AHC: Have Washington D.C. as largest US city

[Tibi088]

Maybe you just need time. I think of Madrid: it was in the middle of nowhere and was far from being the biggest city of Spain when it became the capital. Now it is the biggest city of Spain.

 

[funnyhat]

Maybe you just need time. I think of Madrid: it was in the middle of nowhere and was far from being the biggest city of Spain when it became the capital. Now it is the biggest city of Spain.

Nah, it's almost certainly too late for D.C. It's the political capital, but not the economic capital. In the case of Madrid, being the seat of government in an age of mercantilism made it natural for it also to become the economic center. We obviously live in a very different economic age and geographic proximity to the national capital is not essential for a city to become economically powerful. New York and Los Angeles are much more important economic centers and there is no particular reason for D.C. to overtake them.

 

[Clay/Bryan 2016]

Yeah, not sure how to get the city proper to the number one spot, but maybe if crime in NYC remains bad post-1990 and if crime has an NYC level recovery in the D.C. area, the Washington metro area COULD be the number 1 metro area years from NOW.

For an extreme example using a recent POD, how bad can you get the crime in New York to be in the 80's? How bad does it have to be to getthe art scene to at least partially leave the city? Or is that just ASB? Probably is. Not that those people made up a lot of the population, but when city living became cool again, NYC being at the center of arts and culture put it at the top of young people's lists. If you can somehow get the yuppies, artists, hipsters, overseas nouveau riche to move somewhere else starting in the late 80's, you might be able to build momentum for later this century. But not by the present-day. New York just has too big of a head start. You're gonna need an early POD to pull this off.

My instinct would be to get the center of immigration shifted to a different city somehow, but while that might kick New York off the top it's not going to help D.C. as said other port city will probably be Number 1 instead.

 

[funnyhat]

Yeah, not sure how to get the city proper to the number one spot, but maybe if crime in NYC remains bad post-1990 and if crime has an NYC level recovery in the D.C. area, the Washington metro area COULD be the number 1 metro area years from NOW.

Crime in the city wouldn't be enough to cause millions to leave the entire metropolitan area. People would just move to the suburbs where the crime rates are lower. That's what happened in the Detroit area, where I grew up. (I don't think you can get NYC to have higher crime rates than Detroit's.)

What can cause large numbers of people to leave is the economy. If the local economy is based heavily on a few industries and they go under, large numbers of people will leave to find work elsewhere. That has happened in the Detroit area when the auto industry has struggled. But New York's economy seems too diversified for something similar to occur.

 

[jahenders]

It's incredibly unlikely that DC could get there now, since it's not even in the ballpark and it's not growing significantly.

As far as the economy, while the DC AREA is guaranteed growth as the government continues to grow and grow and grow (along with supporting contractors), not a lot of that growth (at least residentially) is IN DC. DC is unattractive for most people to live in and they continually do things to shoot themselves in the foot. For example, Wal-Mart planned to open a few stores there a year or two ago (i.e. hundreds of new jobs and new, cheap shopping). But then the city council decided to implement a new tax that would apply to NO ONE but Wal-Mart so Wal-Mart cancelled those plans. Way to go DC, that'll show them ... or, rather, it should remind your citizens that you're idiots.

Crime in the city wouldn't be enough to cause millions to leave the entire metropolitan area. People would just move to the suburbs where the crime rates are lower. That's what happened in the Detroit area, where I grew up. (I don't think you can get NYC to have higher crime rates than Detroit's.)

What can cause large numbers of people to leave is the economy. If the local economy is based heavily on a few industries and they go under, large numbers of people will leave to find work elsewhere. That has happened in the Detroit area when the auto industry has struggled. But New York's economy seems too diversified for something similar to occur.

 

[David T]

Instead of London or Paris, a better analogy would be Brasilia. Brasilia was meant to be a big city eventually, and became one. But nobody expected it to surpass Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro in population--and of course it hasn't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_in_Brazil Similarly with Canberra in Australia.