Metropolitan area populations, 1940

[pj3000]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Wow, Scranton was almost a Top 20 metro. Now it couldn't even dream of matching Allentown. It's now a minor exurban mini-metro.

Great bones, though. At least they still have Dunder Mifflin.

Originally Posted by Docere

More of a cluster of industrial towns? Scranton had a population of 140,000 (and 76,000 today) in 1940. Wilkes-Barre is 20 miles away and also part of the area. It too lost about half its population (86,000 in 1940, 44,000 today).

Originally Posted by Crawford

Right, Scranton area is like a mini-version of Germany's Ruhr. There are maybe a dozen mining towns in a valley. Wilkes Barre alone is almost Scranton's equal. Essen is nothing like Frankfurt or Munich but the Ruhr is much more populous.

The Scranton core wouldn't have New Orleans' historical heft, but if you go out in the neighborhoods, I think their prewar heft looks roughly comparable.

Yes, really just an agglomeration of somewhat connected, but 1940s disconnected mining/manufacturing towns back then.

The Lackawanna/Susquehanna Valley back then was really just a collection of towns. It's actually much more connected now due to suburbanization bridging the gaps.

[pj3000]

Amazing and somewhat depressing to see Detroit, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Cleveland right up there. They were the true workhorses of the American economy, and primed for an even bigger WWII build-up.

[lio45]

The most shocking thing on that list for me by far was Scranton > Houston.

[austlar1]

Originally Posted by pj3000

Yes, really just an agglomeration of somewhat connected, but 1940s disconnected mining/manufacturing towns back then.

The Lackawanna/Susquehanna Valley back then was really just a collection of towns. It's actually much more connected now due to suburbanization bridging the gaps.

Isn't that where Rabbit got rich? Sold lots of Toyotas in those postwar years!

[pj3000]

Originally Posted by lio45

The most shocking thing on that list for me by far was Scranton > Houston.

Considering current times, I guess. But why would anyone think that a city in Texas or anywhere in the South would be bigger than any prominent city of the North at that time? There was basically nothing of note down there in comparison to the northern US. LA, San Francisco, and even Kansas City were outliers of the time.

There's a reason that New Orleans and Houston are the sole southern metros on this list -- they were industrial/heavy manufacturing/port cities, which were for the south, but paled in comparison to massive economic manufacturing machine that was happening up north.

[Docere]

% of population in the Northeast or East North Central region

1940 47.5%
2020 31.7%

[austlar1]

If you check out the metro area figures for 1950 v/s 1940 I posted earlier on here, you'll notice that Dallas and Fort Worth were still counted as separate metro areas, basically just the population of their respective counties- Dallas metro 1950 figure was 610,852. Fort Worth metro figure was 359,246. The combined population was 970,098. That would actually make the combined Dallas-Fort Worth region the most populous area in Texas or the South in 1950. Never mind that the 30 miles between downtown Dallas and downtown Fort Worth was still mostly undeveloped prairie and river bottom. Today Dallas County and Tarrant County make up the core of the DFW area with almost 5 million people in a metro of 7.5 million plus. Back in 1950 that seemed inconceivable.

[bigstick]

Originally Posted by austlar1

Here's a link to 1950 metro area pops and comparison to 1940. Table 2 contains ranking by size. https://www2.census.gov/library/publ...03/pc-3-03.pdf

Atlanta had 518,100 in 1940...

[bobdreamz]

It's weird not seeing Miami on there which had a population of about 267k in 1940. It nearly doubled in 1950 after WW 2 to 488k & a gain of 82.5% and this was for Miami-Dade county only.

[Crawford]

I doubt there were that many in Broward and especially Palm Beach back then, though. Jacksonville was still Florida's leading city.

My aunt lived for two years in West Palm in the 1970's. She said it was like rural Alabama. The northerners and Latinos had yet to transform the area. There were Jews, but down in Miami Beach, and mostly pensioners. Palm Beach was a winter-only enclave for a few rich WASPy Northeasterners. What a change.

[Crawford]

Scranton appears to be the U.S. metro with the greatest % population loss. It's funny, bc there's almost no dramatic visible decline. No abandoned neighborhoods, no ghettohoods, no bombed-out retail stretches. Almost all U.S. cities had some degree of this, even the boomtowns.

Looking around on Streetview, it just appears that Scranton stopped growing. It looks like almost everything was built prior to WW2. Family sizes plummeted, a lot of those occupied-looking structures are just some granny living alone in a multi-unit structure.

Granted, Scranton doesn't look particularly healthy, anywhere. But it doesn't appear to have any dramatic decline.

[jmecklenborg]

I haven't used Excel in years...just realized I didn't use the percentage formula correctly. Oh well, I think everyone gets this:


Houston is the standout, by orders of magnitude. San Francisco is somehow holding steady at #8.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

I haven't used Excel in years...just realized I didn't use the percentage formula correctly. Oh well, I think everyone gets this:


Houston is the standout, by orders of magnitude. San Francisco is somehow holding steady at #8.

You need to multiply it by 100 to read correctly. NY has grown by 72% since 1940, not 0.72%.

That said, I think the ordering of the growth rates for Midwest and East Coast cities will surprise some people.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

You need to multiply it by 100 to read correctly. NY has grown by 72% since 1940, not 0.72%.

I didn't even know my work computer had Excel on it!

That said, I think the ordering of the growth rates for Midwest and East Coast cities will surprise some people.

