This simple graphic emphasizes the bias in the USA to live in metropolitan areas, rather than spread

This simple graphic emphasizes the bias in the USA to live in metropolitan areas, rather than spread out in rural regions. The premise is that I’ve divided the country into ten noncontiguous areas of equal population, with 32 million people each. The areas are grouped based on their population density. In the visualization, the squares are proportional to the land area of each region, with a scale provided. The results are interesting but not surprising.  The 10% of the USA population that lives in the most rural regions would be spread out across 87.3% of the land area.  On average, you would only find 10 people per square mile in this vast area. On the other end of the spectrum would be a 1,574 square mile region (less than one-twentieth of a percent of the USA land area) that has the population density of Queens County, NY (>20k people per square mile).All population density calculations were made at the census tract level, using land area only (water area excluded). Fun fact: 96 of the 100 census tracts with the highest overall population density are in New York, three are in California, and one is in Illinois. The one in Illinois (in Chicago) has the highest population density in the country (1,560 people in about three-thousandths of a square mile - 455,643 people per square mile)!Data source: US Census API (http://www.census.gov/developers/) -- source link

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