Colleagues,
We had an interesting discussion a while back on urban-rural definitions and it prompted me to look at the latest Census Bureau definitions that came out in late December
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-areas/urban-rural.html
I'm looking at some of the changes -- in a nutshellf the 'urban' definition was restricted to a minimum 5,000 (up from 2,500) population OR 2,000 housing units (a new metric), causing a number of places between 2,500 and 5,000 population to change from 'urban' to 'rural' and a handful of places with low population but high housing units (they seem to be spots for vacation rentals or second homes) to change from 'rural' to 'urban'
My question since there are so many involved with grants and other funding support here -- does this make any practical difference for funding? Preliminary questioning led me to documentation like this suggesting that, at least for health care, this Urban Area definition is not considered useful for funding purposes because it doesn't follow county or municipal boundaries. BUT under certain conditions the presence of a UA can determine whether an 'outlying' county in a metro can be considered rural. "Starting in FY 2022, we’ll consider all outlying metro counties without a UA to be rural." according to this https://www.hrsa.gov/rural-health/about-us/what-is-rural
Has anybody heard of any effects of these changed 'rural' definitions on funding or anything else as a practical matter? I'm having a hard time finding specific cases, if you know of any I'd love to hear on or off the list -- Tim Henderson, Pew Stateline
Yes that restates the issue I asked about — I haven’t found any cases yet where there are funding implications. The consensus seems to be that this just brings Census Bureau definitions a little closer to other federal agencies which have a much broader definition of rural. Even the UA issue I mentioned is meaningless because it refers to the old UA definition of 50,000 and now 5,000 is the floor. (That’s because they erased the distinction between Urban Area and Urban Cluster). Todd Graham weighed in on this on Twitter and others pointed out RUCA codes used for health funding in which this range of areas that lost urban status (population 2,500-4,999) were already well within rural guidelines and so were areas up to 50,000 population (codes 4-10 are considered rural)
www.ers.usda.gov/.../