Census Bureau updates definition of rural

Josh Zumbrun reported yesterday for the Wall Street Journal on the U.S. Census Bureau's changing definition of rural.  The upper threshold will now be population clusters of 5,000 (and those living in "open territory"), whereas previously it was 2,500.  That prior definition was one of the most miserly in the world.  Here's an excerpt from the WSJ story:  

That [change in definition] reclassified 4.2 million people, living in 1,140 areas of the U.S., from urban to rural.This has real-world consequences: Access to many federal and state programs is based on whether an area is defined as rural or urban.

But it also presents an opportunity to take stock of how rural has been defined, and whether the definition really matches what people think.

“People’s perception of the norm for urban vs. rural can be very different than the government’s definition,” said Claire McKay Bowen, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute, a think tank.

When people think of urban areas, the images that spring to mind are probably of skyscrapers, buses, heavy traffic, bright lights, hospital systems and crowds of pedestrians, or of urban sprawl: the miles of subdivided suburbs and strip malls.

They don’t think of a town such as Salmon, Idaho, where Dr. Bowen grew up, with a population of just over 3,000. It is the county seat of Lemhi County, which is the size of Connecticut but with a population of under 10,000. School sports events were typically a 2½-hour drive—each way—for visiting teams. It is a five-hour drive to Boise.

The story provides some history of the U.S. Census definition, and it closes with this international angle:

The World Bank has promoted an international standard that defines cities as having more than 50,000 people. Using this rule would put a total of 95 million Americans outside of cities—approaching 30% of the population.

There’s no question most Americans live in and around the major cities; over half live in the 72 largest. But the official rural population count has long been held down by an arbitrary definition. The country is more rural and small-town than we think.

You can find another recent post about the rural population in the most recent census on this blog.  This is one from last month about how the rural population is now rising, after decades of population loss.  But that rise pre-dates this change in Census Bureau definition.