Nobody lives here: the 5 million US census blocks with zero population
mapsbynik.tumblr.com
mapsbynik.tumblr.com
https://www.fort.usgs.gov/sites/default/files/products/publi...
Two comments:
1. I lean towards the idea that the government wastes a lot of money on stupid things. This however, is pretty dam neat.
2. I'm surprised that most of the US (60%?) is purple/blue which would suggest most of the land in the US has a road within 0.2 to 0.5 km? That's really surprising. I guess if you threw in logging roads and any type of path that could support vehicle traffic it makes sense.
Sure in theory state and local spending are seperate but in practice a lot of state and local spending is tied to the federal government.
But sometime swing over to Google Maps and start zooming in on a state in the center of the country, but stay away from the larger cities. You'll find a lot of places with pretty regular grids of roads, just spaced out more than they would be in a city (about a mile apart is pretty common). And if you think about what that land is used for, you'll probably be able to work out why they're there :)
http://www.datapointed.net/2009/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdon...
This 3D population density map is pretty nice although it seems to have larger blocks. http://undertheraedar.blogspot.com/2011/07/united-states-cen...
The accompanying text states:
> The map tends to highlight two types of areas: places where human habitation is physically restrictive or impossible, and places where human habitation is prohibited by social or legal convention.
And the creator states his purpose (emphasis mine):
> Ultimately, I made this map to show a different side of the United States. Human geographers spend so much time thinking about where people are. I thought I might bring some new insight by showing where they are not, adding contrast and context to the typical displays of the country’s population geography.
I for one found it very interesting to see the vast expanses of the U.S. that record no permanent residences. Of particular interest to me is the administrative effort that must go into maintaining almost five million census blocks that have no citizens to report!
Some of the big green areas are obvious: the Everglades, the forests of Maine, the awful stuff we call "Nevada".
But what about the green blob on the Georgia-Florida border? And what's up with south Texas?
Also, if you didn't catch the link, a fixed map: http://mapsbynik.com/maps/census0pop/census0pop-mapsbynik-re...
I was curious about that too. Apparently it's a very large swamp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okefenokee_Swamp
> And what's up with south Texas?
Have you been to south Texas?
Nope. And it appears that those who do go there, don't stay.
1) http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2013/04/20/scrip...
Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge
Much of south Texas is shanty towns and illegal settlements, because immigration won't check documents until you are about 100 miles from the border. These people are largely ignored by the US population and not counted in census.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_(United_States)#Publi...
For this past long weekend I snowshoed into a remote lake and stayed in (and fixed up) a beautiful abandoned cabin. Ice fishing, star and northern light photography, wildlife viewing and beautiful sunshine. Didn't see a single person, and I would have been shocked if I did.
I'm in the Yukon, Alaska is much the same.
Remember, the daylight up here is already 6am-10pm, so there is tons of daylight for activities, and lots of the cabin work can be done in the evening, when the sun is setting but it's not yet dark enough for Northern Lights photos.
Was the door rehanging due to some sort of winterizing or bear-proofing?
I suspect it was built in the '60s or '70s, likely a trappers cabin (most up here are). It was built with logs much too big to be from the Yukon though, so I think it must have been something important for them to import logs like that (likely from just down the road in Alaska). Which is confusing, because it wasn't on any important routes like you expect to find on, say, the Yukon river, or big lakes up here.
Judging from the materials, recent improvements and nails, books, clothes, stove, etc, I then suspect sometime in the 90's someone moved in for a summer and did a ton of work. New window shutters (built with screws indicating a cordless drill), new floorboards with paint, roof work, etc. etc. Also they conveniently left a bunch of brand new sheets of plywood and 2x4s out of the weather, and many thousands of nails. The only "visitors message" was from '98, written in pencil, which was conveniently left in a tin of nails for use in construction.
The door was very solid and clearly bolted and locked in many places long ago - the thing about locked doors on cabins in the Yukon is they tend to get smashed in by people, as this one had been. People up here prefer cabins be left unlocked so they can be used in emergencies in the winter (when it's -40) so 99.9% of cabins are not locked, and simply have a book that says "please use this cabin and treat it as your own - also leave a note in the guest book if you like". It's a great sense of community. So the door had been smashed in and was lying under a couple of feet of snow. The first night I was busy with everything else, so I just nailed up a sheet of plastic over the door in an attempt to make it air-tight. (I brought the plastic with me, having been told the cabin was a wreck)
After I dug out the door and got all the snow/ice off it, It was easy to line up the hinges and put a couple of big nails through to get it hanging right. It's possible it was knocked in by a bear (not common, but it happens), though I didn't see any evidence to suggest that.
Bears are awake now, but I didn't see any or any evidence of them yet this spring, and I covered ~40km on snowshoes
All in all, as you might be able to tell, it's a great sense of adventure to go to remote rivers and lakes and simply explore :) I'm working through the photos now, I'll post back here when they're online so you can see what I'm talking about.
I'd call this city just about perfect, though - it's still in Wyoming, so there's still separation between people, but it's a quick hop skip and jump to a bigger city for any events in that area.
Do you mean, they just purchased a farm? Or do you mean like the actual US Homestead Act, making a farm out of nothing?
