Rurals of Nevada - Half a Century of De-Ruralization (art. 20)
The USDA's 2024 Rural America at a Glance is out and prompts looking again at the Three Rurals and how counties become de-ruralized.
The 2024 edition of Rural America at a Glance from the USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) came out a few weeks ago. These annual reports are some of the best looks at the demographics of rural life out there. Although I remain more interested in looking at Nevada’s rural areas than an aggregate picture of rural America as a whole, the reports are must-reads. Given some intriguing data in the 2024 edition, I am planning on digging deeper into the report over the next few months—if for nothing else than to take a break from politics.
In general, the 2024 edition presented an overview of rural America that was not surprising. Of the 3,144 counties in the United States, 1,958 (62.3%) were classified as non-metro. Those counties, however, accounted for only 13.7% of the estimated American population in July 2023 (roughly 46 million out of just under 335 million people). The net population change was less than half that of urban areas—and that change was more likely to come from migration than natural growth. These population changes in Nevada are what I intend to dive into in upcoming articles.
But I did notice one thing immediately: Lyon County has moved from nonmetro (rural) to metropolitan classification. It therefore joins Clark, Washoe, Carson City, and Storey among the ranks of Nevada’s metro counties, according to federal agencies such as the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The reason for this is a fuller analysis of the 2020 Census data, but it also highlights continued problems with the definition of rural.
As a short recap, one theme of the Rurals of Nevada is that the definitions of “rural” are problematic in part because they are all based on urban areas—an apophatic approach that generates some real issues. For example, the state of Nevada defines the 15 rural counties as having populations less than 100,000. This allows the state and state-wide organizations to pretend that Carson City, Esmeralda, and Elko counties somehow share commonalities from a policy perspective.
The USDA classifications hopefully offer a more nuanced view of rural communities. I want to look at the grand-daddy of them, the fifty-year old Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (RUCC)
The USDA classifications hopefully offer a more nuanced view. I have discussed some of the USDA ERS’ efforts to develop more refined definitions in my second article, “What is Rural?”. I focused on the Far and Remote Areas (FAR) codes, which use zip codes to map access to services. I also discussed briefly the Rural-Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) concept that uses the sub-county Census tracts as a basis. My interest in these two models was that they are far better suited to tracking service access for rural areas, one of the issues in which I am interested.
But I have not examined the foundational classification system, the Rural-Urban Continuum Codes, or RUCC. Celebrating fifty years, the RUCC is really the grand-daddy of the USDA ERS efforts. Since the RUCC is largely a county-level classification, it overlaps with what I am already doing with Nevada counties—which is why I have not really looked at it. But it is the first of the USDA classifications to get updated with the 2020 Census data and the basis of the Rural America at a Glance series. Time to rectify the oversight.
Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (RUCC)
The ERS’ John Cromartie (one of the co-authors of Rural America at a Glance) has written an extensive article, “Historical Development of ERS Rural-Urban Classification Systems”, that goes into far more detail about the systems that I can here. I highly recommend it. I will just be giving the basics here.
The USDA first developed the Rural-Urban Continuum Codes (RUCC) in 1974 and used the 1970 decennial Census data as the basis. The USDA’s Calvin Beale heavily promoted the RUCC classification, which is why they are sometimes called Beale Codes. The purpose was to develop a more accurate measure of the interactions between urban and rural areas. The need was driven by the recognition in the early 1970s that both rural areas were beginning to lose population to urban areas (de-ruralization) and that commuting culture and suburbanization were changing how urban-rural economic interfaces worked. By focusing on the county level, where significant amounts of economic data already existed, the RUCC intended to provide a new means of assessing these changes.
Central to this approach was the question of adjacency. The RUCC allowed two improvements over simply classifying areas as urban and rural (or metro or non-metro). First, it allowed changing demographics to be tracked more closely because relations between counties could be more closely tracked. The second is that the model makes it much easier to incorporate changes in definitions of urban areas over time as new Census data is collected (the RUCC is updated after every decennial Census). For instance, the recent Census re-definition of urban areas that I discussed in late 2022 and which the OMB adopted were incorporated readily into the 2024 Rural America at a Glance (although they had no impact in the RUCC analysis of Nevada counties).
