The definition of “urban”
I recently came across a statistic indicating that “In 2020, about 82.66 percent of the total population in the United States lived in cities and urban areas.”
That rather astounded me. But what I didn’t know (and what a commenter – sorry, I forget who it was) pointed out was that the statistic is based on a definition of “urban” that counts any town with a population over 2,500.
Here’s how the census bureau explains it:
The Bureau of the Census defines urban as comprising all territory, population, and housing units located in urbanized areas and in places of 2,500 or more inhabitants outside of UAs. The term urban refers to both kinds of geographic entities…
A UA [urbanized area] is a continuously built-up area with a population of 50,000 or more. It comprises one or more places—central place(s)—and the adjacent densely settled surrounding area—urban fringe—consisting of other places and nonplace territory…
Outside of UAs, an urban place is any incorporated place or census designated place (CDP) with at least 2,500 inhabitants. A CDP is a densely settled population center that has a name and community identity, and is not part of any incorporated place.
Is it goes on with further definitions and explanations, as well as the history of the census department’s struggle to define terms that refer to what is commonly known as “rural” and “urban.” Let’s just say it’s complicated. I understand that statisticians have to define things, but for most us, it’s confusing and can be misleading to think that a town of 2,500 is urban.
How many people are aware of these definitions? I certainly wasn’t. And how do they affect our perception of statistics and their meaning? When we read that America is so overwhelmingly urban, it conjures up one sort of country. If the cutoff for “urban” was at a higher number, it would change the statistics and bring to mind a different sort of country.
LOL, by that definition the town I used to live in CT was “urban”? Total population was 6000 and average lot size was minimum 2 acres. All my daughter’s friends lived an average of about 4 miles away. Oh….and the chicken population was 12 million (Land o Lakes facilty), cows definitely outnumbered people, and a big industry in town was Earthgrow who produces mulch. Yeah, real urban.
I am reminded of a Economics class I took where the professor said that our university was located a semi-rural place. (The Uni’s orgin: back in the 19th century, a farmer gave 640 acres to the state to be used for an agricultural college.) A student from a city of over 100,000 replied, “What do you mean, SEMI-rural?”
physicsguy, having at least passed through the CT town where you used to live, I would also be reluctant to call it “urban.”
I lived in Jeffrey City, WY as a uranium miner in 1978. It’s a ghost town now. Was it 2500 people then? Maybe 1000? Do sage grouse, pronghorns, wild horses count? Inflation.
I grew up in a town a little bigger than 1,000, but it was close to the “big city” (my childhood self thought) which was over 30,000. Well, outside of Des Moines and a couple sizeable river cities, the whole state was rural really.
Our whole political discourse is rife with misleading and nonsense definitions. An old story (30+ years ago) was data analysis from I believe The World Health Org. The USA was rated to have the most expensive healthcare system, but also a very poor quality of healthcare outcomes.
How do you measure quality of outcomes? It was based entirely on infant mortality. That’s a little strange, but OK; how come the USA has such a poor infant mortality rate? In many countries (then), they don’t record an infant death at all, until the infant is one week old, or as much as one month old in some countries.
Now I understand. It’s not data we’re looking at, but propaganda. Watch the definitions and check the assumptions.
We’ll need a whole new definition of “urban legend.”
Definitions and calculations of statistical models is critical. ALWAYS look for the definitions. The classic example is infant mortality. In the US, we count any birth after 22 weeks gestation (24 wks from last cycle) as a live birth. In most other countries, the live birth stat is 35 weeks, 39 weeks, and 4 week post birth. You cannot compare. That is why the US looks terrible in infant mortality stats. Same with many Global Stats and data. I will not even start the discussion of measurement and system error in sampling and models….
wrt infant mortality, not many people know the differences. Those who slag the US, when apprised, don’t care.
Check out google earth. Find a town of, say, 4000 people and roam its streets with street view. Look at what the end of the block looks like, viewing out of town.
You going to compare that with, say, practically anyplace on Long Island?
Now, definitions are definitions and if you know them, you know whether to dismiss them.
