4 ms·

I'd like to see a source for your claim that most Americans live in cities. As far as I know, the census does not differentiate between suburban and urban areas

I'd like to see a source for your claim that most Americans live in cities. As far as I know, the census does not differentiate between suburban and urban areas so we don't have any "official" numbers on how many Americans live in suburban areas. They are just lumped into the urban population.

opencl 8y ago
Yes, the census "80% of people live in cities" thing really just means "incorporated areas". In reality ~2/3 of housing stock in the US is detached[1]. Traditional detached houses and mobile homes combined are around 78 million. Now I have not seen detailed statistics about the exact number of people living in each type but it seems pretty safe to say that the average household size for detached housing is at least as high as for apartments, and most likely higher. US average household size is 2.58 people which would imply ~200 million people in detached housing, well over half the population. [1]https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/units.html https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/unit...
ghaff 8y ago
In fact the US census definition is even wider than that for urban. My town's a good example. It's essentially a 7K population rural town; I'm in the middle of about 100 acres with a couple neighbors. But I'm fairly near a major city and I'm solidly urban per the census. It's complicated to determine what's urban and suburban--much less exurban (which is what ESRI calls where I live). [1] But the census uses a measure where the areas it counts as "rural" are mostly very rural. [1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-suburban-are-big-american-cities/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-suburban-are-big-am...