The result has been a robust system that has accurately tracked the changes in the United States over the last fifty years. One interesting fact that Cromartie highlights in his history is that while metro counties have increased and nonmetro counties decreased over the half-century, the number of adjacent counties has remained relatively constant—even though they are a higher share of all nonmetro counties (Cromartie, 7). Urban areas expand and bring new neighboring counties into their orbit (or their sprawl, if one is pessimistic). The general model that the American population is becoming more urban and that even rural counties are in more contact with urban areas is strongly supported by the RUCC data.
Here is how the RUCC classification currently works. The starting point is the definition of urban areas used by the Census Bureau and the OMB: the 50,000 population threshold. Metropolitan counties either have urban populations greater than 50,000 OR have 25% or more of their workforce commuting regularly to such urban areas. Storey and now Lyon counties are classified as metro because of the commuting threshold rather than urban population size.
The nonmetro definition, in addition to not meeting the two criteria above, includes three other conditions that, in some combination, define these areas:
Open countryside;
Rural towns (dense population clusters of more than 5,000 people).
Urban clusters with populations between 5,000 and 49,999 persons.
These various criteria combined provide nine categories: three metro (RUCC 1-3) and six nonmetro (RUCC 4-9). The nine category definitions are as follows:
Metro: Counties in metro areas of 1 million population or more.
Metro: Counties in metro areas of 250,000 to 1 million population.
Metro: Counties in metro areas of fewer than 250,000 population.
Urban population of 20,000 or more, adjacent to a metro area.
Urban population of 20,000 or more, not adjacent to a metro area.
Urban population of 5,000 to 20,000, adjacent to a metro area.
Urban population of 5,000 to 20,000, not adjacent to a metro area.
Urban population of fewer than 5,000, adjacent to a metro area.
Urban population of fewer than 5,000, not adjacent to a metro area.
One item to note is that for the non-metro areas, a consistent binary is established based on whether a county is adjacent to a metro area (RUCC codes 1, 2, and 3) or not. The question of adjacency is vital to how these codes are generally used: to determine access to services such as healthcare, education, or urban job markets.
Given the above definitions, here is what Nevada looks like with the RUCC codes versus my three Rurals of Nevada groupings:
Overall, the RUCC maps fairly closely to my Three Rurals. Each group of counties has a central urban area, such as Reno for the Western Rural or Las Vegas for the Central Rurals. Elko fulfills that function for the I-80 Corridor counties.
Note that only Churchill and Douglas counties remain nonmetro in the Western Rural region. This follows the general rule that rural areas “disappear” as they become more attached to urban areas. Nonmetro counties have decreased from 2,682 nonmetro counties in 1970 to 1,958 today (a 27% decrease in fifty years). Most often, this happens because counties become absorbed into metro commuting areas—which is exactly what is happening in the Western Rurals. The ongoing growth in both Reno and Carson City is creating a spill-over effect on the neighboring counties.
But the situations with Reno and Carson City are somewhat different. Reno was a relatively small metropolitan area (“The Biggest Little City in the World” as the famous Reno Arch reads in a slogan devised in the 1920s), but did surpass the 250,000 population threshold to go from RUCC 3 to 2 after the 1990 Census. Reno’s growth spurred urban expansion as it drew neighboring counties into its commuting orbit. Between the 1993 and 2003 RUCC classifications, Storey County jumped from RUCC 8 (nonmetro) to RUCC 3 and metro status in a single decade as it effectively became a bedroom county for Reno. Lyon County—mainly Fernley with the extension of the industrial and distribution businesses along USA Parkway—is undergoing this same change now.
Carson City’s growth, however, appears to be autochthonous and likely due to the expansion of Nevada’s government workforce. Carson City had passed the 50,000 population threshold with the 2000 Census, moving it from RUCC 4 to RUCC 3 with the 2003 classifications. It remains at that level today, twenty years later—and is unlikely to hit 250,000 anytime soon. The growth was enough to cause Douglas County to jump from RUCC 7 to RUCC 4 between 1993 and 2003, where it remains after the last two Census decennials.
