Cincinnati will soon be Ohio's largest metro

[skycity]

The new numbers are out and it looks like Cincinnati will soon be a larger metro than Cleveland. Here are the numbers for 2006:

Cleveland - 2,114,155 (between 2000 and 2006 it declined by -1.6 losing 33,855 people)

Cincinnati - 2, 104,218 (between 2000 and 2006 it grew by 4.7 growing by 94,545 people)

Even if Cleveland's metro stopped losing population, Cincinnati is so close that it will very soon be larger. What does this mean in the long run?

[dwirth]

Uh - but that's not true - not even close --- so it means nothing for the future... The numbers you're noting are sort of like the people in Columbus claiming their the largest city in Ohio - which technically they are --- though they tend to forget that their metro area is far smaller than the Cleve or Cincy metro areas...

The 2000 Census had Cleveland--Akron, OH CMSA (the official Census "Cleveland" metro) at 2,945,831 population vs. Cincinnati--Hamilton, OH--KY--IN CMSA (Cincinnati metro) at 1,979,202. Cleveland was 15th largest and Cincinnati was 24th. Add or subtract the population losses/gains you noted below and it hardly changes... Your number of 2,114,155 for Cleveland is just Cleveland - not Cleveland/Akron (which run together) - while your Cincinnati number appears to be for the entire Cincy metro - not just "Cincinnati"... If someone is passing off these numbers as true, they're very wrong.

Add in Canton's 406,000 people (just an hour from downtown Cleveland) and Cleveland metro actually has about 3.4MM people. Add in Dayton (just an hour from downtown Cincinnati) and Cincinnati has some 3.1MM people. Columbus metro - any way you slice it - is still around 1,600,000 - though they'll try and tell you it isn't... I hate Columbus' attitude... (3rd largest in the state, 30-somethingth largest in the US)

Cleveland--Akron, OH CMSA

2,945,831

The new numbers are out and it looks like Cincinnati will soon be a larger metro than Cleveland. Here are the numbers for 2006:

Cleveland - 2,114,155 (between 2000 and 2006 it declined by -1.6 losing 33,855 people)

Cincinnati - 2, 104,218 (between 2000 and 2006 it grew by 4.7 growing by 94,545 people)

Even if Cleveland's metro stopped losing population, Cincinnati is so close that it will very soon be larger. What does this mean in the long run?

[skycity]

If you measure by CMSA you are right. However, it is true that Cleveland will soon become Ohio's second largest Metropolitan Statistical Area. Granted, they do weird things with the MSA rankings like separate San Jose and San Francisco into two different metro areas. I'm not really sure which list is the best way of ranking metro area population. The CMSA list that I found lumps in Batavia, NY into Rochester's area. Batavia could have gone to Buffalo, however. It is probably almost 50%/50% between how many people living in Batavia work in Rochester vs. Buffalo. The CMSA list also leaves off places like Phoenix, Richmond and Miami so I'm not sure if that is a great way of ranking population centers. Should Akron and Canton be their own areas or should they be part of the Cleveland area? Should Toledo be part of Detroit's area? Who knows?

[danielmdifranco]

The new numbers are out and it looks like Cincinnati will soon be a larger metro than Cleveland. Here are the numbers for 2006:

Cleveland - 2,114,155 (between 2000 and 2006 it declined by -1.6 losing 33,855 people)

Cincinnati - 2, 104,218 (between 2000 and 2006 it grew by 4.7 growing by 94,545 people)

Even if Cleveland's metro stopped losing population, Cincinnati is so close that it will very soon be larger. What does this mean in the long run?

[ainulindale]

Add in Canton's 406,000 people (just an hour from downtown Cleveland) and Cleveland metro actually has about 3.4MM people. Add in Dayton (just an hour from downtown Cincinnati) and Cincinnati has some 3.1MM people.

[krazeeboi]

Usually Rustbelt cities that are losing people are at least retaining people or even growing moderately at the metro level, but Cleveland is losing metro area population too! No wonder those folks at UrbanOhio hate the Sunbelt with such a passion; I would too if I were faced with such grim prospects about my city.

Eventually, Columbus will be the largest city and MSA in Ohio. The latest estimate for its MSA is 1,725,570, which is a 7% growth rate since 2000, compared with Cincinnati's 4.7% growth rate. Columbus also added the most people to its MSA since 2000 as well.

[NorthCoast]

I don't know if this is going to technically ever be recognized but at least in a social context there seems to be a lot of talk that Dayton is very close to being considered a part of the Cincinnati metropolitan area due to continue growth on both of the cities fringes which have almost met. Texas has DFW and now Ohio will have Cin-Day.

[chazman]

The Cincinnati area is almost as large as Cleveland because the federal government abolished CMSAs (consolidated statistical metropolitan areas) and replaced them with CSAs (consolidated statistical areas) meaning that Akron (part of the Cleveland CMSA) is no longer counted as part of metro Cleveland, though it remains part of the larger statistical area. Many people tend to refer to to CSAs as "major metro areas" even though the word metropolitan is not part of the new census definitions. If we do this then Cleveland still has a metro area of 2.9 million even if we no longer call it a metro area. At this point it looks like Dayton is still a little ways from being part of the Cincinnati CSA as it will not be quite close enough to Cincy or reliant enough on its labor market to be made one CSA in 2010 when the new census is taken. If we ignore CSAs, which are in reality too spatially big and poorly defined to be metro areas, then krazeeboi is right....Columbus will be at the top of the Ohio heap soon enough.

[doogur]

If you want to just arbitrarily tack on touching metropolitan areas to inflate the size of Cleveland you could simply say the the Pittsburgh-New Castle CSA (2,500,000) and the Youngstown-Warren-East Liverpool CSA (700,000) should be credited to the Cleveland-Akron-Elyria CSA (2,900,000) to form a Cleveland metropolitan area (MSA) of over 6 million people!

The Cleveland MSA is 2.1 million as is the Cincinnati MSA--personally, it doesn't really matter to me that Cincinnati's MSA will surpass Cleveland's, Cleveland is still the bigger city.