'Urban' now requires 5,000 people or 2,000 housing units; losing 'rural' designation could help some towns, hurt others

Gravette, Ark., pop. 3,547, was urban and is now rural.
(File photo by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

About 1,100 U.S. towns with 4.2 million residents are now classified as rural, not urban, because the Bureau of the Census has changed the criteria it uses to make those distinctions, as it does after each census. This change is the biggest since 1910, reports Mike Schneider of The Associated Press. 

"The new criteria raised the population threshold from 2,500 to 5,000 people and housing units were added to the definition," Schneider reports. "The change matters because rural and urban areas often qualify for different types of federal funding for transportation, housing, health care, education and agriculture,"The federal government doesn’t have a standard definition of urban or rural, but the Census Bureau’s definition often provides a baseline."

Mary Craigle, chief of Montana’s Research and Information Services Bureau, told AP, “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.”

The change reflects the reduced economic vitality and diversity of small towns. North Carolina State Demographer Michael Cline told AP that in 1910, a town with 2,500 people had many more goods and services than a typical town that size today, “and these new definitions acknowledge that.”

The Census Bureau had proposed raising the urban threshold to 10,000 but retreated in the face of opposition. The 5,000 threshold means that slightly, to 79.6% of the U.S. population is urban and 20.4% is rural. Under the old criterion, almost 81% was urban, Schneider reports.

UPDATE, Jan. 6: The bureau told Josh Zumbrun of The Wall Street Journal that its old 2,500 threshold was “the lowest in use among all federal agencies. We see the change in our minimum threshold as signifying that the Census Bureau is listening to stakeholders and feedback from other agencies and is matching the way others have characterized and classified settlement in the United States.” Zumbrun concluded, "The official rural population count has long been held down by an arbitrary definition. The country is more rural and small-town than we think."

This is the first time the bureau has used housing units to define urban areas. "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," Schneider reports. "Among the beneficiaries of using housing instead of people are resort towns in ski or beach destinations, or other places with lots of vacation homes, since they can qualify as urban based on the number of homes instead of full-time residents."