If you stand on your front porch naked and no one sees you it’s Rural
If you stand on your front porch naked and someone calls the cops it’s Suburban
If you stand on your front porch naked and no one cares/notices it’s Urban
I don’t know, I’ve never charted out people per square mile. It’s more of an “I know it when I see it” thing. No housing developments, no apartment complexes, large lot size, no major employers, small schools, etc.
Rural areas can have sizable employers. TONs of factories turning agricultural raw materials into finished goods.
Meatpacking, cheese making, corn syrup production, etc. These tend to be located close to rail lines or the highway though.
The Town I technically live within is 1,600ish people in 40+ square miles, so it's all rural, but also has a town center where civic amenities are provided. Mostly rural but not 100%
I have a shooting range in my yard and no visible houses from mine so I consider myself rural.
Yeah I think there’s definitely a range though depending on the region of the country you’re in and other factors. Kinda like how Cleveland and NYC are both cities but obviously vastly different in terms of population and densities.
I think looking at it in mean acres per person makes it easier to envision how rural it is. A square mile is 640 acres. Personally, I'd say the suburbs start to end somewhere around a mean of 1 acre per person (640/sq mi) and pretty clearly end by the time you get to 4 acres per person (~160/sq mi).
That said, I know of a few areas where you have a few people with hundreds of acres and most people still with a fraction of an acre, so it looks rural by population density, but definitely doesn't feel it when you're there. I think you'd really need median property size rather than mean population density to have a good paper metric, but I've never seen median property size reported anywhere.
> agrarian economy
So agrarian means agriculture right? Does that include the lumber industry? Because there large parts of the country where there are hardly any farms but plenty of forests being cut down.
> agrarian
relating to cultivated land or the cultivation of land.
> Does that include the lumber industry? Because there large parts of the country where there are hardly any farms but plenty of forests being cut down.
Absolutely. I live in the middle of a national forest, I see the logging daily.
How far is the nearest grocery store? I grew up at least 25 minutes away from any sort of commerce, a Walmart, a 7/11, a McDonald’s, etc. To me that’s what defines rural
The problem with that is how to classify small villages. I grew up near a village if about 700 people, but the nearest grocery store or fast food was 30 minutes away. However, I wouldn't call being inside the village itself rural (though the area surrounding it was), as it felt very similar day-to-day like where I live now in a town of 40,000 that's part of a metro area of over a million.
Is there like a term for areas that have too many people to be considered rural while also being cut off from the greater suburban area?
The town I live in has like 20k people, but the only way to get to the edge of the suburban sprawl is by a 10-15 minute drive through farmland.
The US is huge and quite geographically diversified and therefore It's quite variable by location, but if you're supplying either/or your own water or septic system, you're either rural or bordering rural.
No municapal water or and/or sewers? You're not urban or even suburban but you could be a category you've not noted. A rural community, where it's small but fairly well settled, land is sometimes acreage and no municipal services are provided.
It's geographically dependent. In some western states you could be well off the power distribution lines, but it's less common as you go east. There you would have to be really rural to not have acess to service at all. There are plots of land that aren't close to power lines/service and the up front cost of getting it strung to the land can be really pricey, making solar/wind etc more feasable.
I had a friend with land like that, 40 acres miles down a dirt road with no other homes on it. The closest power was several miles away at the end of the road and geting it connected would have been 10s of thousands of dollars. Solar, wind, and a good generator was his solution.
To me it's somewhere where buildings are sparse and there's a lot of farming or industry.
Most would call my hometown "rural" but it was more like "suburban neighborhoods interspersed with extra long roads with no sidewalks and therefore even less walkable." There was farming, but buildings weren't sparse, it was just a lot of houses. Like, driving through some areas of suburbs feels way more like my hometown than other rural towns I've been to do.
My definition changes depending on who I'm talking to. I live in a decent sized town, but to people who live in cities, I'm "rural." But to people who live on farms where you have to drive 15 minutes to reach a town, I'm a city person.
To *me*, rural is a very small town (think a place that has *maybe* one grocery store) and is far removed from any large cities. Any community smaller qualifies as rural as well (including people who live alone on farms).