Yet this process is not playing out in Nevada’s most populous urban area. Since the RUCC was introduced in 1973, the Las Vegas area has grown tremendously, surpassing a million people (and moving up to RUCC 1) with the 2000 Census. However, this growth has not resulted in major growth in adjacent counties, except for the area in Nye around Pahrump. But then again Pahrump has other factors, such as its increasing role as a retirement destination, that may contribute to its growth.
Pertinent factors limiting Las Vegas’ impact on neighboring counties are the size of Clark County and Las Vegas’ location towards its center. This contrasts sharply with Reno’s situation at the extreme south end of Washoe County, placing that city in close proximity to neighboring counties. So close that Storey County has been considered part of the Reno Metropolitan Statistical Area for decades, and Lyon is now included as well (OMB Bulletin 23-01, page 68). However, the more populous Las Vegas-Henderson-North Las Vegas Statistical Area is contained only within Clark County (OMB Bulleting 23-01, page 59).
Certainly, there is an additional argument that the large amount of federal land ownership in Nevada is a limiting factor on Las Vegas’ impact. Yet the Southern Nevada Economic and Conservation Act (aka the Clark County Lands Bill) sponsored by Senator Cortez Masto currently moving its way through Congress only opens 25,000 of Clark County’s 5.2 million acres to development. Most of this land is southeast of Las Vegas—that is, away from other Nevada counties. Oddly, Mohave County in Arizona and, to a lesser extent, San Bernadino County in California are likely to benefit more than Lincoln and Nye counties in Nevada.
In short, geography matters as much as population in these designations. Reno’s growth and impact on county-to-county relations is much closer to what the RUCC classification was designed to capture than Las Vegas’ growth. Las Vegas’ urban impact is actually more similar to much smaller cities whose commuting and service area is a single county. Chalk it up to the uniqueness of Nevada.
Further Refining: Small Cities, Small Towns, and Rurals
But we are here to discuss the rurals, not urban areas.
The 2024 edition of Rural America at a Glance also introduces a further refinement to the classification system to discuss some of the population changes. As described in a note to Figure 2, the system merely aggregates the existing RUCC codes into four “ruralities” (2024 Rural America, page 6). The context of using this grouping applied specifically to changes in types of population change (natural change versus net migration). The rurality types are:
Small City (RUCC 4 and 5): Douglas, Elko, and Nye
Small Town (RUCC 6 and 7): Churchill and Humboldt
Rural Adjacent (RUCC 8): Lincoln, Mineral, and Pershing
Remote Rural (RUCC 9): Esmeralda, Eureka, Lander, and White Pine
I take some pleasure in the Small City grouping including one county from each of my Rurals of Nevada: Douglas from the Western Rural, Elko from the I-80 Corridor, and Nye from the Central Rural. It bolsters my belief I have the groups roughly correct.
One item from this list that intrigues is that the five counties in the Small City and Small Town categories also map closely to another federal statistical categorization, Micropolitan Statistical Areas (µSA) as defined by the OMB. This classification was developed in 2003 to include urban clusters of between 10,000 and 50,000 people. The definition here is a bit different from the urban area/urban cluster classifications issued by the Census Bureau back in late 2022, which I wrote about in an earlier article. As of the publication of the updated list in OMB Bulletin 23-01, there are 542 µSAs in the United States and Puerto Rico. Five of those are in Nevada.
I will deal with the population change issues in a future article. But assuming that the existence of a statistical area of a certain population size (at least 10,000 people for µSAs) includes certain services, we can see if this Small City/Small Town/Rural Adjacent model reinforces the RUCC contention of adjacency.
I will point out this approach is somewhat similar to a second USDA ERS classification developed in the 1990s known as the Urban Influence Codes (UIC), which Cromartie discusses more in-depth (Cromartie, 9-11). My take is a much rougher attempt to get at the same information graphically.
The question is does being an adjacent non-metro county mean better access than being non-adjacent? I took the center urban point of the statistical areas and drew a rough hour travel radius, about 60 miles. Mapping that back onto our county map of Nevada, we get a rough coverage map.
