So I am from Europe and in my country we have 1 city over 1 mil people and 4 cities between 100k-400k. I am fascinated by the idea that in the us there is more than 300 cities from 100k and up inhabitants…like the number of options you can choose from. Here, if you want to have a nice job you just have to pick between top two cities or else you are pretty much screwed in a low paying job.
This brings me to question what is actually life in a city with lets say 100k inhabitants in the US? I hear a lot about how those cities are better than big cities for job prospects etc…and it is just difficult to imagine. In my country the city with 100k inhabitants is considered a shithole tbh. You have a couple of restaurant and small number of business, shopping mall and that’s it. Is it any different in a city like Providence or Boise city…or Grand Rapids? I know that it is different from state to state but I really wonder if midsized American cities offer better opportunities compared to midsize cities in my country, where people are leaving for the only two big cities the moment they graduate from high school
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> So I am from Europe and in my country we have 1 city over 1 mil people and 4 cities between 100k-400k.
What country!?
A lot of cities and towns of 100k are suburbs within the metro area of a larger city. Indianapolis ‘ metro area has two suburban cities north of 100k. And I wouldn’t be surprised if 1-3 more hit 100k in the next 20 years or so.
Outside of that a city of 30-100k often tends to be dominated by one employer or a particular industry. In Bloomington, that’s Indiana University and the various businesses that cater to students and faculty. In Elkhart/Goshen, that’s the RV industry.
It’s really going to depend on the particular cities and region
Here we have 80k people.
Really depends on the city. Some smaller cities are riddled with crime and corruption but generally there’s a decent nightlife/restaurant/shopping selection, rent is much cheaper than the big cities while the average person makes about the same amount (obviously the super high paying jobs are mostly in the big cities) the public transit is usually absolute shit. I think most small cities have a decent employment rate
The last two decades have been incredible for the mid-sized American city.
A true flowering of quality of life. Amazing restaurants, music, culture, etc. many of the benefits that used to be exclusively the province of major cities now exist in medium cities but those cities still don’t (generally) have the issues the large cities do.
There are 331 cities in the US above 100k people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population#50_states_and_the_District_of_Columbia
So there’s going to be a tremendous amount of variance between one city to another around the 100k level, from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which is the home to one of the state’s universities, to New Bedford, Massachusetts that is still an important fishing center and draws a lot of tourism.
There are definitely some economically depressed cities, some of which have fallen above the threshold of 100k people, like Youngstown, Ohio, but by and large, there’s no stigma attached to living in a mid-sized city in the US, though they often have fewer cultural opportunities and may be more specialized than larger cities.
I live in a small town of about 25k and its perfect
I’m from a mid-sized city of about 500k (Raleigh). Great for families, pretty boring for young people — there’s a lot of parks and stuff, good schools, museums, but not much in the way of nightlife or cultural amenities that you get in a big city. Economically the area is pretty booming, so usually you can find a decent job in the area for most fields, although for some fields obviously you might have to look in other places.
I live in a college town of 140k people. There is a lot of industry here. There’s a cosmetics company with it’s world headquarters here, and a factory that builds 18 wheelers. There’s a copper smelting plant, two universities and a community college. There’s a brick factory. There’s several large warehouses and a couple more going in. There’s a company that writes software for satellites in orbit. There are a couple dozen restaurants at least, a mall, two large home improvement stores with one more being built, a major lumber yard, a small home improvement store, two Walmarts, a target, three craft stores two axe throwing places, an escape room, a nerf battle ground at least a dozen bars and breweries, 3 or 4 liquor stores and more fast food than you can shake a stick at.
It’s one of the top 20 fastest growing cities in the US, and there are jobs in construction everywhere.
Your cities with 100k people aren’t shitholes because they are small. It’s because they lack the major industry with good jobs to support a thriving population.
I have lived in a couple of 40k – 50k population locales (big towns/little cities).
One was a college town for a major university and had practically everything you could want for services, shopping and restaurants, just not a lot of density (like, there was one Walmart and it was on the outskirts of town; the airport was tiny and took 30+ minutes through traffic to get to). Because of the university, it had amazing cultural, entertainment and nightlife opportunities.
The other is an exurb of a major US city that has more than doubled in size in the last decade (the exurb). It has all the amenities, including a revitalized downtown shopping and restaurant/bar area. It even has a large amphitheater where it holds free summer concerts. This is a model a lot of the wealthier exurbs follow around the northern rim of metro Atlanta, and there really is no reason to want to go into the city most of the time with everything right there. That said, you eventually have done all of the restaurants enough times, and the best ones there don’t stack up against the really good ones in the city. Entertainment is Ok if you are outdoorsy or like drinking, but can feel limited.