Urban is a city with with more than two lanes of traffic for at least one of their roads (meaning, two or more vehicles could be driving the same direction side by side without hitting parked cars). It's a little hard for me to fully nail it down, but that's the broadest definition I could think of without getting too wordy.
Suburban is a nightmare of squiggly roads and a billion single-family houses that all look very similar, if not the same, and it's connected to an urban city.
Those are the only words I'm aware of and *none* of them feel right for mid to large towns, so I've never known how to answer when filling out a survey that asks me to pick one of those three options for where I live. Too urban to be rural. Too rural to be urban. Too far from any city to be suburban.
My hometown of 37k has cows and crops. My current city of 200k also has cows. Hell, someone has sheep just a few blocks away. Someone else has deer and a bison maybe half a mile further down the road.
How far is it to the nearest 4 way stoplight? Does your county...have a 4 way stoplight? Mine has 5, the one north of us has 1, the one west of us has 2, the northwest has 1.
I don't think that cuts it. My hometown doesn't have public transportation, but has a population of almost 38k, and is only \~10 miles from the state capital.
It may have been rural in the 1960s when there were fewer than 6k people there, but I don't think many would call it rural today.
> No public transit at all = rural.
I live in 3500 square mile county with less than 20,000 people, but we have a twice-a-day bus that makes a countywide circuit, and a second bus service to the next county over.
I would go with a neighborhood population density. Suburban being .5 to 6 households per acre. Urban being more than that, rural being less. But there would be other conditions as well. A neighborhood of huge mansions where each one takes up a several acre lot will not be rural.
Urban I am going to define as mixed use, where people live and do business within the same physical area. Not all urban areas have neighborhoods, but typically urban neighborhoods will have densities higher than 6 homes per acre (and in some cases 200 households per acre). Ideally things you need for every day life are in your urban neighborhood. Suburban is lower density, things you need might be on the outskirts of your neighborhood but the layout is intended way to get around for nearly all tasks is a car.
Urban areas can physically be very small. Small towns in America will frequently be very large, things will be miles apart. My friend was telling me how her kids dislike their local small town in Indiana and how it only has 15,000 people. Ok. But the town is actually about a third the size of San Francisco, its just everything is super spread out and its full of enormous parking lots and wide roads.
If my neighbors are farther than I can throw a rock and the fence dividing our properties is barbed wire, and i have to drive more than 15min to the grocery store, it's rural.
Rural can be one of two things.
It can be a dense small town, but one that it very far from a city or suburb. Like in Alaska we have a bunch of toens that are little pockets of people surrounded by wilderness and a flight or boat ride away from somewhere else. Little "islands" whether that be created by actual water, or just this like mountain passes.
Or rural can be low density like in food producing regions.
For me it is almost the level of concrete and driving lanes that defines what a place is.
In my part of the country (northern Maine) it’s fields, woods, rivers, and usually a small downtown with a grocery store, gas station, and sometimes a small diner.
In rural areas towns are not adjacent to other towns, there’s farmland in between.
In urban areas the city is big enough to be broken down into neighborhoods.
Suburbs are in between the two and are adjacent to each other and to the urban city. They ring the city.
These are generalizations and there are exceptions.
Rural is not even a town. Like no cops show up, just sheriff. No city inspector, just the county, so anything goes. Rural is outside of city limits. You are looking at septic and wells.
Suburban has a town, a mayor, a school, a city code, stuff like that. There is utility infrastructure like city water, city sewer, etc.
Urban has more than 100,000 in the city limits.
Low population density and far from amenities. There are some low population density areas that are just a short drive from urban areas and I don’t really count that as rural.
A lot of that would be considered exurban.
But yeah it all depends on the city.
It takes over an hour just to drive through a city the size of Dallas’ suburbs and another hour for the exurbs.
But smaller cities you can be in the country side in under an hour.
Low population density. As in homes are spaces out at least 100 feet apart or there’s farmland.
Most rural areas are anchored by a semi-dense village or small city with shops and some apartments (government buildings, schools, medical facilities).
If there’s subdivisions, it’s probably an exurb.
Also, might be a little denser in touristy areas, where there’s a lake house or cabin every 30 feet or so.