What I notice is that given the Metro- and Micropolitan Statistical Area overlaps, almost every part of the Western Rural region is within a statistical area radius. This includes the entirety of Lyon County, not just Fernley. Only a small portion of extreme northeastern Churchill County does not have relatively easy (1-hour) access to metro services. So while Yerington or Smith Valley (in central and southwestern Lyon County, respectively) may accurately claim to be rural and not in the Reno metro area in the same way Fernley at the northern edge is, the truth is they have much more access to urban services due to the proximity to multiple metro- and micropolitan statistical areas than traditional “rural” counties do.
This situation is in sharp contrast to the other Rurals of Nevada. The Elko and Winnemucca µSAs somewhat cover the I-80 Corridor counties, although the city of Eureka is well outside the easy access radius of Elko even though Eureka County is technically within the Elko micropolitan area. The Eureka Clinic, for instance, is an extension of the William B. Ririe Hospital in Ely rather than the Northeastern Nevada Regional Hospital in Elko.
For the Central Rural counties, the divergence is even more pronounced. Except for northern Mineral County (largely the Walker River Paiute Reservation in Schurz) and extreme southern Nye County around Pahrump, the entire region is outside of urban areas and their services. This situation is particularly jarring for Nye County, which despite its relatively high RUCC of 4 is largely separated from the Las Vegas metropolitan area to which it is technically adjacent. In reality, Tonopah in Nye County is barely 30 minutes closer to Las Vegas than Ely in White Pine County (RUCC 9)—and both are more than 3 hours away. Tonopah is also 2.5 hours away from Pahrump, only slightly less than it is from Fallon. Adjacency is an odd way to describe these distances.
Does RUCC work for Nevada?
The fundamental problem in fully applying the RUCC adjacency idea to Nevada is the huge size of our counties. Not including the Alaska boroughs (that state’s county equivalents), Nye County is the third largest county in the U.S., and Elko County is the fourth largest (according to this list). Six of the 30 largest counties in the U.S. are in Nevada—second only to Arizona’s seven counties. For the record, the six are, in order, Nye (#3), Elko (#4), Lincoln (#7), Humboldt (#13), White Pine (#17), and Clark (#22).
I went with the Top 30 counties because the first non-Western-state county to be included on the list, and the first east of the Mississippi River, is St. Louis County in Minnesota (Duluth is the county seat) at # 30. Texas’ first entry, Brewster County, does not appear until # 39 on the list. But five other Nevada counties are in the Top 100: Washoe (#36), Pershing (#42), Lander (#49), Churchill (#63), and Eureka at #100.
I bring this up because it illustrates an important fact. The concept of adjacency was developed based on the majority of the United States with much smaller counties. Given shorter distances, the original model of adjacency based on a gradual expansion of urban areas and services that “captured” more of the rural population by either commuting or in-migration from rural areas makes a lot of sense. One can easily see a “domino effect” of urbanization as counties grow, become metro, and then the adjacency frontier moves to the next non-metro county out.
But as population densities decrease and distances increase in many large Western counties, this model becomes untenable. Even if some areas of counties become non-metro, significant portions remain rural by any definition and significantly separated from urban services. Of course, this is hardly new; the question of rural areas in otherwise urban counties has bedeviled public policy for years. But given that the West is one of the fastest-growing regions in the U.S. and has larger counties, the situation threatens to become more common.
The problems of rural areas in otherwise urban counties have bedeviled public policy for years. But as the West rapidly grows, the situation threatens to become even more common
Interestingly, the Three Rurals of Nevada each have a county that is likely to become re-classified as metro after the 2030 Census. We can speculate on how those changes to the RUCC might play out.
Our first example is the Western Rurals where the shift from non-metro to metro is already well underway. One uniqueness of this region is that the counties are much smaller than typical in Nevada. While Churchill is a large county, the other three are not, being the fourth- (Lyon), third- (Douglas), and smallest (Storey) counties in Nevada (Carson City, formerly Ormsby County, is technically second-smallest). Douglas County is a candidate to become a metro area after the 2030 Census, which would make the Western Rurals, well, not very rural. The Western Rurals illustrate perfectly the model behind the RUCC codes: small counties adjacent to metro areas become urbanized over time as metro areas expand.
