More than 1,300 small urban areas will be classified rural under new Census criteria; could affect federal funding

More than 1,300 urban areas will be reclassified as rural under the Census Bureau's new criteria; some worry rural areas could get less federal funding. "A revised list of urban areas won’t be released until later this year, but a third of the areas deemed urban a decade ago would be knocked into the rural category under the new criteria," reports Mike Schneider of The Associated Press.

The biggest change is that the bureau will count housing units instead of people to define urbanity and rurality. Under the old definition, a place with at 2,500 or more residents was considered urban, but many people considered that number, in use for more than a century, too low. Now, urban areas will be those with at least 2,000 housing units, which translates to a population of about 5,000.

"Some communities worry that the switch to housing units will cause some areas to be underestimated if the Census Bureau uses the U.S. average of 2.6 people per household for its calculations," Schneider reports. "A coalition of associations representing cities, counties, planners and transportation groups had objected to many of the proposed changes last year, saying the switch from people to housing units would miss variations in development and land-use patterns.

"The Census Bureau tried to address those concerns by creating three levels of urban-area definitions for census blocks, which are the nation’s smallest geographic unit and show rural areas inside counties that are part of metropolitan areas largely because of commuting patterns. Census blocks will be urban if they have 425 housing units per square mile, the equivalent of 1,105 people. Before the change, census blocks with at least 500 people per square mile were considered urban. The redesignation gives the bureau a way to distinguish between the 'urban nucleus' and less densely populated areas, typically on the fringes of urban areas."

Some stakeholders worry that rural areas could lose federal funding for health care, education, infrastructure and more. Though the bureau warns that the new criteria should be used for statistical purposes only, other federal agencies routinely use its classification system to determine who qualifies for funding, Schneider reports. So more rural areas means blanket funding would have to stretch further, and competition could increase for grants.

Magazine's 'short, selective biography' of Berry has lines from forthcoming book, which will 'offend most everyone'

Wendell Berry (Guy Mendes photo)

Wendell Berry, advocate of the largely rural fundamentals that formed humanity before the Industrial Revolution, gets a big write-up in the Feb. 28 issue of The New Yorker, from none other than the magazine's executive editor, Dorothy Wickenden. For her, it completes a cycle of nearly 60 years.

The daughter of Berry's first commercial editor, Wickenden draws on his and Berry's correspondence from 1964 to 1977, when the writer, as he acknowledged then, was still discovering himself. But it also offers glimpses of his next book and looks at his legacy, which includes The Berry Center, which promotes “prosperous, well-tended farms serving and supporting healthy local communities” and the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Vermont's Sterling College, which offers a tuition-free college degree in sustainable family farming.

Wickenden's expansive, 9,384-word article amounts to a short, selective biography of one of America's most loved and yet also scoffed-at writers. She sums up what we know: "Berry’s admirers call him an Isaiah-like prophet. . . . Critics see him as a utopian or a crank, a Luddite who never met a technological innovation he admired." But this is not just history; it offers insight into the land, culture and neighbors that made Wendell Berry, now 87, who he is -- and why he is what he is.

 

After visiting Berry at his Kentucky farm, Wickenden wrote, "From this sliver of vanishing America, Berry cultivates the unfashionable virtues of neighborliness and compassion. He divides his time between writing and farmwork, continuing his vocation of championing sustainable agriculture in a country fueled by industrial behemoths, while striving to insure that rural Americans—a mocked, despised, and ever-dwindling minority—do not perish altogether."

Berry let Wickenden read, and quote from, his forthcoming book, due this summer: The Need to Be Whole, in which "He argues that the problem of race is inextricable from the violent abuse of our natural resources, and that 'White people’s part in slavery and all the other outcomes of race prejudice, so damaging to its victims,' has also been 'gravely damaging to white people.'"

Wickenden says the book "contains something to offend almost everyone," and her major example is a man Berry calls “one of the great tragic figures of our history,” Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. "He presents Lee as a white supremacist and a slaveholder, but also as a reluctant soldier who opposed secession and was forced to choose between conflicting loyalties: his country and his people." She quotes from the book: “Lee said, ‘I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children.’ For him, the words ‘birthplace’ and ‘home’ and even ‘children’ had a complexity and vibrance of meaning that at present most of us have lost.”