I wonder if whatever factors impose “rural culture” on people cease operating once inside the bounds of, say, Earlham, IA. pop 1410. Or would if you gave them another 2500 bodies.
That town is so small they don’t even have a Dairy Queen. In the Midwest, that was a common rural insult. Now, it makes more sense than government statistics.
America is rural. Just go 50 miles outside any big city and you’ll be in small towns. It’s certainly true around here. Drive 20 miles west and houses start getting sparse and there is lots of forest. Even NYC, if you drive north up the Hudson you’ll see the same increase in forest and significant decrease in housing. This is in the oldest part of the US that was first settled almost 400 years ago.
We once had a German visitor for a year. His comment after traveling around and sight seeing, “America is empty”.
Sounds like the old 80/20 rule to me.
IIRC, the Census Bureau boundary condition for ‘urban’ is that the population density of the delineated area exceeds 500 persons per square mile. That’s quite loose. If you posit that 55% of the land area is devoted to owner-occupied residential housing, that amounts to about 3 acres per household in such housing.
In New York, a thoroughly rural property not devoted to agriculture or animal husbandry will feature a well, a septic tank, an oil tank, and a weekly trip to the county landfill (unless you can hire commercial trash collection). Landline telephone service and the electric grid have been available for several generations. Not sure cable television has ever been common in such households; I believe the satellite dish has been the order of the day.
As you move closer to a densely settled environment, you begin to see these services replaced with alternatives. I believe the modal order of appearance is (1) municipal water, (2) sewerage, (3) gas hook ups, and (4) municipal trash hauling. If you have both a septic tank and a well, there’s a minimum distance between the well head and the septic tank which has to be maintained on an individual property. You could ask a civil engineer how that scales. IMO, the most salient thresh-hold is the replacement of septic tanks with municipal sewerage and the density level at which that’s a prudent substitution.
No clue how this works in Arizona.
Sidewalks too. Sidewalks in New York suburbs are the last stage of the transition to urban service provision and newer tracts commonly neglect this.
For separate reasons, I’ve been trying to see what factors might bear on or cause rural culture. I discovered a couple of items. Many, many of the smaller towns actually have public libraries. A few still have the “opera house”. A town of a thousand in a county of four thousand isn’t going to be raising many bel cantos. It was a public building for touring educators–see Chautaqua and Lyceum–politicians and entertainers who, might, be opera singers doing the music if not the entire production.
Most have been torn down but there are still a few.
Between farming, supporting farming, judging and being judged as competent in related fields–handling compressors, welders, pumps, generators, and so forth, and having a large stock of food because it’s such a drive to the Walmart Supercenter, one might feel self-reliant, able to withstand contingencies which the urban apartment dweller can only dream of.
For some reason, the US will name as a town half a dozen homes around an intersection far out in the country. I don’t count those.
TommyJay, I’m cheered at your mention of Iowa!
This topic is very apropos. I immediately wonder what the legal and policy ramifications of the definition of ‘urban’ areas are. Surely it is possible that, manipulating the definition over time as with a slider on a rheostat, certain public policy outcomes could be adjusted by simply turning that dial, so to speak. Would require little effort on the part of the bureaucracy.
And I suppose this practice need not be limited to government policy only. Insurance rates, for example, could probably be made to differ between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ scenarios, ceteris paribus, with such an adjustment to justify them.
Cornflour and Philip Sells,
I remember the Dairy Queens, but not the insult. Had I grown up in the nearby “city” maybe I would have heard it, since I recollect that many of those folks did consider themselves to be urbane. Nice people and good times generally speaking.
I took up bicycle touring in my early teens and actually cycled through dozens of these “towns” with populations less than 100 or even less than 50. Strange but fun to visit.
Philip,
We should always try to consider the nefarious angles to these issues. We both have probably seen the county level maps of voting statistics.
I’ve always associated the term urban with cities.
Any city of less than 100,000 is to my mind properly designated a town.
Quote; “The total 2020 enumerated population of all cities over 100,000 is 96,598,047, representing 29.14% of the United States population (excluding territories)”
That sounds about right to me. No way is that 82.66% figure accurate. Never forget, while figures don’t lie, liars figure… and democrats absolutely want the ‘figures’ to exaggerate large city populations for representation in the House.