The rates are impressive but the sheer scale of metro growth by several metros is more voluminous than the growth of some of the upstarts.

It's depressing to see what a monster Pittsburgh was in 1940 as compared to what it is now. There (and to some extent Cleveland and Detroit and St. Louis) you see tons of super-interesting buildings, bridges, and public improvements (parkways, etc.) from the 1910s and 1920s that are entirely lacking in most of the rest of the United States.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Houston is the standout, by orders of magnitude.

The magic of starting from low base on full display.

Houston growing 13x over the past 8 decades is certainly impressive, but it's billions of times easier to do that when you start from a relatively low base.

Chicagoland had 4.5M people in 1940. For it to mimic Houston's growth percentage over the past 80 years, the metro would have needed to grow to 60M by 2020, a fairly impractical number for a variety of reasons.

If we roll the clock back to the 80 years before 1940, then we see chicago's "Sunbelt style" growth era on full display.

Chicagoland 1860: 112,172
Chicagoland 1940: 4,499,126

That's an overall growth of 40x!

It was one of the fastest growing cities on the planet at the time.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

The magic of starting from low base on full display.

Houston growing 13x over the past 8 decades is certainly impressive, but it's billions of times easier to do that when you start from a relatively low base.

Chicagoland had 4.5M people in 1940. For it to mimic Houston's growth percentage over the past 80 years, the metro would have needed to grow to 60M by 2020, a fairly impractical number for a variety if reasons.

If we roll the clock back to the 80 years before 1940, then we see chicago's "Sunbelt style" growth on full display.

Chicagoland 1860: 112,172
Chicagoland 1940: 4,499,126

That's an overall growth of 40x!

It was one of the fastest growing cities on the planet at the time.

Yeah, that's why it's useful to look at the growth from a raw numbers versus growth percentages. Even though Houston's growth percentage is impressive, it didn't add as much population as New York over that time. Only Los Angeles added more people than New York over that time period.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Yeah, that's why it's useful to look at the growth from a raw numbers versus growth percentages. Even though Houston's growth percentage is impressive, it didn't add as much population as New York over that time. Only Los Angeles added more people than New York over that time period.

Back in 1940, betting that NYC, Chicago, and LA would still be the top three cities would have been a reasonable bet. But predicting at that same hour that Houston and Dallas would both rise to the Top 5, with both poised to surpass Chicago by 2040, would have been manic street preacher stuff.

Will NYC still be the top city in 2140? Probably. But will Dallas and/or Houston both surpass Los Angeles by 2140? Maybe, since it doesn't seem like LA can physically grow whereas there is nothing but flat land surrounding the Texas cities.

What 500,000 metros in 2020 will be metros of 7 million 100 years from now? Chattanooga? Ft. Wayne, IN? Fresno? Mobile, AL?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

But predicting at that same hour that Houston and Dallas would both rise to the Top 5, with both poised to surpass Chicago by 2040, would have been manic street preacher stuff.

Not terribly dissimilar from some out of their mind lunatic in 1810 predicting that the fledgling tiny frontier village of Chicago (it was barely even a place yet, flung out at the edge of the known world with little more than a small US Army fort surrounded by some houses, with maybe 100 inhabitants, all in danger of being swallowed up by the marsh) would EXPLODE to become the nation's 2nd largest city by 1890, surpassing even the likes of Philly, Boston, and Baltimore!

[wwmiv]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Back in 1940, betting that NYC, Chicago, and LA would still be the top three cities would have been a reasonable bet. But predicting at that same hour that Houston and Dallas would both rise to the Top 5, with both poised to surpass Chicago by 2040, would have been manic street preacher stuff.

Will NYC still be the top city in 2140? Probably. But will Dallas and/or Houston both surpass Los Angeles by 2140? Maybe, since it doesn't seem like LA can physically grow whereas there is nothing but flat land surrounding the Texas cities.

What 500,000 metros in 2020 will be metros of 7 million 100 years from now? Chattanooga? Ft. Wayne, IN? Fresno? Mobile, AL?

Albuquerque.

I wouldn’t say these will get that large, but:

Rapid City, SD: 2 mil
Boise, ID: 3 mil
Spokane+Coeur D’Alene: 4 mil
Fargo, ND: 1 mil
Somewhere, MT: 2 mil
Grand Junction, CO: 1 mil
Redding, CA: 1 mil

Also, these will likely be much larger (~500-750k):

Sedona, Flagstaff, Taos, Prescott, Gallup, Durango, Trinidad, Yuma.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by jmecklenborg

Back in 1940, betting that NYC, Chicago, and LA would still be the top three cities would have been a reasonable bet. But predicting at that same hour that Houston and Dallas would both rise to the Top 5, with both poised to surpass Chicago by 2040, would have been manic street preacher stuff.

Will NYC still be the top city in 2140? Probably. But will Dallas and/or Houston both surpass Los Angeles by 2140? Maybe, since it doesn't seem like LA can physically grow whereas there is nothing but flat land surrounding the Texas cities.

What 500,000 metros in 2020 will be metros of 7 million 100 years from now? Chattanooga? Ft. Wayne, IN? Fresno? Mobile, AL?

L.A. will have to grow up to continue growing. I don't think there is any risk of another city overtaking NYC by 2140, though. NY Metro still adds about 1 million per decade, which is about the same as the "fast growing" metros in Texas.