On Sat, 25 Feb 2012 06:08:19 -0800, Larry Jaques
wrote:

On Sat, 25 Feb 2012 07:24:17 -0500, "Mike Marlow"
wrote:

Larry Jaques wrote:


The East Coast is one big city, as is the greater San Angeles area
here on the Left Coast. You've never been rural so you don't know.

That's what so many people think - until they see the area. Oh - we are

I was back there in '98 with a buddy, doing a PM on a gamma camera up
on Lon Gisland. (Massapequa, IIRC.) We drove from there to D.C. and I
saw all the forests between. Talk about tunnel vision on a really dull
trip. BORING! Anyway, I know it's not one big city, but the density
there is much higher than here in the West.


very rural here. My "lot" that my house sits on is 20 acres and it's all
woods. When I first built my house my nearest neighbor was 1/2 mile up the
road. Not so now, but... Grew up on 400 acres of dairy farm - though those
things are pretty much a thing of the past now. To the contrary, I've never
been urban - or even suburban for that matter.

Geeze, neither you nor CW caught the Demolition Man reference. sigh
Hmm, I missed the Blade Runner and Double Dragon references myself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Angeles


BTW - how much can I sue you for? Maybe we can cut a deal...


from:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/J...ralAmerica.htm

The term €œrural€� conjures widely shared images of farms, ranches,
villages, small towns, and open spaces. Yet, when it comes to
distinguishing rural from urban places, researchers and policymakers
employ a dizzying array of definitions. The use of multiple
definitions reflects the reality that rural and urban are
multidimensional concepts, making clear-cut distinctions between the
two difficult. Is population density the defining concern, or is it
geographic isolation? Is it small population size that makes it
necessary to distinguish rural from urban? If so, how small is rural?
Because the U.S. is a nation in which so many people live in areas
that are not clearly rural or urban, seemingly small changes in the
way rural areas are defined can have large impacts on who and what are
considered rural.



'Rural definitions based on the administrative concept start with the
Census Bureaus list of €œplaces.€� Most places listed in the 2000
Census are incorporated entities with legally prescribed boundaries
(e.g., Peoria City), but some are locally recognized, unincorporated
communities. Rural is defined as territory outside these place
boundaries, together with places smaller than a selected population
threshold. For example, USDAs Telecom Hardship Loan Program defines
rural as any area outside Census places of 5,000 or more people.

Rural definitions based on the land-use concept most often start with
the Census Bureaus set of urban areas, consisting of densely settled
territory. Rural as defined by the Census Bureau includes open
countryside and settlements with fewer than 2,500 residents. Urban
areas are specifically designed to capture densely settled territory
regardless of where municipal boundaries are drawn. They include
adjacent suburbs that are outside place boundaries and exclude any
territory within places that does not meet the density criteria.

The most widely used rural definition based on the economic concept
consists of the 2,050 nonmetropolitan (nonmetro) counties lying
outside metro boundaries. Metropolitan (metro) areas are county-based
entities that account for the economic influence of cities. The Office
of Management and Budget (OMB) defines them as:

Core counties with one or more urban areas of 50,000 people or more,
and;

Outlying counties economically tied to the core counties, as measured
by the share of the employed population that commutes to and from core
counties.
Using these criteria, urban entities are defined as countywide or
multicounty labor market areas extending well beyond their built-up
cores.

Prior to 2000, the land-use concept (Census urban areas) and the
economic concept (OMB metro areas) were not applied to urban entities
below 50,000 people. In 2000, the Census Bureau added urban areas
ranging in size from 2,500 to 49,999 (labeling them urban clusters to
distinguish them from the larger urbanized areas that had been defined
since 1950). OMB added a new micropolitan (micro) area classification,
using the same criteria as used for metro areas but lowering the
threshold to 10,000 people. These modifications greatly increase the
flexibility of researchers and administrators to tailor rural
definitions to different target populations.
Counties are often too large, especially in Western States, to
accurately represent labor market areas in all cases. Thus, metro and
micro areas often include territory that is legitimately rural from
both a land-use and economic perspective. ERS Rural-Urban Commuting
Area (RUCA) codes provide an alternative, economic classification
using census tracts rather than counties. Although relatively new,
these codes have been widely adopted for both research and policy,
especially in rural health applications.

RUCA codes follow (as closely as possible) the same concepts and
criteria used to define metro and micro areas. By using the more
detailed census tracts, they provide a different geographic pattern of
settlement classification. While counties are generally too large to
delineate labor market areas below the 10,000 population threshold,
RUCA codes identify such areas for towns with populations as small as
2,500. Additional information and files containing the codes are
available in the ERS Measuring Rurality Briefing Room.