How urban, suburban, or rural each census tract perceives itself to be

[RI]

I've made a map of how each census tract perceives itself-- whether they're more urban (red), suburban (green), or rural (blue)-- based on data from the 2017 American Housing Survey which was released earlier this year. You can find information on the data here, but essentially HUD asked 55,000 people about their perception of their neighborhood and then projected their responses nationally.

EDIT: Here are Alaska and Hawaii.

[Alcibiades]

Wow - this is fantastic! Just quickly skimming the map, something I noticed is that a lot of small town centres perceive themselves as ‘suburban’, even though the word technically denotes an area surrounding a city.

[RINO Tom]

RI, you are a magician.  Good work.  Maps like these are so much cooler than county-level ones, and it's super interesting for me to look at places I have lived:

- A perfect example is my hometown of Peoria, IL.  Nobody in his right mind could be at a restaurant in the redeveloped Warehouse District of Peoria, looking at the skyline, and not think he is in an "urban" place, if those are the three categories.  However, even getting out to where my child hood home was just outside of Peoria Heights, the atmosphere is strikingly suburban ... but still in the city of Peoria.  Then you get places like Germantown Hills, with very high incomes and higher education attainment than your average rural area ... it's technically a "suburb" of Peoria, but it's in a small county and secluded.  Is it "rural"?  "Suburban"?  "Exurban"?  This map does an awesome job, with the shades, of showing this stuff.

- Johnson County, IA, where I mostly grew up, is interesting, too.  Iowa City is a great case to be made, IMO, for more categories ... honestly, a true "college town" is just different.  On this map, it's "Urban," but almost immediately outside of downtown it switches to lightly shaded "Suburban."  The change around Solon is cool and interesting, too.

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

This is fantastic. For years, I've been saying the obvious urban/suburban divide in Southern California is the 710 freeway and this basically confirms that.

[Sol]

Interesting how a lot of reservations self-identify as urban.

[ملكة كرينجيتوك]

The "urban" areas in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions follow city boundaries much more closely than in the West.

[jimrtex]

Wow - this is fantastic! Just quickly skimming the map, something I noticed is that a lot of small town centres perceive themselves as ‘suburban’, even though the word technically denotes an area surrounding a city.

Here is a description of the methodology.

The Urbanization Perceptions Small Area Index: An Application of Machine Learning and Small Area Estimation to Household Survey Data (.docx)

There was a bonus question to the 2017 American Household Survey that was conducted by the Census Bureau for the the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) which is a moderately large survey (55,000 housing units). The AHS is a biennial survey, which oversamples large metropolitan areas (e.g. part of the intent is to be able to characterize housing conditions in Detroit vs. Dallas, etc.).

The bonus question was:

Which one of the following best describes the area of your(this)home?

1.Urban
2.Suburban
3.Rural

If you had replied "small town center", you would be classified as non-responding.

To someone in New York City or Nassau County, NY the answer is obvious. To someone in Andrews, TX the answer is not obvious. They clearly are not rural. Almost everyone (75%) of the county residents live in the city. Rural is the empty space with nothing but windmills, oil wells, and some cattle (no water for crops). Urban might mean something like Midland or Odessa, but more likely Dallas or Houston. The people in Andrews would be perfectly capable of describing their place, but that particular question would not reveal an answer.

They then took the responses and developed a predicted response that would match actual response most of the time based on 21 variables. The strongest predictors were population and housing density. Moderate were size of incorporated place, and percentage of single family detached housing. Demographic data such as age, race, and ethnicity were weaker (these are aggregate values, e.g. percentage of population under 18, 18-24, etc.).
Suburbs probably have more under 18, less 18-24, and then more for older ages - kids go off to college, then get a job in the big city. If they marry and have children, they move to the suburbs (affordable housing, safer, better schools).

Census tracts have an ideal population of 4000 persons or 1500 housing units. Those with populations larger than 8000 should be split, those with less than 1500(?) should be merged. But the Census Bureau would prefer that they be stable over the decades since they are intended to be used for statistical purposes for small areas.

They were originally intended for large cities, in particular NYC. Rather than get one huge number for the entire city, or very big numbers for each borough, you would get 100s of numbers for small areas of the city.

Since they are used for statistical purposes, you want at least some coherence. You don't want an area where half is farmland, and the other half Stalinist apartment blocks. You want one to be 90% Stalinist apartment blocks, and the other 90% soybeans - at least as far as statistical characterization.

So in more densely populated areas, census tracts are from 1/2 to 3 square miles. If they contain 4000 persons, this is a density of 1300 to 8000 persons per square mile. Depending on how much of the area is residential and not shopping centers, schools, churches, offices, factories, parks, undeveloped, freeway easements, etc. the residential density will be somewhat higher (i.e. residential lots of less than an acre). Clearly not farmlands, but not so clearly suburban.

