WASHINGTON -- More than 1,100 cities, towns and villages in the U.S. lost their status as urban areas on Thursday as the U.S. Census Bureau released a new list of places considered urban based on revised criteria.
"The whole thing about urban and rural is all about money," said Mary Craigle, bureau chief for Montana's Research and Information Services."Places that qualify as urban are eligible for transportation dollars that rural areas aren't, and then rural areas are eligible for dollars that urban areas are not."
"This change in definition is a big deal and a substantial change from the Census Bureau's long-standing procedures," said Kenneth Johnson, a senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire."It has significant implications both for policy and for researchers." In 1910, a town with 2,500 residents had a lot more goods and services than a town that size does today,"and these new definitions acknowledge that," said Michael Cline, North Carolina's state demographer.
For the first time, the Census Bureau is adding housing units to the definition of an urban area. A place can be considered urban if it has at least 2,000 housing units, based on the calculation that the average household has 2.5 people.