The U.S. Census Bureau is changing the definition of an urban area. Some communities that will soon be considered rural worry that the change, which impacts federal funding, could affect health clinics as well as transportation and education.
“Going with the new definition could limit the number of rural health clinics moving forward and have a negative impact on rural access to care,” said Shannon Wu, senior associate director of policy at the hospital association.
For starters, the Census Bureau is switching to housing units instead of people as the basis for calculating what should be an urban area. Bureau officials say the change will make it easier to update between once-a-decade head counts of the U.S. They also contend that it’s needed because aintroduces errors into 2020 census population numbers at small geographies to protect people’s identities. Housing counts stay accurate under the method.
A place had to have at least 2,500 people to be urban under old criteria that lasted more than a century. Now, it will need at least 2,000 housing units, the equivalent of about 5,000 people. 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.
Places with 50,000 residents or more were considered “urbanized areas,” compared with “urban clusters” having between 2,500 and 49,999 residents in the past. But those distinctions will be eliminated and all will be called urban areas under the new definition.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. For instance, Madera County, California, has 3.
The Census Bureau says the new definition should be used for statistical purposes only. But the bureau’s urban areas form the cores of metro and micro areas, and its definitions provide the basis for how other agencies classify urban and rural areas in determining eligibility for federal funding. The bureau reviews the definitions every 10 years
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