Shreveport Is Bigger Than Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco

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The city of Shreveport is not a "major" city. Sure, it's an economic and industrial hub for Northwest Louisiana, and the main cog in the Ark-La-Tex region, so I don't want that first statement to sound like Shreveport doesn't matter. It really does.

But when you're talking about a "major" city in the United States, you're generally thinking of a large metro city with a big population. Something like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Miami, San Francisco, or Pittsburgh. You don't really think of Shreveport in that mix.

However...you might not think of Shreveport in that context, but in reality Shreveport is bigger than over half of the cities I just listed above.

The city of Shreveport is actually bigger than Boston, Miami, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh. But that's not all...Shreveport is bigger than St. Louis, Baltimore, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Buffalo. This list could actually keep going by the way, because Shreveport is bigger than a ton of cities in the US that you would find hard to believe.

People would generally find this concept hard to believe because of the way we think of cities. We think of them in terms of population, sports teams, colleges, businesses, travel destination status, and other qualifiers. But in the context we're talking about, it's land mass that matters. Square miles to be precise.

So yes, in this context, Shreveport is bigger than a list of cities that is kind of uncomfortable.

Firing off a quick Google search, you will be served with the answer of 123 square miles for the size of Shreveport. But without context, most people don't know what that means. So let's look at some other cities to build a frame of reference.

The city of Detroit gets compared to Shreveport a lot, so let's look at them. Same Google search will tell you that Detroit is 142.9 square miles, slightly larger than Shreveport. How about Atlanta, that's 136.8 square miles, just a tad larger than Shreveport.

Already you can see that this doesn't seem right. Detroit and Atlanta both have substantially larger populations than Shreveport, how can the possibly be the same size? Well, it's about to get weirder.

Looking at Boston, we find that it is only 89.63 square miles, roughly 33 square miles SMALLER than Shreveport.

San Francisco, that's 46.87 square miles, 76.13 square miles smaller than Shreveport. Making Shreveport the size of two and a half San Franciscos.

It gets a little better (but not much) when you compare Baltimore's 92.28 square miles, which is just 30.72 square miles smaller than Shreveport.

You can keep this exercise going too. Just start doing some searches for the size of Pittsburgh, Seattle, Baton Rouge, Cleveland, and St. Louis. You'll find that all of those cities are also smaller than Shreveport. So next time someone says Shreveport is just a small town, you can let them know that it's bigger than Boston.