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Nobody lives here: Nearly 5M Census Blocks with zero population (2014)
- thanhhaimai 6y agoTL;DR: Blocks have zero population mostly because - physically restrictive (lake, swamps, mountains, deserts...) - legally/socially restrictive (commercial/industrial/military... zones)
- Razengan 6y ago> Water features such lakes, rivers, swamps and floodplains are revealed as places where it is hard for people to live. Interesting..
- Lendal 6y agoInteresting that on this map, the only state boundary revealed by this data alone is North Dakota. Any ideas why that might be?
- quasse 6y agoLooks like the author updated the article to address that: >Update: On a more detailed examination of those two states, I’m convinced the contrast here is due to differences in the sizes of the blocks. North Dakota’s blocks are more consistently small (StDev of 3.3) while South Dakota’s are more varied in area (StDev of 9.28). West of the Missouri River, South Dakota’s blocks are substantially larger than those in ND, so a single inhabitant can appear to take up more space. Between the states, this provides a good lesson in how changing the size and shape of a geographic unit can alter perceptions of the landscape.
- thanhhaimai 6y agoThe author noted in the post that: > I’m convinced the contrast here is due to differences in the sizes of the blocks. North Dakota’s blocks are more consistently small (StDev of 3.3) while South Dakota’s are more varied in area (StDev of 9.28).
- caf 6y agoThe New Mexico / Colorado border is also somewhat visible.
- genericone 6y agoOn android device, both portrait and landscape mode, the right side of the text is cutoff. Desktop view mode fixes it.
- culopatin 6y agoSame as iPhone. I just moved from Android and after trying for 1min I couldn’t figure out how to get desktop mode in Safari. Sometimes I find myself fighting things like that in iOS. I’m just supposed to guess.
- Jtsummers 6y agoFor whatever reason the "Request Desktop Site" option is hidden in Safari behind the icon in the address bar that suggests it should just be about controlling the font (small-cap-A, big-cap-A). I think it took me two years to finally remember that consistently instead of just being frustrated that I couldn't find it.
- eznzt 6y agoConsider yourself lucky, a few years ago it was under the "share" button. Yes, really.
- Jtsummers 6y agoYep. And I had finally gotten used to that when they moved it. At least the "share" button in iOS is a bit of a catch all (sharing with messaging apps, email, make a bookmark, print it, add to home screen, copy, and more actions), so it at least made some sense. Moving it behind a font control button makes no sense.
- saagarjha 6y agoiOS actually refers to the icon as the "action" icon.
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- walrus01 6y agoIt would be interesting to see this compared as a 1:1 overlap with BLM land in the western states.
- sethhochberg 6y agoFor anybody not super familiar with US government departments and confused by reading this after seeing other headlines coming out of the country in recent years, BLM in this context is "Bureau of Land Management" and not "Black Lives Matter". The BLM is the federal department that oversees most governmental land that isn't managed by some other department. Broadly speaking, this is land which isn't run by a local/state/tribal government, may not have any particular use designated, and is (usually) uninhabited - or at least intended to be.
- walrus01 6y agoIndeed, for reference, truly vast swathes of the rural western states are federal government land. Not all is BLM, some is national park and such, but same concept applies for zero population in a census block. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_lands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_lands
- richardwhiuk 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LruaD7XhQ50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LruaD7XhQ50 is a pretty nice intro to the topic.
- bananabreakfast 6y agoWhile a lot of BLM land is uninhabited, it is not all like that and not necessarily intended that way either. For example, the entirety of California's coastline is BLM land. The BLM simply functions as the kitchen sink of land management at the federal level, catching everything that is not explicitly assigned to other agencies.
- jeffbee 6y ago
- geraldcombs 6y agoApparently people only live on the east side of the Mississippi from ~ Cape Girardeau, MO to the gulf?
- geerlingguy 6y agoFlood plains. Though... in some areas people live in them and complain to the Army Corps and local government every time they get flooded out.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agoprevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14433805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14433805
- pier25 6y agoI wonder if Starlink will eventually have on impact on this, maybe 10 years from now. Some years ago we lived in an off the grid cabin in the mountains of Veracruz (Mexico) and the lack of connectivity was by far the main reason we left. We now live on the outskirts of a small city but I still really miss the absolute silence of living away from civilization.
- uncoder0 6y agoI am betting that Starlink will have an impact on where people live. We have tons of beautiful empty land in this country but, modern life requires broadband and that's not well distributed yet.
- reaperducer 6y agoWe have tons of beautiful empty land in this country It's beautiful because it is empty. I think we should fill up all the vacant lots and surface parking in the cities before we needlessly trample nature any more.
