Combined Statistical Areas by Area in Square Miles

[streetscaper]

Originally Posted by craigs

I understand the criticisms of CSAs as entities, and I think the shift to work-at-home is going to make a big impact on them going forward.

That said, CSAs are comprised of counties. In the older eastern parts of the country, counties are bite-sized and work fairly well in terms of counting metropolitan populations. However, that gets tested when we look at Western counties, which are often enormous.

There is a reason many Western counties are enormous--generally, there is a lot of land, and yet people only live in a small portion of that land. Why bother creating a separate county, or many counties, out of unpopulated regions? More specifically, the populated parts of the Los Angeles-Long Beach CSA are a fraction of its enormous land area. You could cut out 90% of the land area and keep the same overall population. I've seen Steely Dan make the same point about the Chicago CSA--the vast outer areas are essentially irrelevant to the core region's population and economy. It's the same in greater Los Angeles, just super-sized.

Understood... but then maybe CSAs shouldn't be based on counties then