|
|
 |
 Printer-friendly
format
Download PDF version 
Email this page
Nonmetro Counties Vary by Urban Size and Metro Proximity
Ken Hammond, USDA
|
New York City is a world apart from Hickory, NC, even
though both are officially metropolitan
(metro) areas. And nonmetropolitan (nonmetro) counties such
as Washington County, MS, with a city of 41,000 people (Greenville)
and densely settled countryside, differ greatly from sparsely settled
Great Plains counties without an urban center and no more than several
thousand residents each. Frequently though, researchers compare
only metro versus nonmetro totals, either for brevity or because
the data are only available as a dichotomy. However, counties are
likely to vary systematically in their trends and characteristics
by population size and—if nonmetro—by their amount of
urbanization and whether they adjoin a metro area. To address this
diversity, ERS developed the Rural-Urban Continuum Code
to classify counties along a residential scale.
This nine-interval code allows a researcher to look
at metro counties grouped by the population size of their metro
area, and nonmetro
counties by their amount of urbanization, if any. Nonmetro counties
are also cross-classified by whether or not they are adjacent
to a metro central county, on the premise that adjacent counties
will
typically show characteristics somewhat different from nonadjacent
counties due to easier access to metro facilities and employment.
The Rural-Urban Continuum Code is used here to illustrate
the percentage of people who were age 65 or older in 2000. The
lowest incidence
(11.4 percent) was found in metro areas of 1 million or more
population. One key reason for this is that the largest metro areas
are major
gateways for immigrants who are disproportionately young adults
or young families with children. Their addition to the population
base thus reduces the share of older people.
In contrast, 17.7 percent of residents were age 65 years
or older in nonmetro counties without an urban population and not
adjacent to a metro area. Many of the counties in this group are
farming areas that have long experienced high outmigration of young
adults and declining or near stationary population with little
infusion
of immigrants. In such rural areas, social issues concerning older
people are pertinent to a greater share of the population than
is
true in larger communities.
Between these two extremes, the percentage of people
65 and older generally rises with each step down the residential
scale, with
the exception of the category consisting of nonmetro counties
that have 20,000 or more urban residents and are not adjacent to
a metro
area. Although most social and economic variables have at least
one exception to a regular progression of increased or decreased
values along the continuum scale, they usually have a substantial
degree of overall association with the code categories. And that
has made the Rural-Urban Continuum code useful in a variety of
research.
|
