Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
By no means am I trying to — on all of your time-consuming work crunching all of these numbers, but if you want a more apples to apples metro area density comparison, waiting for the Urban Area numbers to be released, and then doing a weighted density calc of those tracts would be far superior, IMO.
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I agree, but I don't have that patience, and the rural ring effect is probably pretty steady east of the Great Plains. When we get new Urban Area definitions (and also new MSA definitions) if the query tool hasn't broken yet (or we have CSVs of tracts) I'll re-run the numbers.
I already have Madison as an example of the empty collar effect, contrasting Dane County with the 4 county MSA:
Dane County: 5,818 ppsm.
Dane County and three corn field collars: 4,834 ppsm.
So the cornfields do drag down WPD but probably not as big of an effect as I postulated. Rather, it seems (most) southern metros just don't have the 5k+ core tracts required to yank WPD out of the 1k/2k ppsm range. Having dense tracts crater last Census also doesn't help the likes of Jackson, MS.
My plan for the list is probably have the 1M+ MSAs in their own list, a cutoff I like since it just catches that eye popping Honolulu number. Once that's done and we all marvel at NYC lapping the field by a factor like 5 or 6, I'll generate the state WPDs since I have a 2010 list to compare to.
@wwmiv, do you know what the timeframe is for the OMB to release new urban area delineations?
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