Pretty, but perhaps not significant. But it is interesting to compare different cities. LA and Atlanta both get spoken of as sprawling sunbelt cities, but they are surprisingly unlike. The 'normal' density for Atlanta is dramatically lower than for LA. The same is true(!) for Chicago. NYC is (of course) its own thing, but it's still wild to see how much it diverges from the logistic line so many other cities follow quite well. Bit wild that the best-fit line suggest that both Cleveland and NYC are deficient in high densities--implication is that both should have more high-density development than they do. I do wonder about LA - is the sharp peak just a lagging indicator of past growth, or does it represent some theoretical maximum of how dense you can get while relying purely on automotive transit?*
Boston has a NYC-like 'flatness' in distribution- plenty of every density. Chicago really looks like two cities---the notable peak and then a more uniform run of higher densities. DC quite odd--looks like there should be a single peak at 10^3.3, but also has an additional pak at 10^4. San Diego a single peak, but with a 'bulge' on the forepeak. Miami a single peak at 10^3 - dense sprawl, but also a long tail of higher density. Las Vegas a single peak, large forepeak, and San Jose almost the same. So really our K-factor is telling us how uniform density is, how usual a certain density.
#---------------------
*Yes, LA is building massive amounts of transit, but the stock dominates. And yes, LA was built around streetcar lines, so maybe this is an artifact of that transportation technology? This is 2025 ACS data, but a comparison of the same metro over multiple censuses might prove very interesting.