Paul in Boston,
One of my good friends from my time in New Mexico was a very well educated fellow from a big city in Germany who was working on a post doc. Near the end of his time in the US, his family came over and they rented a van and they traveled thousands of miles through Colorado, Utah, Montana, Southwest Canada, down the west coast and back to New Mexico through Texas. Talk about empty. But they really appreciated it, as do I.
A funny anecdote, that is irrelevant to our topic, was my friend’s experience at a Texas campground at the end of their trip. The people in the neighboring camp site apparently started cursing at each other or about something.
Now my friend spoke excellent English and was proud of it. In his mind, his crowning language achievement was to be able to curse like a Texan. So he had memorized much of his campground experience and proceeded to recite it for me. Imagine a very refined urban German accent, with a hint of British accent, who is then trying to imitate a Texas accent, while cursing a blue streak. It was hysterical.
I wonder if the following metrics might be helpful in defining non-urban:
Size of the county seat or town administration building is less than 3000 or 5000 square feet (with or without the police station incorporated therein).
Number of blue pages in the phone book for administrative services is 3 (or 6?) pages or less [normal small type].
Seems that by the time you have a blue pages directory of 10+ pages, and a 20000+ square foot taj mahal admin building, you are “urban”, even if you don’t want to be. Court room(s), tax collector, property appraiser, law enforcement, health dept., schools admin, county records office, building dept., parks dept., street maintenance, library, and the other 24 categories I can’t even think of, and you need a pretty substantial building or set of buildings to house them all. But it then takes a lot more than 2500 people as a tax base to support this, too.
My advisor in grad school and his economics professor wife said a city of around 200,000 was close to optimum, being large enough to have most urban center amenities without the traffic and crime of larger cities. Globalization and fentanyl may have put the lie to that 50 year old metric.
Well, since it used to be my job at Census to estimate the populations of cities and towns, I was aware of these definitions. But it is certainly true that much of what the Census Bureau does (like most government agencies) doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
It’s “just” a matter of wonky definitions.
If one can set out to redefine “white supremacist”, “deplorable”, “progressive”, “democracy”, “patriot” and “woman” the way it’s been done (though in the latter case, it’s more a matter of “undefine”), one can redefine most anything…
…and “one” does!
But then Orwell has already described this “phenomenon” in eloquent, if lurid, detail…and he was essentially repackaging, or rather “updating”, the laments of the scriptures (i.e., the prophets, mostly) for the 20th century.
File under: That depends on what the meaning of “large” is.
Back in the 1970s, I needed a phone number for someone who lived in Amarillo TX, so I called Directory Assistance (yes, that far back).
The operator was clearly at some centralized location NOT in The Lone Star State, because the first question she asked me was: “What large city is that near?”
Definitions define the conclusions. Which is one of the reasons most published studies are flawed.
Categories are nothing but definitions. Example — the definition of extreme left in American politics is all those who are currently firing an automatic weapon in the fight to create a Stalinist America. The definition of extreme right is anyone who voted for Trump.
You can live in a 5 million dollar house with millions in assets and be classified as living below the poverty line.
The government–in fact, any organization that issues statistics–can play an awful lot of hanky panky by what terms they use and how they define those terms, by assumptions–explicit and implicit, by the methods they choose to use to calculate their statistics, and even by how they present them visually.
My advisor in grad school and his economics professor wife said a city of around 200,000 was close to optimum, being large enough to have most urban center amenities without the traffic and crime of larger cities. Globalization and fentanyl may have put the lie to that 50 year old metric.
Although they can and do appear in smaller centers (especially as state plants), university medical centers tend to be standard equipment only when the densely settled population is somewhat north of 500,000.
As for street crime, robbery is a crime that’s characteristic of dense settlement and the crime which causes the most anxiety injurious to the common life. Other sorts of crime do vary according to density, but much less radically so. Racial demographics influence the frequency of street crime. Outside the Southern United States, high perpetration segments tend to be thin on the ground in exurban, small town, and rural areas and that influences the observable disjunction between urban-metropolitan settlement and the remainder and between core cities and slums.
