Biggest Cities of the Inland Empire

Spokane calls itself the capital of the Inland Empire. It serves as a business, transportation, and cultural center for much of rural eastern Washington and northern Idaho. It certainly has a lot of people. Spokane is the state’s second largest city and the only city in eastern Washington with more than 100,000 inhabitants. (By comparison, the west side of the mountains claims five cities in six digits.)

Most of the other cities on today’s list serve as regional hubs to the smaller agricultural, shipping, and wine-making communities nearby. Some are suburbs (Spokane Valley, East Wenatchee, West Richland), some are college towns (Walla Walla, Pullman, Ellensburg, Cheney), and some are hotbeds of science and hi-tech (Richland, Moses Lake).

This list is rather straight-forward. It uses freshly-released population data from the 2010 census and includes all sixteen eastern cities with more than 10,000 people. Notice that Spokane is more than twice the size as #2 and almost twenty times the size of #16!

MOST POPULATED CITIES IN EASTERN WASHINGTON

SOURCE: U.S. Census, 2010

June 15th, 2011