- curiousllama 6y agoAgreed, but also... There's like SO MUCH empty land. Growing up in the US, I thought the most empty things got was Ohio. But turns out, we're more like Russia - with the empty siberian frontier - than we are like the UK or something. If everyone were evenly distributed, we'd still have <100 people per sq mile
- jeffbee 6y agoOhio has about the same overall population density as Spain.
- gonzo41 6y agoYou should take a trip to Australia sometime. The desert is sparse. Australia is more like an atoll, with everyone living on the edges. I've been in parts of the outback where my workmates and I were the only people for 10 to 100's of km's in every direction.
- DavidPeiffer 6y agoAnother interesting uninhabited zone is in Idaho. Summarized by Wikipedia: The Zone of Death is the name given to the 50 sq mi (129.50 km2) Idaho section of Yellowstone National Park in which, as a result of a purported loophole in the Constitution of the United States, a criminal could theoretically get away with any crime, up to and including murder. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_Death_(Yellowstone) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_Death_(Yellowstone)
- scottcha 6y agoI worked in that area on a SCA trail crew in 1996, in the Bechlor ranger district, and its nothing we discussed then but looking as the ref it seems this loophole was only noted in 2008. The area is very remote and while in the park not often visited. Its very beautiful with meandering rivers through large grasslands as well as some canyons with the Tetons in the distance.
- lultimouomo 6y ago> Its very beautiful with meandering rivers through large grasslands as well as some canyons with the Tetons in the distance. Nice try, murderer.
- giantg2 6y agoGood luck getting the government to honor that. I can't even get a local court and state trooper to follow their own rules of procedures defined in code or basic civil rights.
- icelancer 6y agoThe poacher who shot an elk there and went to trial had a pretty decent argument citing this particular hypothetical. The judge dismissed the argument but his attorney pressed on; the poacher eventually took a light plea bargain contingent on not appealing and using this line of argumentation. Given the makeup of the federal courts and all the way up to SCOTUS, this would be a dangerous case for the state to take to trial through the appeals process before closing the loophole.
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y agoI am not sure how useful this map is, being uninhabited by humans does not mean useless. It also does not mean "hey, lets build something there". What about agricultural land, forests, water, forests, wild life ?
- zokier 6y agoWhy are rivers separate census blocks when nobody lives on them? Why aren't they part of the surrounding blocks?
- freeone3000 6y agoBecause census blocks are geographic divisions of equal area. The rivers are likely chosen to be separate blocks because nobody lives in them, similar to Central Park or the blocks in National Parks.
- anfilt 6y agoHouse boats are thing.
- rietta 6y agoThis may not be accurate at all, but my first thought was I think I've seen people living in some of those no one lives here on the Alaska TV shows. Specifically, http://www.kavikrivercamp.com http://www.kavikrivercamp.com with Sue Aikens. Not sure how her river camp would be statistically measured.
- freeone3000 6y agoCensus blocks are divided approximately equal by geography, and they're pretty small - NYC's Central Park census block has a population of zero, for instance.
- dathinab 6y agoAnd people (try to) live there. Just not officially. So some some blocks might contain people which e.g. "secretly" live at their working place or similar.
- jaza 6y agoIt's census data, so it's measured by what each person in the country states is his/her primary residence. So if Sue Aikens wrote down her river camp in her census form, it should be included in census data. Although I'm not sure about a place that is a perfectly legal primary residence (the resident owns the title to the land, the resident lives in a permanent dwelling on the land), but that lacks a postal street address.
- titzer 6y agoI literally do not believe the map they posted with this article. Take a look at North Dakota on Google maps, satellite mode, labels off. It's still a grid of farms and roads just as the rest of the midwest, just bigger blocks. Uninhabited? Not so much.
- handmodel 6y agoCensus blocks are not that big. There are 7M of them. You can see them in NYC here: https://popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov/#11.61/40.764/-73.9911 https://popfactfinder.planning.nyc.gov/#11.61/40.764/-73.991... Things like parts of Central Park and Piers are there own blocks. So, unless they capture homeless people living there, the population is zero. My guess is in places like SD there are still plenty of farm areas, commercial areas, schools etc which have no people. South Dakota looks like it has 80k census blocks and 800k people.
- ineedasername 6y agoBecause there are no residents in those blocks. Literally no one lives there. That doesn't mean no one makes use of the Land, such as for farming, mining, etc. In the context of the census, land use is distinct from land habitation.
- resu_nimda 6y agoI wondered why they would create so many unnecessary blocks. I had interpreted a "census block" to be an arbitrary unit, but it seems to have originally designated actual city blocks. In 1990 they decided to divide the whole country into blocks. [1] "An automated computer process looks for all visible and nonvisible features in our geographic database (MAF/TIGER) that should be a block boundary and creates a block each time those features create a polygon." [2] Kind of an interesting extension of the "block" concept. It would seem that population density should be more of a factor. Automatically generating 5 million unpopulated census divisions seems a bit like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_block https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_block [2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2011/07/what-are-census-blocks.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2011/...
