fatlever wrote:I agree with your premise. But to be fair Metro population is what truly counts when judging the City's population base. Atlanta Miami and Washington DC have larger Metro populations than Charlotte.
That being said, Charlotte does also have a fairly significant Metro population and is growing rapidly as anyone who lives here can tell you.
As it is, Charlotte has the 23rd largest consolidated metropolitan statistical area in the country, which still is larger than Cleveland (the 33rd most populated CMSA in the United States), Indianapolis (ranked 34th) and is significantly larger than Milwaukee (39th), Oklahoma City (41st), Memphis (43rd), New Orleans (46th) and Salt Lake City (47th).
Washington, D.C., has a CMSA that pulls from multiple states (Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia), which bloats its numbers. Having the Baltimore area (whose CMSA is larger than Charlotte's) accounts for nearly half of the Washington, D.C. CMSA.
Atlanta's CMSA spans up to 39 counties and goes out to the Alabama border. If Charlotte's CMSA expanded out to a 90-mile radius like Atlanta's, it would include Columbia, S.C. (70th largest CMSA with more than 800,000 people), Winston-Salem, N.C. (85th largest with 671,000 people) and Spartanburg, S.C. (152nd largest with more than 300,000 people) -- making Charlotte slightly behind Detroit's CMSA for 12th in the country.
In any manner, it reinforces my point that Charlotte is not a "mid-sized city."