Wickenden writes, "If readers were incredulous about Berry’s [1977] claim that a pencil was a better tool than a computer, it’s not hard to imagine how many will react to his plea that we extend sympathy to a general whose army fought to perpetuate slavery in America. Several of Berry’s friends urged him to abandon the book, anticipating Twitter eruptions and withering reviews."

“My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor,” Berry writes. “They are asking me to lay aside my old effort to tell the truth, as it is given to me by my own knowledge and judgment, in order to take up another art, which is that of public relations.”

Berry's politically incorrect truth-telling does not extend to his Trump-voting neighbors, 30 miles northeast of Metro Louisville, because that wouldn't be neighborly. He writes, “If two neighbors know that they may seriously disagree, but that either of them, given even a small change of circumstances, may desperately need the other, should they not keep between them a sort of pre-paid forgiveness? They ought to keep it ready to hand, like a fire extinguisher. . . . A society with an absurdly attenuated sense of sin starts talking then of civil war or holy war.”

Wickenden probably didn't realize it, but for some readers those lines will echo in another part of her story, about Berry's connections to Appalachia and the town of Whitesburg, including Tom and Pat Gish, who published The Mountain Eagle every week for 52 years, even after their office was firebombed by a local policeman who state police said was hired by coal operators. But even as the Gishes revealed the Tennessee Valley Authority's role in strip mining and helped visiting journalists explore the region's ills, they were always careful not to publish demeaning pictures of local residents like those that typically illustrate such national stories.

That's community journalism. Berry once defined "community" this way: “A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”

Last-minute Trump administration proposal would define fewer areas as metropolitan; see county-level map

Proposed change in metropolitan county definition
Daily Yonder map; click here for the interactive version.

A proposal published in the Federal Register on the last full day of the Trump administration would change the definition of metropolitan areas, "potentially affecting the way scholars, policy makers, and federal funding agencies address rural needs," Tim Marema reports for The Daily Yonder. "The proposal, posted on Jan. 19, would raise the minimum population of cities that constitute the core of metropolitan statistical areas from 50,000 to 100,000."

Under the Office of Management and Budget's proposal, 251 counties in 144 metro areas would be reclassified as nonmetropolitan. The counties have about 18 million residents, so the non-metro population of the U.S., the broadest and bluntest definition of "rural," would expand nearly 40 percent, from 46 million to 64 million, Marema notes. The OMB study committee's recommendation said the newly non-metro areas would be classified as "micropolitan," a definition that now applies to those with cores cities of 10,000 to 49,999.

The proposal, if approved by the Biden administration, wouldn't take effect until 2023. "The potential impact of the change is complicated and multifaceted, according to the rural researchers the Daily Yonder contacted. None of the four researchers contacted knew about the change before it appeared in the Federal Register on January 19," Marema reports. "It’s unclear how seriously the new Biden administration will consider the proposal."

Federal rural hospital grants now available to 295 counties that are in metro areas but lack urbanized areas of their own

"The Health Resources and Services Administration finalized this week its proposal to modify the list of geographic areas considered rural in an effort to extend grant eligibility for hospitals," Alia Paavola reports for Becker's Hospital Review. "The new definition of rural area now includes outlying metropolitan-statistical-area counties with no urbanized-area population. These counties are now eligible for rural health grant programs."

HRSA's Office of Federal Rural Health Policy, which oversees the grants, says the change adds 295 counties to the list of those meeting the criteria. The rule change applies to rural health grants that begin in fiscal year 2022. Click here to see if your county is now eligible for HRSA grants. 

Quick hits: online toolkit helps local governments get transportation grants; the effect of rurality on voters

Here's a roundup of stories with rural resonance; if you do or see similar work that should be shared on The Rural Blog, email us at heather.chapman@uky.edu.

Rural local governments may be able to more easily access grant money for infrastructure projects through an online toolkit hosted by the Transportation Department.

Opinion: Satellite Starlink is better than nothing for rural broadband. Read more here.

Study: Rural hospitals without obstetricians need more training in emergency pregnancy care. Read more here.

Rurality itself had a distinct effect on votes in the presidential election. Read more here.

Rural fire chiefs talk about the need for more volunteers. Read more here.

Judges might sentence fewer people to prison if local governments had to pay for their prison stays. Read more here.