In Andrews County there are four census tracts. Two are in the city, and the other two are outside, though they come right up to the city limits. The two in the city are around two square miles each.

The density of Andrews, TX is 2263 ppm.

Census Tracts in Andrews County, TX (PDF)

Some densities from Hennepin County, MN

Minneapolis, MN is 7088.

Brooklyn Center 3784
Robbinsdale 4999
Crystal 3833
New Hope 4038
Golden Valley 1998
St. Louis Park 4254
Edina 3163
Richfield 5131

Brooklyn Park 2906
Plymouth 2159
Minnetonka 1847
Eden Prairie 1873
Bloomington 2390
Champlin 2826

Dayton 200
Rogers 1067
Corcoran 150
Medina 192
Orono 465

The census tracts in Andrews are a bit higher since the city limits lap out into the surrounding county census tracts. The census tracts in Minnesota are what you get, the cities are 36 square miles, and undeveloped spaces are included in the cities and census tracts.

So Andrews, from a density standpoint, looks like a second-tier Minneapolis suburb.

So imagine they asked someone in Plymouth

Which one of the following best describes the area of your(this)home?

1.Urban
2.Suburban
3.Rural

98% said suburban (I made this number up, but it might be true).

From this they conclude that persons in census tracts with a population density of 2159 ppm perceive themselves as suburban. They then look at the census tracts in Andrews, Texas and since they have a population density of 2263 they too will perceive themselves as suburban.

If you look at west Texas you will see all kinds of small cities where the census tracts have been drawn tightly around the cities, and then the rest of the county in one or two tracts. This is the correct statistical division. The city/town dwellers are different than ranchers or people who live on an acreage.

One thing the paper notes is that their prediction method over-predicts the dominant response. Since about half the persons responded "suburban", this meant more than half of the projections would be suburban. To correct for this, they classified the tracts that were most predicted to be urban as "urban" and those most predicted to be "rural" as rural.

These are the results for Andrews County. CT 9502 and 9503 are the two for the city of Andrews.

Tract	Housing Units	UPSAI_urban	UPSAI_suburban	UPSAI_rural	UPSAI_Category
9501	760	6%	31%	63%	3
9502	2295	30%	66%	3%	2
9503	1441	39%	57%	4%	1
9504	917	7%	1%	93%	3

For Andrews, TX CT 9503, the prediction is that 57% would describe the area of their home as suburban, 39% as urban, and 4% rural. Dr. RI's maps show the tract as a 57% shade of green. But the study classified CT 9503 as "urban" because 39% urban was among the higher predictions for urban. Their map would have shown it as solid red - with no shading distinction.

[jimrtex]

RI, you are a magician.  Good work.  Maps like these are so much cooler than county-level ones, and it's super interesting for me to look at places I have lived:

- A perfect example is my hometown of Peoria, IL.  Nobody in his right mind could be at a restaurant in the redeveloped Warehouse District of Peoria, looking at the skyline, and not think he is in an "urban" place, if those are the three categories.  However, even getting out to where my child hood home was just outside of Peoria Heights, the atmosphere is strikingly suburban ... but still in the city of Peoria.  Then you get places like Germantown Hills, with very high incomes and higher education attainment than your average rural area ... it's technically a "suburb" of Peoria, but it's in a small county and secluded.  Is it "rural"?  "Suburban"?  "Exurban"?  This map does an awesome job, with the shades, of showing this stuff.

- Johnson County, IA, where I mostly grew up, is interesting, too.  Iowa City is a great case to be made, IMO, for more categories ... honestly, a true "college town" is just different.  On this map, it's "Urban," but almost immediately outside of downtown it switches to lightly shaded "Suburban."  The change around Solon is cool and interesting, too.

The methodology of the study does not really capture how our perceptions are not based only on the immediate area, but its place in a larger area.

You have described your childhood home as "suburban" but this is because you are able to see the gradients in the Peoria area. Your cousin visiting from NYC might remember the corn field or grazing cows in a non-developed area, while you will remember that as being a shopping mall. Meanwhile, your country cousin will remember your home as being "nice" but that she couldn't live there because it was so crowded everywhere and everyone was so rushed.

[jimrtex]

The "urban" areas in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions follow city boundaries much more closely than in the West.

Census tracts in the Midwest are more likely to follow city/township boundaries. Also cities often expanded as workers had to be within walking distance of work or the street-car line. Wealthy and middle-class lived in the cities. It would be prestigious to be in "the city", and developers would want to be annexed to the city so they would have city water and city streets. This led to denser development.

Post WWII essentially universal automobile access meant that people could liver further from work and be more independent in location. They could live 10 miles from work, and own there own home on a residential lot. The suburban townships would development their own independent water systems, and the developer would include streets and sidewalks and water and sewer lines as they developed larger tracts of land. This led to less dense development, and usually to smaller places.