I live in the rural area where the population density is 17 people per square mile. Compare that to Central America where the population density is about 2,000 per square mile. This blog will try to high light facts about this situation.
The big driver for me and most of my friends is "quality of life". That is a little vague, but that is it. In prior blogs I pointed out that median income is one of the best measures of quality of life, but there are also other important factors. My second is rural vs urban and our country is getting more urban every day and I don't think that is good when it comes to "quality of life". Here is some data that I was able to dig up.
In 2000 78.2% of the USA population lived in rural areas. Today that has decline to only 57.3%. If you normalized those percentages, this is a change of 36.5% in just 23 years. If you are over 50 years old, then you have observed this change first hand. Here is some more data.
Where do Whites live? This data is looking at each area separately and seeing what percentage of Whites live there. It is what you might have expected with Urban at 44%, Suburbs at 68% and Rural at 79%. This makes you ask about "Who exactly lives in urban areas?" Here is some data on that.
Look at non-white minorities. In 2018 it was Rural at 22% and Urban at 43%. Where are most of the non-whites? In the urban areas. Detroit is 80% Black, for example. Blacks are a small percent of the population and here is where they live. This data is difficult to understand because is a mixture of percentages and nothing is normalized so that it can be easily compare, but here goes. Back in 1960 only 20% of Blacks lived in larger cities, but by 2022 that was up to 48%. That is a big shift in just over 60 years. Things are changing fast right before your eyes and those changes are significant.
I advise all of you to check out the data on this significant change. Our major cities are populated by recent immigrants and minorities, not the mostly White population that most of us remember. I am not saying this is bad on the surface, but it is significant and we should all be watching the situation to make sure that it does not turn out to be "bad".
