America: A Nation of Small Towns (2020) | Hacker News Reader

America: A Nation of Small Towns (2020)

census.gov

30 pointspizza29 comments

Other interesting facts on US population distribution/location:

> In the U.S., 127 million people live in coastal counties. That’s as much as the entire population of Japan. If they were their own nation, the coastal counties of the U.S. would rank third in the world in gross domestic product, beaten only by China and the U.S. as a whole. The outsize U.S. marine economy is fueled by tourism and recreation, offshore energy, shipbuilding, and aquaculture, to name just a few.

* https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html

> Roughly two-thirds of the United States' population lives within the 100-mile zone—that is, within 100 miles of a U.S. land or coastal border. That's about 200 million people.

* https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

The Census definitions of “urban” and “rural” are pretty amusing. They count “urban clusters” above 2,500 people as urban and not rural. So Sibley Iowa, where my wife went to high school, doesn’t count as “rural” because it has 2,860 people. Even though colloquially almost everyone would consider all of northwest Iowa to be “rural as fuck” and the nearest real city, Sioux Falls South Dakota, is 70 miles away.

Yeah, in the article they call a town with between 5,000 and 10,000 a "mid sized city". Completely ridiculous, IMO.

People read misleading statistics that XX% of the population is urban, but that doesn't reflect reality.

Just took a look around Sibley on Street View and, distance from major cities aside, it definitely has a pretty urban form in some places. The commercial strip on 9th street would look right at home in the inner-ring suburbs near me, and I even spotted a concrete-protected paved bike path on 2nd (honestly impressed, we don't have any of those here).

Certainly it's no city, but it's closer to one than a lot of rural places I've seen.

I'd concur, Sibley has significant grid-street system, one of the hallmarks of urbanity to me.

Every podunk little settlement in the Midwest has a street grid.

Which you can walk across the entirety of in less than an hour.

By any conventional American definition, Sibley is rural bumfuck Iowa. All of rural (respectfully) bumfuck America is dotted with little hamlets like Sibley where people actually live, so if you're trying to deny that it's rural, you're really denying that rural America exists at all.

I mean I recognize that definitions are squishy and this thread started with a dispute of the official definitions in the first place. But when I think "rural" I think of the actual countryside (of which there is a lot in the US), not a population center with the density of some cities here in NJ.

To pick a random example for contrast, something like Hudson, Iowa looks a lot more like what I think of as rural. Which is also a small place people live, but unlike Sibley it bears little resemblance to an urban core.

Sibley is not a population center with the density of a NY or Philly Metro NJ city.

The big ones no, but it's not that far off from small ones like Absecon.

The first one that came to mind is Egg Harbor City as I have family there, but the numbers on that one are admittedly probably skewed because a sizeable portion of it is undeveloped pinelands.

Absecon is a suburb of AC. Sibley is in the literal middle of nowhere. You can walk across Sibley in 20 minutes, and when you hit the end of it, there's nothing but soybeans in any direction.

This is not a winnable argument for you. Sibley, IA is not urban America.

Town news updates my wife has gotten since moving out include a new pig farm, and a Subway sandwich shop opening up.

I find this all pretty amusing. I grew up 6 miles outside of a town of 3000. Nobody there even remotely thought of us being anything other than rural.

My off-the-cuff theory is that the folks that came up with this particular classification lived in some seriously large city such as Washington DC or New York.

Let's try this classification. If you can walk from one end of the town to the other in less than an hour. Sibley Iowa spans almost two miles. Hudson, Iowa, mentioned by a comment below, is five miles.

Folks who spent much of their life back east (as we used to say) often don't have a clear sense of the scale of geography west of the Hudson. For example. If you measure the end-to-end distance of Montana, that distance from Chicago will land you in Washington DC.

Even more so--my professor at the university told of a European colleague who had a little extra time while visiting the US and thought they would take a trip down to Florida then out west. They gave up after Florida after gaining a new appreciation of the geography.

So roughly third lives in "big" cities (50+k pop), third in small cities and towns, and a third in non-incorporated place. Even knowing that US is rural, that last figure is still somewhat surprising.

Of course, some of those unincorporated areas can be fairly urban, e.g. East LA[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Los_Angeles,_California

My favorite example: almost the entirety of the Las Vegas Strip (everything south of the Stratosphere) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise,_Nevada

So I technically live in a "metropolitan area" with a 100k+ population. Somebody got really creative with boundary lines, supposedly to help with procuring federal dollars. I step outside in the morning to the sound of cows moo-ing. A few years ago our street had more chicken than people (until a fox figured out our street had more chickens than people). Occasionally I stop to let wild turkeys cross the road.

So even "big" areas can be quite rural.

I’m in the Baltimore Annapolis metro area. That’s a fair characterization of where I live—five minutes east and I’m at a Target and Whole Foods. But five minutes west and I’m at horse farms. If you keep going toward Baltimore from where I am you go about 15 miles through farms before you hit a CDP or any meaningful size. And Maryland is one of the densest states in the country!

This.

Depending on local rules there can be an incentive for a smaller town to join a larger city or stay separate.

My understanding LA is massive because the city had water rights and if small towns wanted access, they had to join.

Then you can go to other cities that are small by population (SF is 1M) but it’s surrounded by smaller cities towns that combined dwarf it in population.

Then you’ve got “small towns” in CT that are practically touch each other into one massive suburban area but are defined as small cities/towns with tens of thousands in population.

> On the other hand, only 4.0% (780) of all cities had a population of 50,000 or more in 2019, yet nearly 39% of the U.S. population (127.8 million) live in those cities.

I have different take on this: even big American cities have this thing called "suburbs", which give them all a small town feel. Americans have an obsession with living in single family homes, apartment are considered the dwellings of the poor. The only real city in the US is New York :)

That’s a perk when you live in a massive country.

I live in an apartment in some country in Europe, and I certainly dislike hearing my noisy neighbors with their noisy dogs. ;)

Yeah, I wouldn’t live in an apartment if I had the money to afford a house.

Chicago. Chicago is a real city too.

New York is a city enveloped by cities. Chicago bleeds straight into its suburbs. That makes the former America’s only rival to e.g. London or Tokyo.

Chicago and London have pretty similar urban/suburban gradients.

Does anyone have a comparison to other nations?

I have to question how accurate the 2020 Census is..?

For the downvoters, probably deep state far left anti american globalists beaurcrats, the Census themselves admitted to a deeply flawed count. Even a google search reveals this.:

https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/censu...

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3494167-southern-st...

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