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Revisiting "Urban" and "Rural" [1]

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Date: 2025-01-31

Here at Daily Kos, we’ve had a lot of discussion about “rural America”. As part of that discussion, we’ve seen a lot of back-and-forth around terms — “urban”, “suburbs”, “exurbs”, “rural”, “big city”, “boonies”, you name it — but if we’re going to have conversations about how (or whether) Democrats can win outside urban America, who needs help and/or what help is needed, or what our messaging needs to be in those various areas, we really need a clearer picture.

When last I wrote on this subject, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) defined areas in three tiers: “rural”, “urban clusters”, and “urbanized areas”. Well, those definitions are no more; as of the 2020 Census, the definition of “urban area” (UA) is an either/or proposition:

a population of 5,000 or greater OR

at least 2,000 housing units.

(You can dig into raw data, maps, and such at the Census Bureau’s Urban and Rural page. If you’re a spreadsheet fan, a good place to start is this state-sorted list of all urban areas.)

The new definition dropped the number of UAs (just under 1150 of 2010’s list didn’t make the cut in 2020), but it didn’t really address the issue of what I’ll call “surrounding area”. Consider Benton, KY; its population of 4,691 doesn’t merit UA status outright, but its 2,114 housing units make it a beneficiary of the new two-headed definition. It’s the largest city in Marshall County (pop. 35,000), and the nearest cities of any significant size are Murray (pop. 18K) and Paducah (pop. 27K), both of which are 30 minutes distant by car. I’ve been to Benton, and I just can’t call it “urban”.

One can find many such examples across the country. I would argue that the presence of a UA “dot” of 5000-10000 people in a given area doesn’t make the surrounding area urban, and I think that including such places in the “urban population” figures (as the Census Bureau does) is misleading at best. A look at the Census Bureau’s map of US urban areas (PDF here), brings the point home; when you look at Kentucky and surrounding states, for instance, there would be a LOT of empty space if those dots weren’t there:

Columbia (pop. 5018), Beaver Dam (5600), Central City (5700), Monticello (6681)...all “urban areas”?

If we can’t really adapt the OMB/Census Bureau definition of urban areas for our purposes, how shall we distinguish “rural” and “urban” America — not to mention the “in-between” areas?

For purposes of our policy, messaging and electoral efforts, particularly at the state level, I think we needs to take a long, hard look at Core Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs). CBSAs come in three flavors (metropolitan, micropolitan, and combined), and they’re defined in terms of population, employment and commuting:

Start with at least one core urban area of 10K-50K people (for micropolitan) or 50K+ people (for metropolitan) and the county/counties that contain it

Add adjacent counties with strong communting relationships, defined as either: at least 25% of the county’s residents commute to the core area(s) for work, or at least 25% of the county’s workers commute from the core area(s)

If adjacent CBSAs have a combined commuting relationship of 15% or more, they may be referred to as a Combined Statistical Area (CSA)

This process effectively accounts for those “in-between” areas we often call exurbs, fringe towns, and the like; linking living and working areas seems a good measure of each urban area’s “sphere of influence”. The boundary between metropolitan and micropolitan also serves our purposes well; a city of 50K probably has more in common with a city of 100K than it does with a city of 10K, even though the government labels all three as urban areas.

CBSAs also give us a decent granularity with which to work; as of July 2023, there are 387 metropolitan statistical areas and 538 micropolitan statistical areas in the United States. Maps, data, etc. are available at the Census Bureau’s Metropolitan and Micropolitan page, including state-level reference maps.

What does that look like in practice? Well, if you take a look at Kentucky’s reference map (the title image of this article), we’ve gone from the “dots and splotches” of the UA map to a fairly clear picture of the social/economic “reach” of medium and large cities, and we’ve taken the smallest not-really-urban cities of fewer than 10K inhabitants out of the picture.

Micropolitan, Metropolitan, and Combined Statistical Area examples

Here’s an example, focused on south central Kentucky. The Bowling Green (pop. 72,000) Metropolitan SA includes Warren County and three adjacent counties, and there’s enough workforce crossover between it and the two-county Glasgow (pop. 14,800) Micropolitan SA to merit the larger designation of the Bowling Green-Glasgow Combined Statistical Area. Note, however, that there are counties that aren’t part of any CBSA at all; they have neither an urban area of at least 10K popularion (which would make them a micropolitan SA) nor a workforce relationship sufficient to merit inclusion in another CBSA.

So, in broad terms, we now have a three-tiered definition with which to work — Metropolitan Statistical Areas (centered on cities 50K and larger) are effectively urban, Micropolitan Statistical Areas (centered on cities of 10K to 50K) are in-between, and everything else is rural.

Applying that notion to a few states, a quick glance suggests that:

Kentucky is roughly 1/3 urban, 1/3 in-between, and 1/3 rural

Missouri is basically 1/2 rural, as is Wisconsin

North Carolina is only 1/4 rural

(I note, in passing, that comparing Kentucky’s CBSA map to its Congressional District map really shows Republican gerrymandering at work in the Bluegrass State. I’d be interested to know if that correlation is present in other states.)

I think that this “urban-inbetween-rural” approach, as defined by social/economic integration of CBSAs, is a good way to distinguish and discuss our policies, campaigning, and messaging. Do these distinctions match your impression of your state? Let us know in the comments.

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