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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

"...of Top 50 [American] Cities"

It's odd seeing lists like this that focus only on a specific country, ignoring important neighbors. Take Toronto, for example. That city is more important than 40-45 of the cities listed, but since it's a few miles North of some border, it gets completely ignored.

Why not focus on a geographic region instead?

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The border likely affects the availability and format of the data needed to make the calculation.

That makes sense. It would still be nice for the title to reflect that, though, rather than the ambiguous and misleading "Top 50 Cities" that it is right now.

yeah, borders suck.

There are two meanings of the word "America" in common usage. The restricted meaning, used by the article, refers to the political entity USA. The general meaning refers to the continent(s). I don't think many people who saw the title were expecting data on, say, Buenos Aires.

As an American I noticed that when I visited Toronto, Canadians would always compare things to "North America" (as in "Toronto has the 7th largest metro area in North America").

Interestingly, the meaning of this would typically exclude Mexico and Central America, which by geography it should not.

Whereas in the US, we typically compare things to "America" and exclude Canada and Mexico as a matter of course.

I did a few quick searches and Vancouver would be at 25 on their scale for a single-family detached house. That's using a median listing price of $900,000 and median rent of about $3000/month.

The data is out there and the Canadian real estate sales market could certainly use the shakeup of someone like Trulia.

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