Worth A Read: Where US Non-Latino Whites Live -- AEI -- May 3, 2016

I enjoyed the post, but not sure I would have posted it had it not included the paragraph on Boston and Belmont. We "lived in" Belmont, MA, for four years.

From AEI:

If you’re asking about the median population of the places where white Americans live, the answer is 45,200. That’s not Tampa. That’s the size of Wallingford, Connecticut, a town between New Haven and Hartford and home to Choate, the famous prep school.
Let’s be clear about what that median represents, because it’s a pretty astonishing result: Fully half of white Americans live in places smaller than 45,200 people.

t’s so astonishing low that you should be suspicious. Specifically, a place can be called a “city” with its own mayor and city council, but for practical purposes it is part of a dense urban area. Cambridge, Massachusetts, for example, is technically a city of 107,000 people, but it is contiguous to Boston, and you definitely feel like you’re in an urban area. Belmont, only three miles to the west, is listed at 24,700. It is a residential community with a small-town shopping center and doesn’t have the feel of a city, but it is a suburb of Boston.

I had to worry about such issues a few years ago when I was working on a study of American diversity.

To deal with it, I defined a “Greater X”—e.g., a “Greater Colorado Springs”—for each of the fifty largest cities, based on contiguous high-density census tracts rather than the official city limits. For cities of 500,000 or more, I also identified satellites such as Belmont that were not connected by high-density census tracts, but were suburbs of an urban area. So the median of 45,200 is based on a treatment of the problem in which the population of Cambridge is classified as part of the city of Boston and Belmont is defined as a satellite. A town of 45,200 as I am classifying it is a stand-alone community.

Now let’s see if I can give you a more intuitive sense of how many white Americans live outside the great urban centers. I’ll use my home town of Newton, Iowa, population of a little over 15,000, as the first break point. If you live in a place smaller than Newton, you’re definitely in a small town or living in rural America. Wallingford is the next break point, demarcating populations of 15,000–45,000 as the gray area between “town” and “small city.”

I’ll use Des Moines, Iowa, to mark the break between small cities of more than 45,000 and major cities. Greater Des Moines has a population of about 370,000. You can drive from one end of the downtown area to the other in about seven minutes, including stops at red lights along the way. It is a city, yes. It is not “urban America” in any meaningful sense of the term.