemisphere are rapidly falling, the rust belt is tapped out with its population stabilizing, retirees favor other destinations, ect.

Population growth peaked in Houston and Dallas a few years ago, and has been steadily falling ever since.
Birthrates can change on a whim, this is why projections for more than a few years in the future usually turn out wildly inaccurate.
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  #18  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 3:25 PM
Crawford Crawford is offline
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Originally Posted by iheartthed View Post
CSA LA, maybe. Not MSA LA. But if NYC and Philadelphia were ever merged into a single CSA, there would be no chance.
I actually think long-term, it's less likely by CSA, because NYC is surrounded by large population centers not in its CSA, while LA is surrounded by nothing, except for SD.

NYC has Philly, Allentown, Scranton, Albany and Hartford MSAs directly adjoining its CSA. Even putting aside Philly, that's nearly 5 million people. With Philly CSA, it's nearly 12 million. LA has maybe 4 million in the equivalent circumference.
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Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 3:29 PM
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Birthrates can change on a whim, this is why projections for more than a few years in the future usually turn out wildly inaccurate.
Not quite. They are fairly accurate, specially on country-level and in areas past the population transition (Americas, Europe, eastern Asia).

Once the population go below the replacement level, it's a matter of time to have negative growth. As soon the larger cohorts past the reproduction age, even if the population goes back to 2.0, population decline is unavoidable as the following generation is smaller.

Only migration can keep things afloat as it allows the general population to be younger on average (thus higher birth rates, not necessarily fertility rates). But has galleyfox said, the main sources of migration to Texas will be themselves in decline.
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  #20  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2019, 3:46 PM
iheartthed iheartthed is online now
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Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
I actually think long-term, it's less likely by CSA, because NYC is surrounded by large population centers not in its CSA, while LA is surrounded by nothing, except for SD.

NYC has Philly, Allentown, Scranton, Albany and Hartford MSAs directly adjoining its CSA. Even putting aside Philly, that's nearly 5 million people. With Philly CSA, it's nearly 12 million. LA has maybe 4 million in the equivalent circumference.
If not by CSA then there's probably no chance LA ever overtakes NY, since NY's MSA has consistently been adding more people than LA's MSA since the 1980s.
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