Quote Originally Posted by Novine View Post
Portland has far more park land than Detroit. Forest Park by itself is over 5,000 acres is size.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parks_in_Portland,_Oregon

Another 11 sq. miles of the city's area is water. While Portland's overall density is lower than Detroit's, the areas of the city that are actually occupied have more people than the same amount of land in Detroit.
Yeah, a good quarter of Detroit's 138.7 square miles of land is vacant and likely won't be built on, and this isn't including Detroit's parkland, so what's your point? Sometimes, I understand these distinctions, but for all intents and purposes, Detroit functions very similarly to cities with significant amounts of dedicated parkland/wildlands if even now inadvertently.

BTW, for anyone that wants to know, random fact, but I believe of th 11th to 20th largest cities in the country - the peer group Detroit know resides in as either the 17th ot 18th largest city - Detroit remains either the first or second densest of this set even after the 25% population loss last decade. It shows you just how dense the city was, or rather just how sprawly these newer cities are given that Detroit was hugely dense even in its heyday. That said, at around 13,300 people per square mile at its peak - and possibly more is the 2.1 million estimate mid-decade in the 1950's is to be beleived - it still rank as one of the densest major American cities today if it still had its peak density.