The sampling is wrong. Picking the largest municipalities isn't picking the largest cities; it's picking the regions with the best political organization. Jacks

The sampling is wrong. Picking the largest municipalities isn't picking the largest cities; it's picking the regions with the best political organization. Jacksonville proper has about twice as many people as Miami proper, but you'd be insane to say Jacksonville is a "larger city": Miami's core is way denser and the metro area is four times as populated. Similarly, putting San Jose on the list instead of San Francisco doesn't make any sense. You could include northern San Mateo county and Oakland (which adds up to 1.5M) as "San Francisco" and you'd still get a higher ratio than in San Jose. Cities whose boundaries sprawl are concurrently more suburban and more populous: that's confounding. A better list would be: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Houston, Miami, Dallas.