Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dionidium | Hacker News Reader

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Some US cities incorporated their lower-density "streetcar suburbs" over the years and other US cities didn't. This is why "Kansas City" proper has literal farmland [0] within its city limits, while "St. Louis" proper [1] on the other side of the state doesn't even include most of the skyscraper development that's occurred there within the last 40 years.

This is entirely arbitrary and knowing whether a particular place is technically part of "the city" doesn't really tell you anything about it. As you might expect, this causes a ton of unnecessary confusion.

[0] Part of Kansas City proper: https://maps.app.goo.gl/9B9rhVzAtSykLhUs5

[1] "St. Louis" but not part of St. Louis proper: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xXM7A2fQYY2Kh3vY6

They're pretty clearly not using "the city" to refer to city but instead to a certain density threshold, so pointing out that city limits are arbitrary doesn't really help anything.

What you're describing is called "agreement." I'm very plainly arguing that if the distinction between "city" and "suburb" is to mean anything at all, then it can't just be about what's within municipal boundaries and what isn't.

So you were agreeing with OP's comment, not disagreeing?

> Nobody I know would call that street the city. In my mind, "the city" is, minimally, houses that are a few feet apart, small yard in back/front, pretty much nothing on the side. Frequently, it's 2-3 story buildings, with whole floors rented out as an apartment. That's my "least dense" vision of a city. Anything less than that (ie, full yards) falls into my vision of suburb.

What this back-and-forth, and this thread more generally, demonstrates is that these words are not very useful.

They almost never clarify. What they do is produce silly arguments like this one.

That's why people have been using paragraphs to clarify what they mean. Paragraphs that you seem to have ignored in favor of critiquing the utility that specific words have when taken out of the context the author intentionally put them in.

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