One factor is surely simply definitional: The Census Bureau keeps redefining metropolitan areas to include more and more rural land. It's not that people are moving out; rather, the ciies are moving in. For example, I live about 120 miles by road, or 90 by crow, from the Twin Cities in Minnesota, but I can almost walk to the boundary of their MSA, which includes great swaths of farmland and undeveloped tracts.
I don’t put much stock in anything that came out of the last census. It was run by corrupt Commie ‘RATS and the results are what the ‘RATS want them to be. Just the ‘RATS having more “Fun With Numbers”. It’s all bull****. Most conservatives didn’t even participate.
The worse it gets the cheaper it’ll be for me to go rural.
“Much of this is probably wishful thinking on the part of urban-centric AP”
OR NOT...
Democrat policies have destroyed the small factories that dotted the landscape outside the cities, long gone to China or Mexico.
$3 to $4 gas has made the long commute to the cities unworkable for all but the highest paid execs or Government apparatchiks.
What’s left is either Ag, struggling small biz owners drowning in government regulation, Obamacare, and taxes, local gov employees, and those working for them, or those on assistance.
Hope Yen seems to be wishing away redstate citizens
I would rather we had 17 year olds in minor towns making $15 than Inner city welfare cases
They’ve classified my area as “suburban” now.
That’s hysterical.
How many “suburban” two lane roads get closed down due to a herd of Angus snapping a fence and throwing a cow liberation party?
They wish.
There are so few people here in “the suburbs” that our little post office is being shut down and our mail is now being delivered from the next nearest town...a “suburb” of about 300 people.
Although, since they do have 2 stop lights now, that town is probably considered “urban”.
Laughable.
It has been a problem for a long time and won't go away any time soon.
Urbanization is almost irreversible unless/until civilization collapses then population declines turns into fewer cities, economic depression and more self-sufficient communities at a lower standard of living. That is the pattern across continents and millenia.
Yes, it’s part of our master plan. Now stop building McMansions. Oh wait, we took care of that too.
LLS
Down here in Texas, where real estate is still luke-warm overall, rural land is a red hot market. We live in a poor, small county where the price of “small tracts” under 100 acres has just about tripled in the past ten years. In spite of the census definitions of “urban” and “rural” and urban annexation it seems the folks with money are heading to Green Acres and leaving the cities to illegal immigrants, drug dealers, gang bangers and Democrats who want to live in iddy-biddy apartments.