The Distinction Between Rural and Urban Markets Continues to Blur

The line between rural and urban has become increasingly blurry as American families move further away from city centers in search of space, amenities, and lifestyle changes. As suburbs increasingly become employment centers, workers can move even further into rural areas and still have a reasonable commute.

Changes in where people live and work point to the need for new kinds of classifications that consider the social and economic relationships across the urban-rural divide, according to an analysis by the U.S. Census Bureau. Such definitions may move away from describing communities simply as urban, rural, metropolitan, or nonmetropolitan.

A rural community within easy driving distance of an urban area, for example, has access to services, amenities, and opportunities that are more urban by definition. Meanwhile, a small town more distant from a larger urban center might support services and retail not needed in small communities on the edge of a large urban area, allowing small businesses to compete against larger urban retailers. Isolated rural areas may not have enough people to sustain retail establishments, hospitals and other services, the analysis noted.

Currently, the Census Bureau defines urban areas as densely developed territory encompassing a variety of residential, commercial and nonresidential land uses. Rural is any territory not in an urban area. Based on the Census Bureau’s definition, 55.7% of the nation’s rural population lives within metropolitan statistical areas.

The Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service defines Frontier and Remote (FAR) levels that identify ZIP codes where most of the population is at various distances from different sizes of Census Bureau urban areas. The National Center for Education Statistics’ locale codes identify areas as city, suburban, town and rural, distinguished further by population size and proximity to or distance from an urban area.

“Delineating a line between rural and urban America has always been problematic, and the complexity of today’s settlement system now makes futile any search for a one-size-fits-all solution,” wrote Michael Ratcliffe, senior geographer.

In the U.S. Census Bureau’s geography division, and U.S. Department of Agriculture economic research service geographer John Cromartie in the Rural Definitions and Measures Tools guide. “A better strategy is to recognize that urban and rural are multi-dimensional concepts incorporating size, density, distance and other perspectives.”