IMO, you police the population you have and you pay for the services salient to you. Optimally, exurban, small town, and rural areas would be served by sheriff’s patrols in departments which cover catchments of at least of 85,000. Some would be single county departments, but most would be multi-county departments. In non-metropolitan counties, they’d be financed out of general revenues and the charges apportioned among the counties according to population. In metropolitan counties, the sheriff’s department would have a patrol division if there were a critical mass of exurban residents and would be financed out of a property surtax collected in its catchment. The core city and suburban section would be patrolled by a metropolitan police department financed out of a value-added tax applied by the county in the densely settled areas. The other functions of the sheriff’s department would be financed out of general revenues supplement by fees assessed on municipalities and school districts who requested special services. Small towns in areas covered by sheriff’s patrols would have the option to set up a municipal police department, exercised by a referendum subject to periodic review. In New York, police departments have a franchise to deputize security guards who have taken a special course of study, so you could have a helpful reserve force on college campuses, at transportation hubs, at stadiums, at hospitals, and at outlet malls.
The experience of the last 30 years has demonstrated that urban crime can be effectively suppressed by a police force properly staffed, optimally deployed, and given encouragement by politicians (provided that you have courts who understand their business is punishment, not social work). You can have a satisfactory degree of order in your urban-metropolitan areas, but you have to pay for it. Your slums and points adjacent are always going to be sketchy and anxiety provoking, but they do not have to be hyperviolent. A homicide rate in a given neighborhood which exceeds 15 per 100,000 is a choice, and a choice a well-ordered local polity does not make.
As for traffic problems, finance maintenance and amortization of limited access highways out of tolls and only tolls. Finance general public roads out of dedicated funds which may have some general revenue placed in them at the discretion of the local council in question, but which are primarily financed out the state government’s dedicated fund, apportioned among local governments according to the acres of macadam for which they’re responsible. The state’s fund is in turn derived from excises on motor fuels (and, nowadays, charging) and weight-dependent registration fees. With regard to the federal tax on motor fuels, define the vendor’s liability as $x per gallon minus what they paid to the state’s dedicated fund. The federal agency charged with the assessing the tax will be in the business of data collection and inspection, as the states will have an incentive to raise their levy to collect the revenue for their own purposes. You finance road maintenance by levies on people in their capacity as motorists rather than in their capacity as consumers or property owners, this will influence their decisions on consumption of motor transportation and occupying space on roads.
Paul in Boston at 8:32 PM;
You are 1000% correct.
Several years ago I had to spend several days in upstate NY – near Monticello and Finger Lakes / Auburn – and decided to drive there and around those regions using back roads in lieu of major highways.
It was almost all small, old towns, farms or what appeared to be undeveloped land (with trees) and many tiny communities of just a few homes.
Also, I was rather shocked by the poverty I saw.
As I have mentioned before, most NYC residents (who, by virtue of their voting numbers literally control NY State politics) have no idea what upstate NY is like, and have nothing at all in common with upstate residents.
When driving across Pennsylvania a few years back – East/West along I-80 – it was almost all “rural” – farms and such.
Once one gets away from the big cities, you’ll find that most of the USA is fairly rural. Growing up in NYC,, this came as a real shock to me when I first had to drive to Seattle (first along I-80 , then on I-90) from NYC.
I still recall seeing a herd of antelopes running across I-90 while driving through – I forget – if it was S.Dakota or Wyoming or Montana.
That was quite the site for me – a city slicker at the time- to see.
I notice this phenomenon all the time…people (especially media) quoting statistics when it is not clearly explained (or understood) what the numbers actually mean.
Neo you may cause a problem by naively raising a problem if you’re not careful. People may jump to ill-considered solutions. The Census Bureau has used this definition of rural and urban at least since the 1940’s (probably earlier), so it makes sense for it to not do what others decry here by changing definitions. That way we can compare historical statistics. Back in the 40’s, even by this definition, more than 70% of the US population were classified as rural IIRC, so it may indeed have been a more useful rubric.
