I kept Googling things like “US cities with population between 50,000 and 150,000” and not finding a clean answer. The results were listicles with no sourcing, scraped Wikipedia tables of unclear vintage, or instructions to download a raw Census file and figure it out yourself. None of them were the thing I actually wanted.
The thing I wanted was simple: pick a population band, get the list, see where each number came from, and download the result as a CSV. That should not be hard. It exists in the official data — the U.S. Census Bureau publishes annual subcounty population estimates — but the path from raw Census file to a usable filtered list is exactly the kind of work most people will not do.
So I built the version that should have existed. The audience is everyone I imagined was running the same search: researchers checking a figure, journalists framing a story, planners sizing a market, real-estate analysts comparing places, hobbyists curious about their state, anyone who wants the answer without trusting a random listicle.
The bar is straightforward. Published values should be traceable to their named public sources and documented calculations. Population estimates keep their source labels and uncertainty. Calculated fields explain their inputs and limits.