Chicago's traditional downtown is the Loop. Today what most people consider downtown also includes, South Loop, West Loop, River North and a couple other communities. In 2000, River North alone had a density of 48,500 pplpersqr mile. Trust me, that number will increase dramitically by the 2010 census.
Hmm.. Philadelphia has the 3rd largest downtown population in the U.S. at around 95k people in center city. What's san fran population number in its business district. What's the square mileage of those cities. Philly is around 2 sq. mi. San Fran downtown pop 43k 2003. http://patrick.net/housing/crash.html
Chicago with 8sq miles of downtown. The downtown area would be larger than midtown at 400k in Chicago's downtown area to get 50k per sq. mi. as you all indicated.
i went with nyc, chicago, and philly. nyc and chicago are obvious. philly was my third pick because it's completely packed with skyscrapers around 500ft or so. because of the gentleman's agreement not to build higher than the william penn statue, downtown got really dense as the city needed to expand outward a little bit and use the most of those 500 feet of air.
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