The lead-in-the-water panic in Flint Michigan was caused not by increasing lead, but by a redefinition of what the hazardous amount of lead in water was.
IMHO the problem you note calls for a new category designating densely populated area.
“between core cities and
slumssuburbs.”As I have mentioned before, most NYC residents (who, by virtue of their voting numbers literally control NY State politics) have no idea what upstate NY is like, and have nothing at all in common with upstate residents.
It’s not nothing in common, but New York taken as a whole is an ill-considered provincial unit. A satisfactory solution might be for New York to reconstitute itself as a confederation with only a residual central government, and have the two components each go their own way on public policy, electing only a U.S. Senator statewide. You could say the same of Illinois, I think. Ideally, you’d adopt confederation plans for New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia; you’d retrocede DC; then you’d conclude a series of interstate compacts each creating a municipal corporation which acts as a common government for sets of state components. You’d continue to collect data and elect members of Congress from constituencies within the conventional boundaries, but your effective provincial units would be as follows: Greater New York, Greater Philadelphia, Greater Washington, Upstate New York, rPennsylavania (with three rural Jersey counties appended), rVirginia, and a federation of mid-Atlantic fragments including greater Baltimore, rMaryland, rDelaware, and 4 or 5 counties in south Jersey.
My zip code has 1200 addresses. The entire county has only about 30k people. The local Post Office knows us. The nearest CDP (about 2 miles away where the PO, fire station, ranger station and school is) has about 900 people. There is usually 1 deputy sheriff in the area and sometimes a WSP trooper. The sheriff station is about 18 miles away. Private well, private septic and yet I have gigabit broadband in my yard. Lot of armed feds though (border patrol, fish and wildlife, forest service, national park service and probably others)
Art;
A better way would be for NY State to break up into two or three separate independent states; say Northern NY, Western NY and Southern NY. Southern NY would be NYC, Long Island, and Westchester County.
The situation in NY – where hi density population areas, but geographically a small part of the state – also exists in Oregon, Washington, Illinois , Pennsylvania and maybe a few other states.
The folks in the eastern parts (i.e., east of the Cascade Mountains) of Oregon and Washington, are fairly conservative unlike their leftists compatriots west of the Cascades.
Cook County, Ill, needs to be a state all its own, as does Philadelphia County, Pa.
I think the last time a state actually split was during the Civil War, where W.Virginia in 1863 decided to split off from Virginia.
Unfortunately, the only activity in adding new US Congressional seats is the effort to have Puerto Rico and DC become states.
A better way would be for NY State to break up into two or three separate independent states; say Northern NY, Western NY and Southern NY. Southern NY would be NYC, Long Island, and Westchester County.
Not sure why that would be better.
One snag is that it would implicate representation in the Senate. The utility of confederation plan is that you can revise your provincial units without tampering with federal representation. We’ve admitted just six states since the close of the Frontier and just two within living memory (and at the time of the last set of admissions, the courtesy culture in Congress was such that they took care to admit one state which had a Republican advantage in its territorial legislature and one which had a Democratic advantage).
Another demurral I can see concerns the sum of population and the settlement pattern. Upstate New York has a population of 7.3 million people, just 10% over the mean of the 50 states. About 40% live in core city / suburban tracts. The other 60% live in exurban, small-town, and rural zones. It has two 2d tier cities and two 3d tier cities; there is no ready way to draw the lines so you get two of each in your successor states. The 2d tier cities are in the west, the 3d tier are in the central and eastern portions. The western zone would be bipolar and a 50-50 split between core city / suburban and exurban &c. With a unified Upstate, you have three tiers of cities and multi-polarity.
As for the North Country, it has a population about that of Vermont, most of the area is in undeveloped parkland, and you have no cities. The largest settlement is around Glens Falls, where you have about 40,000 people. All of the higher education up there consists of teaching institutions. I cannot see creating a state out of it. I suppose you could be talking about joining the Adirondacks, Hudson Valley, Capital District, and Catskills. That would have a more varied portfolio of assets – three cities, one 3d tier and two fourth tier; two research institutions and stand-alone professional schools in Albany. Oh, you get Glimmerglass too.
