Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

You may have noticed an interesting item in the StarTribune on Sunday, January 8.

A story about the 2020 Census ran under the headline “Updated census categories baffle come communities.” The story was based on a new document from the Census Bureau issued December 28, 2022.

The story is that the Census Bureau re-categorized 1,140 cities in the U.S. from urban to rural. Among them were cities like Melrose, Benson, Albany, Long Prairie, Granite Falls and 36 more. The reason was a newer Census Bureau benchmark that an urban city should have a population of 5,000 or over 2,000 housing units.

What caught my eye, publisher Tim Douglass’ eye and that of a few more was this sentence: “Only 36 U.S. cities were changed from rural to urban including one in Minnesota, Glenwood.”

Tim Douglass contacted the StarTribune reporter who wrote the story and the reporter sent a link the StarTribune used for the story. His theory, and mine, too, was that someone mistook Glenwood for Glencoe. Off and on Tim said the Tribune still gets mail for the paper in Glencoe, the McCleod County Register. In meeting with the folks from Glencoe at newspaper conventions the publisher there laughs about the same thing, mail for Glenwood sometimes goes there.

Using the link to the U.S. Census Bureau the reporter sent I went online and printed out the list of cities labeled urban in Minnesota. Glencoe is listed with a population of 5,710 and 2,478 housing units, so it would have made the list either by population or housing units.

Glenwood comes next in line with a population of 4,202 and 2,478 housing units., implying that the city made the list via the number of housing units.

Except those numbers are not correct when you look at other census data from the same site.

If you look up Glenwood, Minnesota as a city you will find the Census Bureau says our fair city has 2,657 residents and 1,406 housing units.

Oh, on one list Glencoe is also listed as a city in Pope County!

So somebody goofed. And yes we are baffled!

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If you like numbers the Census Bureau site is a lot of fun.

Minnesota has a population of 5,706,494 residents with an average household income of $77,720. It has 2,485,558 housing units and 2,281,033 households.

Pope County has a population of 11,308, and average household income of $67,040. It has 6,367 housing units and 4,892 households. There are 382 employers and we have a 62.9 percent employment rate. A total of 22.2 percent hold a bachelor’s degree or more.

Nationally there are 2,613 urban areas with a population of 265,149,027 people and that amounts to 80 percent of the U.S. population. There are 66,300,254 of us considered to live in rural areas, which is 20 percent of the population.

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Last week I wrote of my concerns about the impact of extended leave for maternity or health issues. I referred to six weeks being a problem for small employers where there is just one person doing a specific job, a job that co-workers would not necessarily have the skills to fill in.

That was written before a more detailed plan came out that indicated that the leave period proposed would be 12 weeks, twice as long. That makes the problem that much worse. I have not seen anything about exempting small employers, just something that it would allow small employers to compete with larger employers in terms of benefits.

But who is going to do the work?