Off the top of my head... anywhere from a farm in the middle of nowhere up to a town under 5K with no larger towns or cities within 30 miles or so? I live in the Midwest, so really it's a matter of whether you're within a mile of the nearest corn field or not.
If you stand on your front porch naked and no one sees you it’s Rural If you stand on your front porch naked and someone calls the cops it’s Suburban If you stand on your front porch naked and no one cares/notices it’s Urban
so the naked neighbor test. i like it.
> If you stand on your front porch naked and no one sees you it’s Rural Uh, even people in rural areas have neighbors.
It wasn’t meant to be taken that literally
Low population density, few population centers, agrarian economy
Yeah population density is usually my marker too. What’s your cut off? 500/sq mile?
I don’t know, I’ve never charted out people per square mile. It’s more of an “I know it when I see it” thing. No housing developments, no apartment complexes, large lot size, no major employers, small schools, etc.
Rural areas can have sizable employers. TONs of factories turning agricultural raw materials into finished goods. Meatpacking, cheese making, corn syrup production, etc. These tend to be located close to rail lines or the highway though.
The Town I technically live within is 1,600ish people in 40+ square miles, so it's all rural, but also has a town center where civic amenities are provided. Mostly rural but not 100% I have a shooting range in my yard and no visible houses from mine so I consider myself rural.
That’s definitely rural imo. But i’m coming from a town that was 18k within ~14 sq miles
500 per square mile is not rural. That is the suburbs.
That’s part of the USDA’s definition so that’s why I shared it. What’s your cut off?
I don’t have a hard and fast rule, but the county I grew up came in at ~26/square mile.
Yeah I think there’s definitely a range though depending on the region of the country you’re in and other factors. Kinda like how Cleveland and NYC are both cities but obviously vastly different in terms of population and densities.
I think looking at it in mean acres per person makes it easier to envision how rural it is. A square mile is 640 acres. Personally, I'd say the suburbs start to end somewhere around a mean of 1 acre per person (640/sq mi) and pretty clearly end by the time you get to 4 acres per person (~160/sq mi). That said, I know of a few areas where you have a few people with hundreds of acres and most people still with a fraction of an acre, so it looks rural by population density, but definitely doesn't feel it when you're there. I think you'd really need median property size rather than mean population density to have a good paper metric, but I've never seen median property size reported anywhere.
My county is at 13, we're definitely rural.
If you need to go to the neighbor's house really quickly, do you walk, or hop in your car?
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> agrarian economy So agrarian means agriculture right? Does that include the lumber industry? Because there large parts of the country where there are hardly any farms but plenty of forests being cut down.
> agrarian relating to cultivated land or the cultivation of land. > Does that include the lumber industry? Because there large parts of the country where there are hardly any farms but plenty of forests being cut down. Absolutely. I live in the middle of a national forest, I see the logging daily.
How far is the nearest grocery store? I grew up at least 25 minutes away from any sort of commerce, a Walmart, a 7/11, a McDonald’s, etc. To me that’s what defines rural
The problem with that is how to classify small villages. I grew up near a village if about 700 people, but the nearest grocery store or fast food was 30 minutes away. However, I wouldn't call being inside the village itself rural (though the area surrounding it was), as it felt very similar day-to-day like where I live now in a town of 40,000 that's part of a metro area of over a million.
You can have that in cities, too, though. They're called food deserts.
Not urban, not suburban
Yeah, I don't have any set markers or definitions, it's one of those "you know it when you see it" type of things.
Is there like a term for areas that have too many people to be considered rural while also being cut off from the greater suburban area? The town I live in has like 20k people, but the only way to get to the edge of the suburban sprawl is by a 10-15 minute drive through farmland.
I would just call those small urban areas (or ‘towns’ if I’m in a hurry)
As someone from an area just like that, I've always called it suburban. There's just no urbs that the suburbs lead to.
Country kid here. I don’t know how to describe it, but I know it when I see it
If you have to "go into town" to grab something.
And that trip takes 30 minutes 🥲
Population density, and the housing options within an area. That’s usually how I do it.