Cook County, Ill, needs to be a state all its own, as does Philadelphia County, Pa.
Disagree. There’s a continuous blob of urban settlement around Chicago which consumes three counties entirely, most of the area of three others, and peeks into three others. Around Philadelphia, that blob extends over ten counties, completely consumes two of those counties and nearly consumes three others. If you’re going to have city states, take it all, clipping only some exurban periphery e.g the Pine Barrens in Burlington County NJ
In reference to Long Island, and rural vs urban.
I visited there with a girlfriend a few years ago (post 9/11) and this boy who grew up in an Iowa town of 600 was pretty astonished to find out how open and suburban most of it was once you got out towards the east end. My impression of what the area around ‘New York City’ looked like was definitely driven mostly by views of mid-town Manhattan.
It was also amusing when it dawned on me during our ride on a LI Railroad commuter train that we weren’t going to cross a bridge to get to Brooklyn and Queens as they are physically located on Long Island. She always talked about them as if they were separated (i.e. traveling from her hometown was going from “Long Island” to Queens.)
Unfortunately, the only activity in adding new US Congressional seats is the effort to have Puerto Rico and DC become states.
Transparently bad ideas, both.
DC accounts for 15% of the urban settlement around the Potomac. There are three counties around DC with larger populations and fewer troublesome people living in them. DC was erected out of anxiety about the power a state government could exert over the federal capital. That’s an anachronistic concern as we speak. Retrocede it; time for Maryland to get a 25th county and 700,000 new residents.
As for Puerto Rico, it does not benefit from statehood. It might benefit from a conservatorship to get its treasury and audit and control system in order, as well as repeal of regulatory and welfare policies which have hindered its economic development. Puerto Rico is a foreign country which has a jurisdictional association with the United States; it can not be truly a part of this country and that’s fine. We should have had it on a path to sovereignty.
I agree with them.
I grew up in a farmhouse with one “neighbor” within a mile in any direction.
The county seat of the county I grew up in had a population of about 3,000 at the time.
From my perspective, the city slickers who lived in that town were as urban as can be. So what if the tallest building other than the county courthouse was the three story community bank building? It had bars and restaurants and churches and a movie theater and a post office…it was a city as far as I was concerned.
Some helpful context might be that the US cities with over 100,000 people–probably “urban” by anyone’s definition–make up 30% of the US population (97 million people). For just cities over 1 million, it’s 8% of the US population (25 million people).
So 50% of the country lives in the cities bigger than 2,500 but smaller than 100,000. My guess is that at least 25% of the US is living in a city 50,000 – 100,000. Most of those cities in turn are part of a metropolitan area of the the 100,000+ cities (which in turn are part of the metropolitan area of one of the 1,000,000+ cities).
I know that in my home state, Washington, 60% of the population lives in 3 counties, and nearly all of that 60% are in a 30 mile radius of Seattle (Everett and Tacoma are in that radius, but not Olympia, Spokane,Yakima, or the Tri-Cities). Even so, those three counties have huge uninhabited areas.
Where you want to draw the line for “urban” is up to you for the thing you’re trying to capture but as Frank points out the Census has drawn the line at 2500 people since the 1940s. The only reason it’s surprising that 2500 would count is because fallacies of equivocation are being made using the connotations of “urban”.
Would you say a town of 3,000 was “urban”? Well, if it’s Clyde Hill, Washington, it’s part of the Seattle metro area and the CEO of Microsoft (not Bill Gates) is one of your neighbors, so it’s not exactly “country”. (Bill Gates lives in neighboring Medina, also a town under 3,000, also part of the Seattle metro area.)
Whatever big city you live near, one of those really expensive small cities in its metro area is probably under 3,000 people.
Now an isolated town of 2500 wouldn’t be very “urban” in feel. But now we all have to argue about what “isolated” means.
Seattle was an engaging place 30 years ago. Now it’s a locus of stupidity.
Art Deco says:”The situation in NY – where hi density population areas, but geographically a small part of the state – also exists in Oregon, Washington, Illinois , Pennsylvania and maybe a few other states.”