A new peer-reviewed paper shows that a cattle farm that practices regenerative grazing improved its soil and lowered its carbon footprint, but requires more land. Read more here.

Report: When growing rural counties are reclassified as urban, that makes rural America look less successful

Headwaters Economics map shows in light blue counties that were classified as rural from 1970 to 2018, those that were reclassified from rural to urban in dark blue, and those that were always urban during that period in white. 

Rural America suffers many disparities compared to metropolitan counties, but it's misleading to compare rural counties from one year to the next, because the most successful rural counties are often reclassified as metropolitan—leaving only the less-prosperous counties to be counted as rural, according to a new report by Headwaters Economics.

"Rural America is reported as declining in part because we no longer count as Rural those counties that grew into a Metro classification. We are measuring those counties that stay Rural which, by definition, have not grown," says the report.

"The research showed that 48% of counties that were classified as rural in 1970 grew into metropolitan counties by 2018," Jan Pytalski reports for The Daily Yonder. "But the ones that remained rural had their share of success as well. For example, the average poverty rate in rural counties overall dropped 26% between 1970 and 2018."

Rural voters more influential in some Super Tuesday states

Rural and urban registered voters in Super Tuesday states (Daily Yonder chart; click on the image to enlarge it).
Maine, the most rural state by population,  is not included in the chart because current totals were not available.

Fourteen states will hold their primaries today, and though rural voters will be underrepresented because of major cities in California and Texas, eight of the states have an above-average number of registered voters in rural areas, Tim Marema and Bill Bishop report for The Daily Yonder.

Maine and Vermont have the highest percentage of rural voters, with about two-thirds of each state's voters living in rural areas. But those states represent only 3.6 million people—5 percent of those eligible to vote today. "Besides Vermont and Maine, Super Tuesday states with above-average numbers of rural voters are Alabama, 24%; Arkansas, 37%; Minnesota, 22%; North Carolina, 22%; Oklahoma, 34%; and Tennessee, 22%," Bishop and Marema note.

Texas has the largest number of rural voters of any Super Tuesday state, with almost 1.9 million. North Carolina comes second with almost 1.5 million, and Oklahoma is third with about 916,000. But rural voters are less likely to make a big impact in Texas than elsewhere, since they make up a much smaller share of overall voters than in North Carolina or Oklahoma. Rural Native Americans could have a big impact in Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Colorado, Maria Givens reports for the Yonder.

Still, Super Tuesday results will largely reflect metropolitan preferences, since half of the nation's 10 largest metro areas will vote today, Marema and Bishop note. But, they write: "That’s not to say rural voters won’t have an impact. It’s the Democratic primary that matters this year, since President Donald Trump faces no serious opposition. In a large Democratic field, smaller margins will matter. And that’s exactly when blocs of voters like the rural electorate could make a difference."

Ag Secretary Perdue calls for uniform definition of 'rural'

Most longtime readers of The Rural Blog realize that researchers studying rural America must generally take pains to define what, precisely, they consider rural. The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, defines it by what it isn't: anything that isn't metropolitan is rural. But different federal agencies define rural in different ways, which leads to confusion as communities qualify for some rural programs but not others.

"As larger socioeconomic forces have shaped demographic changes in rural communities and spurred population shifts, some experts and policymakers — Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue among them — have called for an updated calculation that takes more factors into account beyond population size," Liz Crampton reports for Politico.

Many federal programs for rural communities require a population under 10,000, but others require a population under 20,000. A metropolitan designation requires a city of 50,000. Some growing communities can qualify for programs via grandfather clauses. And some federal officials can take into account whether an area is "rural in character" when determining whether a community qualifies, Crampton reports.

Perdue pushed for a comprehensive definition of rural to be included in the 2018 Farm Bill. While the bill didn't include that measure, "It did increase the population limit for eligibility for water, community facilities and broadband programs to 50,000 people. A USDA spokesperson said the department is working on implementing those provisions," Crampton reports.

Changing the qualifications for programs would cause major disruption to non-profits and other organizations that facilitate rural development programs, warned Tom Collishaw, president and CEO of housing non-profit Self-Help Enterprises. "We’ve built our business models around this, and our delivery systems around this and we’ve built economies of scale," Collishaw said. "We’ve figured out how to do this."