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Comment by brown9-2 | Hacker News Reader

Do they even need to spread to the suburbs?

that's where majority of the US population lives -- the sprawl if you may. If you simply restrict to SF/NYC and downtown areas (which in a lot of the US cities are mainly office buildings and not housing), you're not going to able to expand your business.

The majority of Americans live in cities, not suburbia - 71.2% of the U.S. population lived in urbanised areas as of 2010.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/03/us-ur...

The "urbanized areas" referred to by that article are mostly subsurbs.

'According to the Census Bureau, a place is "urban" if it's a big, modest or even very small collection of people living near each other. That includes Houston, with its 4.9 million people, and Bellevue, Iowa, with its 2,543'

That counts all 4.9 million people in the Houston Metro as being "urban", which is a joke. Maybe a few hundred thousand tops live in what you might characterize as a real city environment-the vast vast majority of is suburbs

Urbanized areas contain 50 000 or more people while urban clusters have 2 500 to 50 000 people. The 71.2% figure I presented is for urbanised areas, i.e. 50 000+; including the 2 500 - 50 000 urban clusters it rises to 80.7%.

>"Maybe a few hundred thousand tops live in what you might characterize as a real city"

Manhattan alone contains 1.6 million people; your few hundred thousand tops estimate for the U.S. urban population is very short.

I think your parent referred to Houston's population only.

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