subject: What Exactly Is A Rural Area And Why Should We Care 2 [print this page] Rural areas comprise open country and settlements with fewer than 2,500 residents, areas designated as rural can have population densities as high as 999 per square mile or as low as 1 person per square mile. USDA The USDA's Office of Rural Development may define rural by various population thresholds.
The 2002 farm bill (P.L. 107 to 171, Sec. 6020) defined rural and rural area as any area other than (1) a city or town that has a population of greater than 50,000 inhabitants, and (2) the urbanized areas contiguous and adjacent to such a city or town. The rural urban continuum codes, urban influence codes, and rural county typology codes developed by USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) allow researchers to break out the standard metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas into smaller residential groups.
For example, a metropolitan county is one that contains an urbanized area, or one that has a twenty five percent commuter rate to an urbanized area regardless of population. OMB: Under the Core Based Statistical Areas used by the OMB, a metropolitan county, or Metropolitan Statistical Area, consists of (1) central counties with one or more urbanized areas (as defined by the Census Bureau) and (2) outlying counties that are economically tied to the core counties as measured by worker commuting data (i.e. if 25 percent of workers living there commute to the core counties, or if 25 percent of the employment in the county consists of workers coming from the central counties).
Non metro counties are outside the boundaries of metro areas and are further subdivided into Micropolitan Statistical Areas cantered on urban clusters of 10,000 to 50,000 residents, and all remaining non core counties.
National Centre for Education Statistics (NCES) revised its definition of rural schools in 2006 after working with the Census Bureau to create a new locale classification system to capitalize on improved geocoding technology and the 2000 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) definitions of metro areas that rely less on population size and county boundaries than proximity of an address to an urbanized area.
The new classification system has four major local categories, city, suburban, town, and rural, each of which is subdivided into three subcategories. Cities and suburbs are subdivided into the categories small, midsize, or large, towns and rural areas are subdivided by their proximity to an urbanized area into the categories fringe, distant, or remote. These twelve categories are based on several key concepts that Census uses to define an area's urbanicity, principal city, urbanized area, and urban cluster.
