The geography of America is shifting. Population and job growth are happening faster in suburbs than in urban neighborhoods. At the same time, crowded urban neighborhoods are getting richer and their housing is getting more expensive. There are clear statistical differences among Americans living in urban, suburban, and rural parts of America when it comes to voting patterns, attitudes on social issues, labor and economic outcomes, and health outcomes.  The distinction between urban and rural matters to the federal government, and there is an abundance of official federal definitions of urban and rural. And yet among these definitions, none includes a third category: suburban.

The lack of an official federal definition of suburban means that government data are not reported separately for suburban areas. That makes it hard to measure the reach and impact of federal programs and to produce vital statistics about Americans and their communities.

Much of America looks suburban, with neighborhoods of single-family homes connected by roads to retail centers and low-rise office buildings. For the first time, government data confirm this. According to the newly released 2017 American Housing Survey (of nearly 76,000 households nationwide), about 52 percent of people in the United States describe their neighborhood as suburban, while about 27 percent describe their neighborhood as urban, and 21 percent as rural.

These results echo those from a 2015 survey in which one of us (Jed Kolko) and colleagues at Trulia asked more than 2,000 people around the nation the same question. We found then that 53 percent of survey respondents described their neighborhood as suburban, 26 percent as urban, and 21 percent as rural.

Because there is no official definition of “suburban,” asking people to describe their neighborhood is the first step in formalizing a definition. Kolko showed that household density and other neighborhood characteristics are strongly associated with how people describe their neighborhoods. Others have used those density cutoffs in geographic analyses, including of the midterm elections.

Official geographic definitions should catch up with how Americans describe their neighborhoods. These definitions do a good job at distinguishing rural neighborhoods from the overwhelmingly non-rural majority of the population, but fare poorly at differentiating urban from suburban neighborhoods.

Finding the suburban in urban data

We wondered: Do existing government definitions of urbanization reveal that more than half of Americans live in the suburbs? We compare each AHS respondent’s answer to the neighborhood question with how their address is classified by two main federal definitions of urbanization: the Census Bureau’s Urban Areas and the Office of Management and Budget’s Core-Based Statistical Areas, which include Metropolitan Statistical Areas and Micropolitan Statistical Areas.

But here’s the hitch: Urbanized Areas, as currently defined, are mostly suburban. Nearly twice as many households in Urbanized Areas describe their neighborhood as suburban (63 percent) compared to urban (32 percent). Also, residents of Urban Clusters—Urban Areas with fewer than 50,000 people—are almost as likely to describe their neighborhood as rural as they are urban.

How respondents described their neighborhood, by 2010 Urban Area category (Census Bureau)

*Rows may not add up to 100 percent due to rounding.

The story is much the same when looking at Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Metropolitan Statistical Areas do well at distinguishing urban and suburban neighborhoods from rural neighborhoods, although not quite as well as Census Urban Areas do. Our analysis reveals that 86 percent of households living in the 382 Metropolitan Statistical Areas consider their neighborhood to be either urban or suburban, while 72 percent of households living outside of Metropolitan or Micropolitan Statistical Areas consider their neighborhood to be rural.

Even central cities—the most urban part of Metropolitan Statistical Areas—are quite suburban. The slight majority of households (51 percent) living within the central city of a Metropolitan Statistical Area describe their neighborhood as urban, while 47 percent describe their neighborhood as suburban. Outside of central cities, but within a Metropolitan Statistical Area, the majority (64 percent) describe their neighborhood as suburban.

How respondents described their neighborhood, by 2013 Core-Based Statistical Area category (OMB)

*Rows may not add up to 100 percent due to rounding.

So, looking at a national level, we find Census Urbanized Areas and OMB’s Metropolitan Statistical Areas are predominantly suburban, and even the central cities of Metropolitan Statistical Areas are quite suburban. It turns out these findings are generally true when we look individually at the 15 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the U.S. All of these are more suburban than urban. Some of the faster-growing areas, such as Atlanta, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, and Phoenix, are more than 60 percent suburban.

How respondents described their neighborhood in the 15 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas (OMB)

*Due to disclosure rules, the suburban category also includes a small number of respondents who described their neighborhood as rural. Adding rural to suburban does not cause the suburban category to become the majority category in any of the 15 metropolitan areas.

We believe there are two conclusions to be drawn from our initial review of the 2017 AHS neighborhood question results. First, we feel there is enough evidence to promote the statement “America is majority suburban” from anecdote, or stylized fact, to fact. Second, existing federal definitions of urban and rural obscure the fact that most Americans describe their neighborhood as suburban, and this is true when looking nationally or at specific Metropolitan Statistical Areas or Census Urbanized Areas.

As producers and consumers of data products, it is clear to us that there is a demand for an official definition of suburban, so we think it is time to make the suburbs official. An official definition of suburban, distinct from urban and rural, could bring consistency to suburban measures of homeownership, transit usage, population growth, poverty, and many other topics. And we believe it is feasible.

With insights from the 2017 AHS neighborhood description data, the smallest geographic building blocks could be classified as suburban or urban using the process the Census Bureau already uses to delineate urban areas from rural America. We would at last be able to better understand the places where more than half of Americans live.