Both of them were large enough and dynamic enough to have a good mix of bright, aspirational transplants and locals that it doesn’t exactly feel like a monoculture. However, one was decidedly “blue” — one of the bluest parts of its state and felt like quite a bubble. The other one is in a very “red” county and there is enough of the hateful people around that it can feel more “country” than it really is.
My family enjoyed living in both places and have thrived. They’ve mostly lived in the “red” exurb and had charmed lives while I drove into the city every day and had a different overall experience (usually about 30 minutes each way).
We had excellent medical care in both places. In both places, we had 5 or more grocery stores in short distance away. Anything we can’t buy in a store, Amazon puts on our front porch.
Wide mix, cool Ann Arbor MI and Portland ME, boring Manchester NH, long dreary economic decline Troy NY and most mid sized cities in Upstate NY.
The number of large cities is less surprising given the size of the country; for reference, the distance from New York to Los Angeles is about the same as the distance from Madrid to Moscow.
I live in a suburb od Des Moines, IA (DSM). The population of DSM proper I’d around 220k and the metropolitan population is around 560k. We are in the middle of farm land, near acouple large universities and a few smaller colleges and have a relatively low cost of living. This has made DSM a popular place for agriculture companies, and some related fields (machinery) and quite a bit of insurance and finance. So there are lots of business and IT jobs, some mechanical/elecrtical assembly and engineering,and many agriculture science jobs. The population also supports many bars and restaurants, retail and some entertainment but very little tourism. There’s also schools and municipal services that supply many jobs.
Living here is relatively cheap compared to what we get paid, but there isn’t as lively of an entertainment, food or music scene as you’d find in bigger cities. For us it’s enough, though. Schools are pretty good, but have unfortunate declined in quality with the last few sets of elected officials. We have a decent parks and rec scene, but no big bodies of water or mountains That contributes to the lack of tourism.
tl;Dr, great place to live, not the best to visit.
A 100,000 population can be a suburb in our biggest metro regions. I’m from a state that has no big cities and I’ll give you an idea, my home city of Charleston SC has a little over 150,000 people but we are a small city by US standards
There are small cities that are somewhat cohesive as actual cities like Santa Barbara and others which are very large suburbs without as much cohesion as with single family homes and a small center or worse not center
My city is about 60k people, but we’re kinda merged and alongside a city of 160k people. Previously I lived in a city with a metro area population of over 2m so I have some good comparisons.
I’d say overall there are so pros and cons. My city isn’t considered a shithole (well, not anymore than the big city is).
* there’s no traffic, I can get anywhere I want in 20 minutes
* likewise, it’s bike friendly, I can easily bike all over and most streets have dedicated bike lanes
* and of course, being smaller, public transportation is pretty decent and gets you almost wherever you need to go
* being smaller, we’re very close to nature though that is more based on location than city size
* we tend to have whatever you need, but maybe not a lot of variety in it (like we have one major electronics store, whereas big cities have a lot of them)
* we lack some food options and especially ethnic cuisines
* because we’re not a huge market, we struggle more with healthcare providers and some other professions. there’s a big doctor shortage right now and basically no doctor in town is taking new patients. being a smaller city it’s harder to attract professionals here.
* the job market can vary greatly depending on what you do. As noted, if you are in the medical field it’s easy to get a job here and you can get some decent bonuses to move here. However in my field (IT) there are far fewer options and many people I know here in my field work remotely for companies elsewhere. there’s not a ton of industry here either and as companies succeed and grow they tend to move out of town (case in point, Nike was founded here but moved up to portland when they got big).
Overall it’s a nice life. Our city has some issues with housing affordability (we have an urban growth boundary to limit city sprawl, which also limits land to build housing on) and jobs can be hard to find in some industries, but it’s a great place to live if those aren’t obstacles for you. I greatly prefer it to larger cities myself, when I go visit big cities I find it very frustrating and get annoyed having to sit in traffic and confused when trying to eat out because there are too many choices…
Our midsize cities are very spread out and take up many miles so it says 100k people, but it does not feel that way at all.
Eugene Oregon is a pretty nice mid sized city
When talking about city size, make sure you factor in the full metro area for a City. For example: the Municipality of the City of Cincinnati is around 300k in population, but the Cincinnati metro area is over 2.2 Million.
Cincinnati would be considered at the lower end range of what is considered a large city, but far from an extra large city (i.e. Houston) or the mega cites of NYC, LA or Chicago.
A city with a metro population of 100k would be consider a small city. I don’t know the cutoff for midsized but it would include those at 1 million.