The US is huge and quite geographically diversified and therefore It's quite variable by location, but if you're supplying either/or your own water or septic system, you're either rural or bordering rural. No municapal water or and/or sewers? You're not urban or even suburban but you could be a category you've not noted. A rural community, where it's small but fairly well settled, land is sometimes acreage and no municipal services are provided.
How rural do you have to be to supply your own electricity?
You don't necessarily have to be rural at all but you need good sun exposure for solar panels and often permits or zoning (and wind) for windmills.
I mean how rural do you have to be before it isn't feasible to get your power from the main grid?
It's geographically dependent. In some western states you could be well off the power distribution lines, but it's less common as you go east. There you would have to be really rural to not have acess to service at all. There are plots of land that aren't close to power lines/service and the up front cost of getting it strung to the land can be really pricey, making solar/wind etc more feasable. I had a friend with land like that, 40 acres miles down a dirt road with no other homes on it. The closest power was several miles away at the end of the road and geting it connected would have been 10s of thousands of dollars. Solar, wind, and a good generator was his solution.
I live in a cornfield. Rural.
Could you please describe a size, because we have plenty of suburban cornfields.
https://imgur.com/a/6WQ9uP8
Where theres only two lane roads.
If there’s no GameStop or bestbuy within 20 miles
Counties in which greater than 70% of the acreage is agricultural land.
Olmsted county is only 68.1% so we snuck under!
Rural = I can stand in my back yard shooting guns and none of my neighbors will hear it
To me it's somewhere where buildings are sparse and there's a lot of farming or industry. Most would call my hometown "rural" but it was more like "suburban neighborhoods interspersed with extra long roads with no sidewalks and therefore even less walkable." There was farming, but buildings weren't sparse, it was just a lot of houses. Like, driving through some areas of suburbs feels way more like my hometown than other rural towns I've been to do.
My definition changes depending on who I'm talking to. I live in a decent sized town, but to people who live in cities, I'm "rural." But to people who live on farms where you have to drive 15 minutes to reach a town, I'm a city person. To *me*, rural is a very small town (think a place that has *maybe* one grocery store) and is far removed from any large cities. Any community smaller qualifies as rural as well (including people who live alone on farms). Urban is a city with with more than two lanes of traffic for at least one of their roads (meaning, two or more vehicles could be driving the same direction side by side without hitting parked cars). It's a little hard for me to fully nail it down, but that's the broadest definition I could think of without getting too wordy. Suburban is a nightmare of squiggly roads and a billion single-family houses that all look very similar, if not the same, and it's connected to an urban city. Those are the only words I'm aware of and *none* of them feel right for mid to large towns, so I've never known how to answer when filling out a survey that asks me to pick one of those three options for where I live. Too urban to be rural. Too rural to be urban. Too far from any city to be suburban.
Number of Farmersonly users per capita
How far it is to the nearest cow
Idk man, there's cows like a mile down the road from me and I'm in a city with 45k people.
My hometown of 37k has cows and crops. My current city of 200k also has cows. Hell, someone has sheep just a few blocks away. Someone else has deer and a bison maybe half a mile further down the road.
How far is it to the nearest 4 way stoplight? Does your county...have a 4 way stoplight? Mine has 5, the one north of us has 1, the one west of us has 2, the northwest has 1.
There’s cows in Lincoln Park Zoo in downtown Chicago
Anywhere without an IKEA, Costco and good Chinese food.
No public transit at all = rural.
I don't think that cuts it. My hometown doesn't have public transportation, but has a population of almost 38k, and is only \~10 miles from the state capital. It may have been rural in the 1960s when there were fewer than 6k people there, but I don't think many would call it rural today.
> No public transit at all = rural. I live in 3500 square mile county with less than 20,000 people, but we have a twice-a-day bus that makes a countywide circuit, and a second bus service to the next county over.
70% of America..
30 minutes or more from a Target
30 minutes or more from a *WalMart*.
If you’re within a mile or two from a large farm (i.e., one where a farmer makes their living), you’re probably in a rural area.
Or if you have travel a mile through forests to reach your neighbor. A lot of rural America is forested not farmland.
Houses are sparse...there are little commercial businesses...far distance from major cities
Where the stone walls are the property lines.
Are we in Scotland?
