ACS Data Users Group

Happy New Year, everyone!

I am looking for percent rural and urban population and land area by counties for 2020 census. I am unable to locate this file. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

Indraneel

The only county data on rural status I know is USDA typology (though not-rural is not the same as urban)

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rural-classifications/
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/rural-urban-continuum-codes/

there’s also Rural Urban Continuum codes above for counties which might help with the Urban part ( and also make some distinctions within rural counties)

—Tim Henderson

That ain't the half of it, Tim. Don't forget RUCAs, FORHP classifications, USDA Urban Influence Codes, Isserman Rural-Urban Density Codes, or any of the other two dozen or so rural definitions in use at various federal agencies.

just to state the obvious:

USDA/ERS's rural-urban continuum and these others are methodologically independent of USCB's urban-rural designations. But interesting. So... shop around for the classification scheme that fits your purpose.

--TG

Right you are, Todd. I was responding more to Tim than to Neel_2019.

[quote userid="3302" url="~/discussion-forum/f/forum/1127/percent-rural-and-urban-population-by-counties/2953#2953"]shop around[/quote]

Indeed, this is what I tell our clients & users:

• Learn what urban/rural classification system predominates in your area of research.
• Determine what geographic level(s) are available in your source data.
• Choose geographic granularity based on scope or type of analysis.

Dept of Education urban/rural 12 category (4 major with 3 minor in each major) GIS layer -- https://nces.ed.gov/programs/edge/Geographic/LocaleBoundaries Todd Graham Tim Henderson

and "Census-defined" -- very interesting, Thanks Stas. At a glance looks like they're based on ZCTA so they can match school locations? This may be the first public data I've seen that attempts to define "suburban" -- some places have been doing that with aerial photography (NY Times) or other data tricks (Brookings)

Even though it hasn't been updated since 2013, I really like the CDC's urban-rural classification system for counties:

www.cdc.gov/.../urban_rural.htm

Ooh, I like it! And it looks like they will be updating it this year.

One of the "Urban and Rural" deliverables is the soon(?) upcoming release of the Census Blocks file, UR version, thru Census TIGER. This should be near-identical to the Census Blocks file, PL version, released in summer 2021 - but now the UR code and UrbanArea ID field will be filled in (instead of blank).

Census's press kit says this will be published "January 2023" :-\

Once that's available, you'll be able to summarize population, land area, etc by the UR code & county FIPS.

In theory, these stats should also be queryable thru data.census.gov - when available - but you might have to wait until Census Bureau puts up the DHC file (formerly SF1) online. I'm guessing on this. The redesign of DEC products has made some things unpredictable.

--Todd Graham

The 2020-vintage urban-rural designations haven't yet been released.

Moreover, the Bureau doesn't report urban areas in terms of counties. You could use CBSAs (micropolitan and metropolitan counties), with non-CBSAs considered "rural". Most social scientists would NOT consider this adequate, though.

Jinx, Todd Graham! I owe you a Coke.

FWIW, this census.gov web page provides the most current info about their urban/rural definitions (the official Census urban/rural definitions, not USDA, OMB CBSAs, etc.). There's a link there to a very recent (12/29/22) press release that announced the new 2020 urban areas, including some high-level stats about them. (Maybe this is the press kit Todd was referring to in his reply.) It links to a Federal Register Notice that lists the new UAs with their populations, housing counts & land areas, but I don't see any other source of that info available yet.

Echoing what Todd said, I fully expect we'll have access to 2020 urban/rural populations by county sometime this year, but it's not yet clear when!

Thank you everyone for insightful comments and suggestions! I am hoping that rural/urban populations by counties will be released soon by the Census.

Hi Neel_2019 ,

The Bureau hasn't yet released urban/rural populations by county yet (that I know of), but you can get estimates of these figures using the newly released Urban Areas, which are now available as a geography in MCDC's Geocorr application.

Here's a direct link to the query, with results from all states.

If you want to run it yourself, on the Geocorr input form, choose 2020 counties as your source geography, and 2022 urban/rural portion as your target geography.

If you're running a query against many states, it's much faster to deselect the option for HTML output, which takes a long time to generate, and select only CSV output.

Multiply the allocation factors by 100 to get percentages.

Hi there, I work in public transit at the county level and I am looking for the same thing for our NTD reporting. they released the 2020 urban area but i cannot get the areas broken down by block which is what i need to see the total urban population, i brought it into GIS and I still cant break it out by my county. My next step is to contact my local planning agencies to see if they have that number for me. It is so hard to find and I don't know why they don't break it out by block. Here is a link of the new 2020 urban areas, if you haven't seen this. The second link is my county by block but you could put in your state and see if you find anything. I am not 100% sure that H002 is the correct table, so take this with a grain of salt

FTA Census Map (arcgis.com)

https://data.census.gov/table?q=Urban+Areas&g=0400000US06$050000_0500000US06061$1000000&tid=DECENNIALSF12000.H002