But what if the counties had been larger? Another area likely to jump across the 50,000 threshold after the 2030 Census is Pahrump. Since Pahrump contains around 90% of Nye County’s population, one might consider its metro status to be not too different from a major city in a largely rural county. It will likely just continue to de-populate its hinterland as the population is drawn towards Pahrump or otherwise leaves (de-ruralization).
The problem is that northern Nye County is not losing population, but is likely to see a significant influx as the Round Mountain Mine expands and additional mining opens around Tonopah. This new development is not going to be connected to the Pahrump-Las Vegas area through either commuter or any other links. At the same time, it is difficult to see how urbanization in Pahrump and a larger population in the Tonopah/Round Mountain area will help the other Central Rural counties.
The third example may prove most typical of the West, in the vein of Las Vegas and Clark County: a metro area in a large county with limited impact on its neighbors. The Elko/Spring Creek µSA is tracking to jump the 50,000 threshold after 2030, but the size of Elko County is going to effectively mean the impact will not spill over to neighboring communities such as Wells, West Wendover, or Jackpot, all of which are outside the 1-hour radius within Elko County. The problems of devising policies for a “metro” county with significant rural areas will only become more pronounced.
Moreover, neighboring counties in the I-80 Corridor are not likely to be drawn closely to Elko’s metropolitan orbit. Winnemucca (Humboldt County) may become more metropolitan if current lithium and other projects advance, although I doubt it until at least 2040. Pershing County probably will look increasingly towards Reno. Eureka and White Pine would move from RUCC 9 to RUCC 8 (and from Remote Rural to Rural-Adjacent) but given the distance of their population centers (Eureka and Ely, respectively) will only have limited benefit, similar to the limited impact Las Vegas has on Lincoln County’s current situation.
The last two examples indicate that metro/non-metro adjacency will not be able to adequately explain the dynamics of either the Central Rurals or the I-80 Corridor as new metro areas emerge. If anything, it may create a false impression of their access to resources for anyone looking from the outside as simply the county level.
Conclusion: Un-Ruralization rather than De-Ruralization
My intent is not to knock the RUCC classification. It works for a large part of the country and provides a bird’s-eye (Washington-eye?) view of what is happening in rural America. But I do think the population change model under it may no longer be as valid now as it was fifty years ago—particularly in the West.
As John Cromartie notes, part of the development of the RUCC was driven by a recognition that rural areas were increasingly losing both population and economic opportunities to more urbanized areas in the 1960s and 1970s. This process, often described as de-ruralization, was assumed to be a “new normal.” It also became another component of the myth of the Aging Rurals.
But what is happening now is different. In place of depopulating rurals, we have areas with significant populations that are effectively separated from urban areas but have little possibility of connecting with them. Some of the other USDA classifications have attempted to capture this by refining what metro areas are used (the Urban Influence Codes discussed briefly above) or moving to sub-county regions (the Rural-Urban Commuting Codes and the Frontier and Remote Area Codes, both developed in the 2000s). This process moved in parallel with a more robust understanding of development patterns developed by researchers (see Cromartie, 11-12).
But even these models, I think, still miss fully what is happening in the Central Rurals and the I-80 Corridor. These rural counties are no longer losing significant populations, but if the 2024 Rural America at a Glance is correct are gaining it. There is also a possibility that rural natural growth will increase in many areas, undoing the Aging Rurals myth. The new mining now is planning on 20- or 30-year operational periods, with significant development and remediation time on either end. That pattern means generational thinking in terms of infrastructure.
However, it will not be the same infrastructure as a retail, manufacturing, or diversified service urban area. It will have to be geared towards a smaller, separated population and will likely require continuing funding and infrastructure thinking more akin to rural development projects in the 1950s and 1960s. The RUCC and other classifications starting from a mid-20th century model of urban services are likely not to capture this.
What is happening in places like Lyon County and likely to happen in Nye and Elko can better be described as un-ruralization. These counties are being treated as urban by classification more than the actual situation. The threat is that this classification may deny many truly rural areas of vital funding and service resources they need. There may be consequences if we are not careful.