Quote:
Originally Posted by Evergrey
I just analyzed satellite imagery of the "urbanized" corridor between Charleston and Huntington (including Teays Valley). Teays/Hurricane is well-situated between the two largest cities in WV... and I am sure people commute to both. However, this area is significantly closer to Charleston than Huntington.
There is a small undeveloped hill separating the Nitro area from the densely settled areas of Teays... which is where the Census Bureau is now breaking off Teays from Charleston's UA and giving it to Huntington. Going west... west of Milton there is some extremely lightly populated territory... but it's not totally undeveloped like the aforementioned hill... so I guess being "contiguous"... the Teays corridor now gets placed into Huntington's UA. However, the most heavily populated portions of this valley are closer to Charleston... regardless of a small undeveloped hill west of Nitro.
So due to this reclassification... Charleston looks like the fastest shrinking UA in America!
This is so dumb, I'm having a hard time explaining it!
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That said... I regard MSAs... while imperfect... to be the best comparative unit of measurement. They are based on regional economies as opposed to silly twisting of geometry (such as your example of the lonely road counting as "urbanized").
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As often as anything they are based on the whims of some bureaucrat who has scarcely even seen the areas in question. There is not a person living in Morgantown or Clarksburg or Uniontown who doesn't realize this is really one economic unit here, and a very active, dynamic one at that. You can compare any comparable geographic area you like for Kanawha and this area, or any economic data similarly and you will see what I mean. This region is every bit as active and prosperous economically as that one. And, the population dynamics are also similar except that this area is much closer to very large population centers, which might explain why the bureaucrats tend to keep the units seperate statistically.
