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Comment by ulfw | Hacker News Reader

Both are quite boring mid-size cities that are heavily overpriced for what they offer. SF is more exciting/prettier yet less safe than SJ.

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The 17th largest city in the US is mid-sized?

San Jose has this problem where instead of acting like a top 20 city they act like Lubbock.

From my perspective living in Asia I’d place it on par with a small rural village

After I moved to Beijing, my first job was at a company opening a network of village banks. The villages had a population of around 1 million. SF has 850k people.

There's a theoretical limit of 1400 villages in the entire country at that size, and that's assuming zero population in cities. I don't see how it can be true.

If a village has 1 mil, then China is probably entirely made up of something like 40 cities and 500 villages, plus some smaller stuff.

Well, there are more than 100 cities in China with over 1 million people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...

From the perspective, I would think a city of 800k is definitely midsized if you compare with China.

I'm from Brazil, and we would definitely say 1 million people is a midsized city there (I don't live there anymore). For example, have you ever heard of Campinas? Well, it has a population of over 1.2 million people, and everyone I know around the area call it a midsized city.

But no, no one in their right mind would say a 1 million people city is a village :D.

This is a very funny comment. Small rural villages in China do not have 61 story buildings.

Non-major cities do, but not “small rural villages”.

China has over 100 cities with > 1 million population. (113 to be precise).

The 100th-ranked US city (Huntsville, AL) has a population of 225k. (The 113th, Fayetville, NC, has just under 210k.)

San Francisco, with 808k population, would rank 126th in China. Not "small rural", but definitely a 2nd or 3rd tier city at best. (The comparable Chinese city, Anqing, is a prefecture-level city in the southwest of Anhi Province, and has, to boot, 631 years on SF.)

Consider that Wuhan, a city in China you'd likely never have heard of prior to early 2020, has a population of 11 million, more than any US city, and ranks 9th overall in population within China.

China: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...>

US: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...>

Anquing: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anqing>

The city of San Jose is spread over a huge area (a good fraction of Santa Clara Valley aka Silicon Valley). The downtown area of San Jose which you might think of as a city is rather small.

The convex hull of San Jose also encloses a ton of junk that is not San Jose because of their unincorporated enclaves and incorporated exclaves. San Jose badly fails my test of whether a city is good or bad based on the geometric complexity of their boundary.

yeah, SF is only 800k people, it is pretty small, and the sunset, richmond, parkside, excelcior, and visitation valley neighborhoods are basically single-family subrubs.

Realistically, SF is only a city in it's north-east quadrant. the rest are cute, sleepy suburbs. And I say that as someone who lives in one of those neighborhoods.

It's not even a million population. Certainly would never call San Jose or San Francisco a metropolis.

Because the US is so car centric, the largest cities just feel like "mid-size" cities compared it other continents.

A town of 100k in Europe will feel livelier than a metro area of 3 million in the US.

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