Unfortunately the insidious succeeding cases to Baker v Carr eliminated the ability of representation by geographical designations except as to equal population in state legislature districts. Those decisions made jokes of the top chamber of the legislatures of California, Oregon, and Washington. In CA each state senate district just consists of 2 adjacent state assembly districts. Those decisions rendered any kind of federalism beneath the US federal government illegal.
For the same reason, people want to eliminate the Electoral College. We live in the country the Warren Court made.
Art Deco says:”The situation in NY – where hi density population areas, but geographically a small part of the state – also exists in Oregon, Washington, Illinois , Pennsylvania and maybe a few other states.”
You’re quoting someone else there. I never said that.
The Warren Court and it’s successors have made a hash of redistricting and apportionment. Please recall, though, that Robert Bork’s preferred solution would not have been a return to the status quo ante and Bork in his writings for general audiences pointed to some problems in how states apportioned their legislatures which arguably did implicate the guarantee clause.
IMO, there’s seldom a satisfactory reason for an upper chamber in state legislatures wherein representation is assigned equally to fixed geographic units. An upper chamber apportioned according to population is redundant unless the upper chamber is smaller and functionally distinct from the lower chamber (which IMO should be the case).
For the same reason, people want to eliminate the Electoral College.
Again, partisan Democrats do not have procedural principles, just improvisations which provide excuses for what’s convenient for them at the moment. They want to get rid of the electoral college because it’s proven an impediment to them getting what they want.
Clowns abounds around the Sounds.
Exceptions are those who read Neo.
My guess is that when the Census set the definition of “urban” as low as 2500 people back in 1910 (really) they were probably trying to capture such things as which Americans had electricity, indoor plumbing, bought food rather than produced it at home, etc.
Nowadays practically all Americans have all these things no matter where they live. “Urban” means different things to different people but not a radically different material lifestyle, as it did in the early 20th century.
My guess is that when the Census set the definition of “urban” as low as 2500 people back in 1910 (really) they were probably trying to capture such things as which Americans had electricity, indoor plumbing, bought food rather than produced it at home, etc.
It’s been a while, but I believe that urban geographers develop taxonomies of settlement based on the services which typically emerge at given population levels. A low order service might be a grocery store (now a convenience store). These aren’t fixed, of course.
My apologies Art Deco. You were quoting someone else, and I sloppily assigned it to you.
As for unicameral legislatures, I agree. Why have an upper chamber if they’re both representing the same constituencies? Better yet in CA, as I say to all petition gatherers, “The only initiative I’ll sign is the one that does away with the legislature if we’re going to do everything by initiative.”
stan on June 14, 2022 at 8:44 am said:
You can live in a 5 million dollar house with millions in assets and be classified as living below the poverty line.
Which led me to consider: when do we start to hear about a frugality line or a “live within your means” line?
Many years ago I read a book by someone who, on his 3rd or 4th try at entrepreneurship, had finally build up a successful hair solon/hair products business. He claimed that to really be financially secure, you had to be able to live on only 20% of your income (the rest going to taxes and savings/ investments).
Urban: The city trims the trees.
Rural: Everyone owns a chain saw.
@ Molly Brown > you got that right.
For anybody really into some of these topics, it’s worth taking a gander at (and also giving a listen to the associated podcast for) Strong Towns, at strongtowns.org. His analysis of our current development pattern is eye-popping, and his assessments of some of the motivation behind it insightful
Molly Brown has the true definition.
The definition of “urban places” goes back all the way to the original census, back in 1790. But it’s true that I only discovered that when I started working with census records in some of my work.
One small point: The legal ability of a city to expand into surrounding areas varies considerably from state to state. In my state, South Carolina, it is difficult, so cities tend to remain geographically smaller even if the area grows in population. So two very similar urban areas, in two different states, could have cities at their cores of quite different sizes and populations, and surrounding smaller towns of different numbers and sizes as well, even as the reality of their “urbanness” was essentially the same.
For whatever that’s worth.
