It’s just that the U.S. Census Bureau is changing the definition of an urban area. Under the new criteria, more than 1,300 small cities, towns and villages designated urban a decade ago would be considered rural.

That matters because urban and rural areas qualify for different types of federal funding. Some communities worry the change could affect health clinics in rural areas as well as transportation and education funding from federal programs. But leaders in other communities designated to lose their urban status say it won’t make a difference.1

Groups like the American Hospital Association say the changes, which are the biggest being made to the definitions in decades, could cause problems for people who need medical care in rural areas.

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A coalition of associations representing cities, counties, planners and transportation groups had objected to many of the proposed changes last year, saying the switch from people to housing units would miss variations in development and land use patterns.2

The redesignation gives the bureau a way to distinguish between the “urban nucleus” and less densely populated areas, typically on the fringes of urban areas.

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• 1. “We are rural and we feel rural, and that’s how we already identify,” said Randy Reeg, city administrator of Mauston, Wisconsin, a city of 4,347 residents about 75 miles (120 kilometers) northwest of Madison.
• 2. The Census Bureau tried to address those concerns by creating three levels of urban area definitions for census blocks, which are the nation’s smallest geographic unit. Census blocks will be urban if they have 425 housing units per square mile, the equivalent of 1,105 people. Before the change, census blocks with at least 500 people per square mile were considered urban.