Monday, July 08, 2019

Metropolitanization: Why "rural broadband" misses the mark on America's telecom infrastructure deficiencies

Metropolitan America | Newgeography.com: The rural to urban exodus is well known. It has driven the growth of the largest urban areas from one million residents as late as 1800 to nearly 40 million today. The United States has risen from less than 40 percent urban in 1900 to more than 80 percent today. Other, more affluent nations have experienced similar trends. Even more quickly, China has risen from 19 percent urban in 1980 to 56 percent in 2015 today, according to the United Nations. Even the least affluent nations are urbanizing rapidly.

But the trend reflective of urbanization is the movement of people into metropolitan areas, which include traditional (core) city, suburban and even rural areas. This might best be called “metropolitanization.” According to the US Office of Management and Budget, a metropolitan area is “a geographic entity associated with at least one core … plus adjacent territory that has a high degree of social and economic integration with the core as measured by commuting ties" (Note 1). The core is the largest urban area in the metropolitan area. The peripheries of metropolitan areas, outside the largest urban areas, are largely rural by the Census Bureau definition. In 2010, the majority of the nation’s rural population lived in metropolitan areas, while 90 percent of metropolitan land area was rural. Despite living areas formally designated as rural, residents in the metropolitan periphery more often live an urban, rather than rural lifestyle.
So much of the discussion of deficiencies and disparities in advanced telecommunications infrastructure (ATI) in the United States is framed as a dichotomy between urban and rural areas, invoking comparisons to electrical distribution and telephone infrastructure in the early 20th century. Time has moved on and circumstances have changed. Back then as Wendell Cox explains in his blog post, residential settlement patterns were much more sharply defined as urban or rural.

In today's America, that's no longer the case. Metropolitanization has blurred the lines between what was once considered rural and urban. Now on the peripheries of metro areas there are exurbs and quasi-rural areas, an in between type of settlement pattern that has developed in recent decades. They aren't as densely populated as the suburbs and their sprawling housing tracts. But they're more densely populated than traditional rural areas where there may only be 50 to 100 people per square mile. These outlying areas are appealing to homebuyers because they can be seen as within commuting distance of a job center while offering affordable housing at lower prices than in closer in, more densely populated areas.

Metropolitanization has implications for ATI since these exurban areas are often poorly served because they are not seen by dominant investor-owned ATI providers as having high profit potential. However, with metro area traffic congestion increasing making already long commutes longer, ATI can provide the critical infrastructure to enable exurban and residents of other less densely developed areas at the edges of metro areas to work in their communities rather than commute daily to a distant office. That comes with an environmental impact bonus by reducing transportation demand.