re: Big cities in the United States that you almost never hear about

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Nearly a third of the state lives in Louisville metro.


I don't recall Kentucky annexing Indiana, although we did defeat them in the Civil War.

7 Kentucky counties and 5 Indiana counties make up the Louisville metro area.
I have a bias? You're damn right. I want a Kentucky city to be the capital, not one that serves a large population in another state.

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And 80 - 90% of them live in the state of Kentucky.

One that is, by far, the largest in the state. One that is easily the most important economic engine in the state. One that pays the most taxes (and gets less than half of that back).

You are simply wrong on this.

Mobile's population is a little misleading. For decades Baldwin County was part of the metro but commuting patterns caused it to drop off. The Mobile/Baldwin County area population is currently at 620,000. You're right about Huntsville though. The Hunstville/Decatur CSA currently has 735,000 residents. Huntsville is not by any means tiny but it is suprising to think that there are nearly 3 quarters of a million people living in the contiguous Huntsville area.

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The single biggest one in the country is probably Riverside/San Bernadino, California though. 4.5 million metro that is a complete afterthought due to it being so close to Los Angeles.

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Definitely. You also mentioned Virginia Beach which is another. I am definitely surprised they haven't gotten a pro sports team of some sort.

Also, I would consider San Jose and the entire South Bay its own metro area, and that's pretty huge as well. Orange County is probably its own metro area as well, to be honest. Ditto Ventura County. Sacramento metro is also pretty damn big as well.

They were all separate metro areas for a long, long time until they grew into megalopolises in the last twenty or thirty years.

For Americans, I don't think most realize just how huge Mexico City is. Guadalajara and Monterrey are also really damn big, not terribly far from the border, and aren't that well known.

Maybe not unknown, but I think a lot of people tend to think of St. Louis as some dying small shite river town with a few pro sports teams (and a city core and downtown that's pretty crappy). It's metro area is 2.8 million - about the same size as Denver and Tampa and larger than Charlotte and Pittsburgh. For that matter, Detroit metro is still a top 15 metro in the U.S. (and has some of the nicest suburbs in America). Philly is kind of quietly still a top 6 or 7 metro area in the whole country.

For smaller metro areas that are surprisingly larger than you'd think, Bridgeport/New Haven, CT (like 2 million combined), Fresno, CA, Greenville, SC (already mentioned), Bakersfield, CA, Albany, NY, McAllen, TX (already mentioned), Greensboro, NC, and Ogden, UT come to mind. They're larger than I think a lot of people would imagine.