1.2 million city proper. 3 million metro. But this guess is almost certainly higher than it would have been before I started hearing you talk about it.
we are getting sprawly enough in Austin and SA that soon I feel like we’ll just be one huge metro area (since we are only an hour apart and they are two of the fastest growing cities in the US)
The lack of a commuter rail between us is a goddamn travesty. I could get around DFW pretty easily with the DART rail and TRE; there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be a 45 minute train ride.
I’m going to recuse myself since my family lives in the area and I’ve been there in the last handful of years, but to your point, it does feel like people don’t realize how big a lot of cities in TX are. I think El Paso & Corpus Christi are underestimated too.
Random: my dog is from San Antonio. Her rescuer lives in San Antonio. My dog and her siblings were moved to Washington State to be adopted. I think everyone of them is within 20 miles of each other.
this was inspired by me looking at the map on the left as a person from Minneapolis and thinking how crazy it is that San Antonio (407 sq mi) is close to the geographic size of LA (469 sq mi) and no one has ever heard of it or been here, basically
It's one of the more frustrating things tbh, especially when the misconception is used as an excuse for why we don't have things, or can't improve things. Or when bands don't come through town.
It's wild how common this belief is, too. Probably the funniest aspect of this is how many people think Austin is the larger of the two cities when it's really only about half the size of SA.
When I was doing movie reviews we’d get shafted on big releases ALL the time because studios and PR firms think San Antonio is a small town. It was wildly frustrating and was a big reason why I eventually quit.
I always feel like the relative progressiveness of Austin is exaggerated. My experience is there are a lot of wealthy people who are up their own asses and libertarians. But part of that might be my general resentment of Texas as a Comanche person.
Yeah exactly, I've lived here most of my life at this point and I get really tired of hearing "oh you're left wing in Texas and you're not even in Austin? Must suck for you" from people who've never been here.
I wrote that as a joke, and I am legit surprised at all of the really low guesses - It's a city large enough to support an NBA team and people are guessing less than half a million. Pretty surprising.
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It's a big city!