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- cowsandmilk 6y agoIncorporating them into neighboring blocks can cause problems. The current approach does well at giving us local population density, even if it is zero in these cases. Merging all these blocks together would result in inaccurate numbers for density in many small rural towns as their land areas are artificially inflated.
- mannykannot 6y agoThe thing is, if you do the whole country through some uniform process, you don't get into an endless discussion about how you should do it - what's in and what's out? What is the appropriate size and shape of this block, and this one and this...
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- m_mueller 6y ago> Commercial and industrial areas are also likely to be green on this map. IMO this is a big mistake by US zone planning. Having lived in Japan for a while, the ability to live in any zone and let the market figure it out has big benefits. Rents are comparatively low, even in Tokyo. We were able to live 10min from my campus as a family of 3 for $1k/month. There are small commercial centers everywhere in walkable distance, even 1h away from the center by commuter train. Everywhere you go there is life, people to meet, things to buy, festivals to attend, conversations to be had.
- calvinmorrison 6y agoThis is kind of poorly done. Zoom in on my city (Philadelphia). Look at South Philly. It's half green! shocking until you realize this is the giant I-2 Industrial zoned sectors for shipping, the shopping centers, warehouses, etc.
- thedufer 6y agoI don't think it's poorly done, so much as it isn't what you expected it to be. The text below the image pretty clearly explains the effect that you're seeing: > Commercial and industrial areas are also likely to be green on this map. The local shopping mall, an office park, a warehouse district or a factory may have their own Census Blocks. But if people don’t live there, they will be considered “uninhabited”. So it should be noted that just because a block is unoccupied, that does not mean it is undeveloped.
- mannykannot 6y agoI have a question about the allocation of blocks and the definition of "inhabited". Firstly, from the numbers given, it seems that the average size of a block is a little less than a square kilometer. In some places, major highways show up as thin ribbons in the high-resolution display [1]. One example that I am familiar with is Interstate 84 across the Poconos in North-Eastern Pennsylvania. I located one section of this highway in Google maps [1]. Using the distance-mearsuring tool to mark out a square kilometer, it was clear that, if these blocks were square kilometers, or some other compact shape of that area, the highway would not appear as thin as it does, and one would not be able to pick out the wiggles in the highway's route, which actually show up in considerable detail. Maybe these roads (and also streams, which show even more detail) are additional features on the map, unfortunately also colored green, but if so, the selection of which ones to show seems rather arbitrary. Regardless, there are also several sections where it seems implausible that there is any dwelling within a kilometer's distance of the highway - for example, either side of I-84 at [2], yet, on the census map, the highway threads through here as a thin green line on a white background ([3]; south-east quadrant.) At the very least, it seems unlikely that the blocks are arranged as a uniform square grid. [1] https://mapsbynik.com/maps/census0pop/ https://mapsbynik.com/maps/census0pop/ [2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/41%C2%B020'59.2%22N+74%C2%B056'47.7%22W https://www.google.com/maps/place/41%C2%B020'59.2%22N+74%C2%... [3] http://mapsbynik.com/maps/census0pop/tiles-140420/TileGroup150/9-376-44.jpg http://mapsbynik.com/maps/census0pop/tiles-140420/TileGroup1...
- jcrawfordor 6y agoCensus blocks are intentionally bounded by geographical features such as roads and are not intended to be of uniform size. Census blocks are intended as an organizational unit for census data and not necessarily for any comparative use, such as this website makes, since it's clear that the demographics of blocks will vary widely depending on location, size, etc. Historically census blocks were determined in the field as an early stage of enumeration based on local conventions, but today they're defined semi-automatically from GIS data. Still, what exactly defines a block and what is typical of them varies widely from place to place. Blocks are the lowest level of the hierarchy in which census data is organized, next being block groups and then tracts.
- ecommerceguy 6y agoCensus Blocks aren't just used for population, for instance in traffic modeling the number of employees in a block is often non-zero - think of commercial or industrial areas. Back in a past lifetime I created numerous land-use models that allocated all sorts of things to "zero-pop" blocks: sewer capacity, revenue, spending, pollution generation. While allocation could use any polygon Census Blocks were convenient.
- nickthemagicman 6y agoPeople talk about over-population but I've driven across America numerous times and there appears to be TONS of room for more people. It appears that you need 1/4 acre to be able to grow enough food to support a family and with nuclear power for heat...it seems like a lot more population growth is possible. Am I missing something?
- ncmncm 6y agoThe little spur of Minnesota up into Canada is shown as not worth having fought over. I would value more a map of differences between this and the previous census, showing which areas somebody had moved out of or into.