I was mostly bringing up the 5.2 vs 6.4 both under Metro area.
The CSA isn’t necessarily relevant, but a reasonable agreement exists that it’s really the same metro area. The beltways (495, 695) are less than 25 miles apart. Laurel, Maryland is 20 miles from both downtown DC and downtown Baltimore. Meanwhile the other cities from Richmond to Boston are 95-200 miles from each other.
I knew someone whose tech support job would regularly send them to both cities in the same day. Apparently many companies located between them so they could easily serve both.
You can’t just look at distance and judge. I knew guys who lived north of Baltimore but commuted every day to the Pentagon. That doesn’t make Baltimore and DC two parts of the same city.
Just like there are people who commute from New York to London, or vice-versa. NyLon is a thing, but that still doesn’t make them two parts of the same city.
Culture is fractal, and happens on many different levels. And there are many types of stratifications of culture. And those stratifications can happen in multiple dimensions at the same time.
But culture can also refer to a larger conglomeration of smaller cultures, or components of smaller cultures.
Just like a meal or dinner from one place can have many different components, and be differently prepared from a meal or dinner of the same overall type from some other place. There are components that may be shared between them, and there might be components that are different. But even if you start out with the exact same components in both places, the end result may be radically different, simply due to the different methods and the different people involved.
In the case of DC versus Baltimore, it’s the larger scale differences that I’m talking about.
What parts of DC, Baltimore, and Loudan county did you live in?
Culture isn’t easy to find objective measurements but politically things are objectively similar between Baltimore and DC with extremely strong Democratic leanings. 2020 DC voted 5.40% Trump, 92.15% Biden vs Baltimore City 10.69% Trump, 87.28% Biden vs Fauquier County 57% Trump, 40% Biden.
Poor parts of every county or city are going to have more similarities to other poor parts of every other city or county than compared to the rich areas that may be nearby.
That is one aspect of the multi-dimensional fractal nature of culture that I mentioned. Poor/rich is just one dimension to be considered. So are political leanings.
However, when you consider all the other dimensions, you will find that DC and the surrounding suburbs have more similarities to each other than they do with the corresponding areas in and around Baltimore.
Making them up to be the same CSA is just the way that the federal government gets away with paying cheaper wages in the DC area, because they can now lump Baltimore in there, and obviously by that new federal standard, federal wages in the DC area are not out of line with the overall CSA.
It’s just a lie that the federal government is telling you. And that they told me, when I lived there.
The CSA isn’t necessarily relevant, but a reasonable agreement exists that it’s really the same metro area. The beltways (495, 695) are less than 25 miles apart. Laurel, Maryland is 20 miles from both downtown DC and downtown Baltimore. Meanwhile the other cities from Richmond to Boston are 95-200 miles from each other.
I knew someone whose tech support job would regularly send them to both cities in the same day. Apparently many companies located between them so they could easily serve both.