February 24, 2011

Sorry Tacoma, Spokane is still No. 2

How about the Lilac City! The Census numbers came out and Spokane is still the No. 2 city in the state of Washington in terms of population. That's right Tacoma, you can continue just to suck at life...

Spokane kept ahold of its standing as Washington’s second-largest city, adding 13,287 residents for a 6.8 percent growth rate between 2000 and 2010. With 208,916 residents, Spokane stayed ahead of Tacoma, which had 198,397 residents.

Seattle topped the list with 608,660 people.

Spokane Valley, which incorporated eight years ago, made its census debut as Washington’s 10th largest city with 89,755 residents.

Now I would like to point out that the Spokane Valley being considered a different city is really, really stupid. There's no geographical separation between Spokane and Spokane Valley. So if you add the two together you get 298,671. That's a city center about the size of Pittsburgh or Cincinnati.

Now those East Coast cities have metro areas of probably around two million people, while Spokane has a metro area of roughly 650,000. But that could also be misleading because I grew up just north of Spokane in Stevens County and we would drive down to Spokane on a regular basis, as it was the cultural and business center of the region. The city has a much father reach that can be measured traditional measuring tools.

It's still bigger than Boise and the Boise metropolitan area. Thank god. Now I can't wait for the city to take over Seattle as the biggest city in Washington in about 400 years.

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