Hartford 3rd most typical city in America

HBJ File Photo Downtown Hartford's skyline

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By Joe Cooper

A new statistical analysis identifies Hartford as the third most typical city in America when it comes to representing the demographics of the United States.

ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight.com reported the metropolitan area that most reflects the United States is New Haven with a 93.2 rating. Tampa/St. Petersburg was next at 91.6 and Hartford came in third at 90.2. Oklahoma City, Okla., and Springfield, Mass., rounded out the top 5.

The site calculated how demographically similar each U.S. metropolitan area is to the U.S. overall, based on age, educational attainment, and race and ethnicity. The index equals 100 if a metro’s demographic mix were identical to that of the U.S. overall.

According to FiveThirtyEight.com, the places that look most like America tend to be larger metros, though not the largest ones. The similarity index is highest, on average, for metros with between 1 million and 2 million people. The metros that look least like America are those with fewer than 100,000 people.

“If your image of the real America is a small town, you might be thinking of an America that no longer exists,” said author Jed Kolko, an independent economist and a senior fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Terner Center for Housing Innovation.