I have visited there and it's one of the few residences I've ever been to where you can do a full 360 degree revolution while standing on their property and all you see is nature except for their small prairie home...no other buildings, power lines, or structures owned by anyone else in sight. Also, the air there is wonderful; there's a faint scent of sage all the time.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_populati...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harney_County,_Oregon
Beautiful place in its own stark way - especially Steens Mountain. I wouldn't want to live there, though.
Wyoming has a population of ~576,000, which is clearly less than Alaska's population of ~731,000 in absolute numbers of population.
However, because Alaska is roughly 6 times larger (586,412 square miles vs 97,814), it wins by quite a bit on lowest density.
To put that number in perspective, I live on the border of Cobb County, Georgia, whose population as of 2012 is 707,442. This is one county outside the city limits of Atlanta (but not by much). While Cobb County is a metro Atlanta suburban county, it also has a large portion of semi-rural area. It blows my mind that more than an entire state's populace fits in a tiny (geographically speaking) county in a largely rural state.
You aren't adding any precision, or disambiguating. The OP said least _densely_ populated, as did I.
Just making sure we're all talking about the same thing.
As others have noted, Alaska easily wins the least-density contest.
LA is 18.1 million, San Diego 3.2 Sacramento 2.2, Stockton 0.7, Portland 0.5, and Seattle-Tacoma 3.6. I get about 23.3 million total, which is still 54 million short.
SF-SJ-Oak adds another 8.4 million, but most of it is more than 30 miles from I5.
Checking by state confirms it:
CA: 38m, OR: 3.9m, WA: 6.9m. combined total: 48.8m. Still 30 million short.
Mythbusted.
As for within 5 Miles of I-5.. probably not, but within it's area of influence, for sure - the western parts of those three states are pretty empty, even by my midwest trained standards.
And yes, as an old / dated statistic, a 30 - 100 mile radius might have worked further back.
Truth is that population centers are highly concentrated within the US (and the world).
A set of visualizations I've collected showing density as cartograms or height relief: http://imgur.com/a/JgtVp#0
The height map in particular shows the concentration by MSA, and the population density of the eastern US: http://i.imgur.com/NjeWb3a.png
Incidentally, I'd always thought it was 2/3 of the US population east of the Mississippi. Yep.
Adding up: ca: 37.2, or: 3.8, wa: 7.0, id: 1.6, mn: 1.0, nv: 2.8, az: 6.6, ut: 2.9, wy: 0.6, co: 5.3, nm: 2.0, tx: 26.4, nd: 0.7, sd: 0.8, nb: 1.9, ks: 2.9, ok: 3.8, mn: 5.4, ia: 3.1, mo: 6.0, ar: 3.0, la: 4.6, ak: 0.7, hi: 1.4
We get 131.5 million. US pop: 313m
Via bc:
100 * (131.5/313)
42.000
Knock off Texas and you're there: 105m, or 33.546% of the US population.
Last I checked, most of Texas was more than 30 miles from US I-5. Or even more than five miles.
Using 2010 census numbers from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Us_state_population, rounded to nearest 100k.
You get west of the western edge of the Gulf of Mexico. So yo don't get moisture coming north off of the Gulf. So the land not only gets more rugged, it gets drier. So you get less farming and more ranching.
If you're interested in what the area looks like, check out the Trans-Taiga Road as well as the (less remote) James Bay Road.
Not a whole lot going on up in the north by comparison. Just forest and many many lakes which alternate between being frozen or mosquito infested depending on the season.
Large portions of that area are also owned by paper companies. They obviously use it for harvesting trees but also open it up for public use. That makes it sort of a quasi national park type area except that it's privately owned. There are also a lot of privately owned 'outdoors' cabins up there where hunters/campers go in the summer, and snowmobilers in the winter. Not many people 'live' there, but during some periods of the year there are a fair number of people around, particularly near the larger lakes.
It is a beautiful and relaxing area, I head up there once a year to go camping and 'unplug' from Boston for a week. It is somewhat refreshing to be 80 miles from the nearest paved road and 5 miles of canoe paddling from your vehicle.
Hong Kong has a density of 6,620 people per square km. If the US was that dense, we could fit the entire population (317 million) in about 48,000 square km (the US has close to 10 million square km)
Of course, we probably couldn't have that many people living in that dense an area. But we do have a long way to go before we are pushing each other into the ocean.
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_popula...
Also there's a perception of a few places as being the "big cities" even though population has changed a lot over the years. Perception hasn't changed. So even though SF is definitely dense, there are other places that are equally dense, like Miami, Philadelphia, and Louisville that people don't really think of that way. And then there are emerging big cities (but not necessarily dense) like San Antonio that people perceive as being small.
Remember, if the census block has is filled in, it could only have 1 or 2 people living in it (i.e. a farm).
We have so much dam space in the US it's mind blowing.
The looming water crisis is a particularly big problem in California, Arizona, and parts of the Southwest. Interestingly, farmland irrigation accounts for a bigger drain on water than almost all of the nearby cities combined.
And as the note about the ND-SD border mentions, there are artifacts in the map that arise from the shapes and distributions of the blocks. Whether there might be few or many other such artifacts, the cartographer gives us no information to ascertain.