I should make one more note about urban and rural and the Census Bureau. Those definitions have been consistent, and keeping the definitions consistent is important for researchers and statisticians, but the Census Bureau has not been unaware that new definitions are needed for data collection.
Way back, I worked on the breakup of AT&T. (For those of you born since 1990, there used to be only one telephone company, and it was a monopoly broken up in 1983 under Reagan.) We worked with the Census’ digital files. They collected data for Standard Statistical Areas (SSAs), and Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs). The latter covered the area of every large city in the US and its surrounding suburbs. One of our biggest problems was making the maps match up since the SMSAs were done in much greater detail (at a different scale), so the edges of the digital maps did not match. I don’t know whether the Census Bureau has added an “urban core” collection area or not, but maybe that is what is needed. If not, the problem is people citing urban/rural statistics instead of SSA/SMSA statistics. It’s the writers not the Census Bureau that are at fault for using the less useful rubric.
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Some helpful context might be that the US cities with over 100,000 people–probably “urban” by anyone’s definition–make up 30% of the US population (97 million people). For just cities over 1 million, it’s 8% of the US population (25 million people).
You’re describing core city municipalities, not metropolitan urban settlements as a whole. The tract development where I grew up encompasses about 600,000 people, but the core city encompasses just 1/3 of that.
What’s wrong with that definition? Wow- a lot. I live in NY. Found out after I moved here NY has some funny political structures. Let’s take a nearby village- Clyde. Many of the villages in NY are surrounded completely by a town. Clyde case is surrounded by Galen. The village is the crowded area, in Clyde’s case a few less than 2000 people, about 886 per square mile. (all numbers from city-data dot com)
So Galen, with it’s population of 4290 (many of them Amish) would by that definition be urban, while Clyde isn’t. 72 people per square mile.
But why divide them up that way? Found this out. Many operational differences between the two. The fire department serves the whole area. But only the village has hydrants… Village plows load up with salt only. More expensive than the salt/sand mixture the town uses. The village has sewer systems that the sand would build up in, the town doesn’t. The village has street lights “downtown”. And one blinking light. The town doesn’t. I think both the village and the town share police department costs.
In the last few decades several villages have dissolved and been absorbed into the surrounding towns. It’s always contentious when that happens with local infighting happening. One side or the other always thinks they’re getting the short end of the stick in the bargain. And it’s likely always true.
The reality is that suburban matters as a category. It’s silly to divide by only two categories when there are such radical differences between urban and suburban and between suburban and rural.
Sorta tongue in cheek.
Urban — you pay for parking
Suburban — free parking
Rural — parking lot is gravel or dirt
But why divide them up that way?
Villages are overlay municipalities. The territory within them remains a part of the town. You have an incorporated village to establish and maintain functions that are not undertaken by town governments.
A law was passed in 1924 that effectively discontinued the practice of municipal annexations. With some qualifications, the boundaries of foundational municipalities have been fixed since that time. After 1924, new tract development was under the jurisdiction of town governments. So, town governments took on functions previously performed by village and city governments. Town tract development enveloped extant villages, rendering the village governments redundant. They remained due to inertia or due to miscellaneous considerations.
You now have strip development adjacent to villages and second-class cities in non-metropolitan zones. You seldom see either the village or the second-class city expanding to include these strips.
In the last few decades several villages have dissolved and been absorbed into the surrounding towns. It’s always contentious when that happens with local infighting happening. One side or the other always thinks they’re getting the short end of the stick in the bargain. And it’s likely always true.
Not sure how it can ‘always’ be true. IMO, in a place like Wayne County, concentrated tract development with signature services should always be under some sort of overlay authority – either an incorporated village or a concatenation of special district authorities.
I think both the village and the town share police department costs.
IMO, the principal repository for police patrols outside of core city / surburban settlements like greater Rochester and greater Syracuse should be sheriff’s departments, some multi-county, some single county. A village or a second-class city would have an option to set up a supplementary police department to enhance patrol coverage, but this would require a referendum and would be subject to automatic review via referendum at least once every 30 years.
the US will name as a town half a dozen homes around an intersection far out in the country.
Petz, NE isn’t even at an intersection, but it has (is?) a grain elevator.