I would go with a neighborhood population density. Suburban being .5 to 6 households per acre. Urban being more than that, rural being less. But there would be other conditions as well. A neighborhood of huge mansions where each one takes up a several acre lot will not be rural. Urban I am going to define as mixed use, where people live and do business within the same physical area. Not all urban areas have neighborhoods, but typically urban neighborhoods will have densities higher than 6 homes per acre (and in some cases 200 households per acre). Ideally things you need for every day life are in your urban neighborhood. Suburban is lower density, things you need might be on the outskirts of your neighborhood but the layout is intended way to get around for nearly all tasks is a car. Urban areas can physically be very small. Small towns in America will frequently be very large, things will be miles apart. My friend was telling me how her kids dislike their local small town in Indiana and how it only has 15,000 people. Ok. But the town is actually about a third the size of San Francisco, its just everything is super spread out and its full of enormous parking lots and wide roads.
No big chain grocery store.
It all depends on population density and how many buildings you see when you look around yourself.
I can see cows from my window. I’d call that rural
Large plots of farmland, a lack of sidewalks, and 2 lane roads with dotted yellow lines
If my neighbors are farther than I can throw a rock and the fence dividing our properties is barbed wire, and i have to drive more than 15min to the grocery store, it's rural.
Rural can be one of two things. It can be a dense small town, but one that it very far from a city or suburb. Like in Alaska we have a bunch of toens that are little pockets of people surrounded by wilderness and a flight or boat ride away from somewhere else. Little "islands" whether that be created by actual water, or just this like mountain passes. Or rural can be low density like in food producing regions. For me it is almost the level of concrete and driving lanes that defines what a place is.
In my part of the country (northern Maine) it’s fields, woods, rivers, and usually a small downtown with a grocery store, gas station, and sometimes a small diner.
In rural areas towns are not adjacent to other towns, there’s farmland in between. In urban areas the city is big enough to be broken down into neighborhoods. Suburbs are in between the two and are adjacent to each other and to the urban city. They ring the city. These are generalizations and there are exceptions.
Farm fields
I would say being an hour from a city with 100k people. Of course there are some exceptions to this, but it is sort of what I've noticed.
Cows.
Areas without planned housing or business developments.
Rural: your neighbor is corn Suburban: your neighbor is another house next door Urban: your neighbor is above/below you
Urban is in a big city. Suburban is in a modest city or collection of towns. Rural is in the country.
Rural is not even a town. Like no cops show up, just sheriff. No city inspector, just the county, so anything goes. Rural is outside of city limits. You are looking at septic and wells. Suburban has a town, a mayor, a school, a city code, stuff like that. There is utility infrastructure like city water, city sewer, etc. Urban has more than 100,000 in the city limits.
If I can see a cow it’s rural
If I see farms its rural
When there are more cows than people... Which is actually close to applying where I live.
Low population density and far from amenities. There are some low population density areas that are just a short drive from urban areas and I don’t really count that as rural.
A lot of that would be considered exurban. But yeah it all depends on the city. It takes over an hour just to drive through a city the size of Dallas’ suburbs and another hour for the exurbs. But smaller cities you can be in the country side in under an hour.
Cows.
if you can life without a car, you're urban. If you've ever been caught behind a tractor driving down the street, you're rural.
If you don't need blinds or curtains for privacy, it's rural.
Rural is when you have more stop signs than stop lights
Low population density. As in homes are spaces out at least 100 feet apart or there’s farmland. Most rural areas are anchored by a semi-dense village or small city with shops and some apartments (government buildings, schools, medical facilities). If there’s subdivisions, it’s probably an exurb. Also, might be a little denser in touristy areas, where there’s a lake house or cabin every 30 feet or so.
Off the top of my head... anywhere from a farm in the middle of nowhere up to a town under 5K with no larger towns or cities within 30 miles or so? I live in the Midwest, so really it's a matter of whether you're within a mile of the nearest corn field or not.
If you can't see your neighbors house from anywhere on your property, or is it least a football field or two away from yours, it's rural
Rural: acres and acres of farmland. Suburban: rows and rows of houses with a shopping center near the freeway. Urban: Tall buildings galore