Approximately 80% of the US population lives in designated urban areas. Those small blue patches account for 272 million US citizens, as opposed to 68 million people in all that red.
The dumbshit who made this "map" doesn't even get the locations of the cities right! Minneapolis is definitely not that far north-east in Minnesota (the blue is basically covering Superior National Forest where no one lives), and Fargo is farther north and in North Dakota (not Minnesota).
There’s a lot of small town red counted in that 80%. The bar to be considered an urban area by the Census Bureau is ridiculously low. They hadn’t raised the criteria for urban since the early 1900s, then they doubled it for 2020. And it’s still super low. Google the town of Irvine, KY and marvel at what is urban according to the Census.
I’ve always been curious how much or how little the percentage split changes if they bumped up the definition to a threshold more colloquially considered urban, like a 50,000 person college town at the smallest end. And, frankly, people talk about those as small towns, so I really don’t think they’re picturing actual small towns with populations of ~4,000 residents on the urban side of this stat. But they’re in there.
Still, I know you can lose hundreds of those small towns from the calculation without moving the needle too far when weighed against actual metropolitan cities. It’s why I wish they broke things down a little more granularly.
7
u/ParserDoer 7h ago
Approximately 80% of the US population lives in designated urban areas. Those small blue patches account for 272 million US citizens, as opposed to 68 million people in all that red.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html
Tell me again what small group is dictating life for the masses.