What are the most culturally different cities that share the same state?

43 comments

1. Maybe Miami and any city in the panhandle

2. Salt Lake City and pretty much every other area outside the valley in Utah are pretty different.

3. You can get some pretty weird contrasts in California. I’ll say Berkeley and Bakersfield off the top of my head.

4. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

5. Portland and Klamath Falls in Oregon.

6. Las Vegas and Elko NV. Or Las Vegas and most of the rest of NV.

7. NYC and Albany

8. New Orleans and Shreveport

9. For Arizona: Tuba City and Scottsdale.

10. Asheville and Fayetteville. Asheville is full of middle-aged hipsters renting their homes, while Fayetteville is a military city.

11. Austin and Lubbock Texas are drastically different.

12. Seattle and Pullman both have major state universities but couldn’t be more different.

13. Miami and ____________

14. Louisville and Lexington vs Everywhere Else in KY

15. Los Alamos is pretty different from the rest of northern New Mexico.

16. California has a lot of these places.

    – Solvang
    – Catalina
    – Los Angeles
    – San Francisco
    – Yosemite

    They can look like completely different places.

17. Miami and Ocala

18. Chicago and Springfield

19. Jacksonville and Miami, FLorida.

    One is redneck, the other is Latin America

20. Austin and Amarillo, El Paso, Fort Worth, and about 100 other cities in Texas.

21. Albuquerque and Santa Fe

22. Seattle is extremely different from the tricity area in Washington. Literally everything from politics to weather is almost completely opposite.

23. Idaho:

    Sun Valley area is a mini Hollywood.

    Boise area is generally smart but has load and vocal pockets of rednecks.

    Rest of the state: Rednecks, sovereign citizens, etc.

24. NYS. Every city is vastly different.

25. Virginia Beach and Roanoke.

26. Ann Arbor and Hillsdale, MI.

27. Gonna go ahead with Boulder, my home city and Colorado Springs.

    Two different civilizations, basically. One is sipping Kombucha and the other destroying Bud light for an inconsequential reason

28. Cincinnati and Cleveland are more different than you might imagine

29. Miami and Jacksonville. Or you could basically have Miami vs the entire state

30. My state is fairly homogeneous, but I’ve heard Portland is so *very* different from almost anywhere else in Oregon.

31. Seattle and Spokane

32. New York City and any city in upstate New York are … not the same. Lol

33. Shreveport and New Orleans (Louisiana)

34. Athens, Ohio vs… the rest of Ohio.

35. I would say El Paso and any far east Texas town.

36. Taos and Hobbs.

    Taos is a solidly Democratic, overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, artistic community nestled in the mountains with ample trails and ski slopes.

    Hobbs is on the edge of the Permian Basin, covered with plains, inhabited by Southern Baptist Republican-voting oil and gas workers. No mountains nearby, just windswept plains as far as the eye can see.

37. Atlanta – full of people not originally from the south. Just miles and miles of Starbucks and strip malls, suburban sprawl that goes on forever, and it retains very little of its southern identity at this point. Everything is new, hardly any old buildings because Sherman burned everything. Plus, every 20 years they knock everything down and put up new stuff. It’s very nice in a bland sort of way.

    Savannah – A very historic and picturesque city with horse & carriage rides and oodles of southern charm. It definitely has its own unique identity.

38. Only separated by about 20 miles, Lawrence and Topeka Kansas

39. NOVA vs the entire region of SWVA is pretty stark, in my personal experience

40. Chicago and Springfield for sure

41. Chicago and Quad Cities on the Illinois side (Moline and Rock Island)

42. Memphis and the rest of Tennessee. Given that I only really spent time in Memphis, I was confused for the longest time why people saw Tennessee as country. And then I went to other cities in Tennessee and now I know why.

43. I’ll answer for my home state of Massachusetts: probably something like Nantucket vs Lowell.

    Besides the obvious wealth gap and the whole being-an-island-tourist-destination thing, Lowell has a huge population of Cambodian people who fled (or whose parents fled) the Khmer Rouge, and as a result, Khmer is one of the most common languages, which isn’t really seen almost anywhere else in the country. There’s street signs and advertisements and things in English and Khmer instead of Spanish or French like you might see elsewhere in the US.