Urban Texas

I didn’t believe it, so I checked my calculations three times:  Texas has a weighted density of 3,042 people per square mile.  1,704 of its 4,388 census tracts, or 39%, are denser than this (hundreds are much, much denser).  The median census tract has a density of 2,000 ppsm.  In 2000, roughly 8.8 million Texans lived at a density of over 3,000 ppsm; roughly 11 million lived at over 2,000 ppsm.

As a benchmark, the Census Bureau uses 1,000 ppsm as the threshold density for urbanized areas.  Atlanta’s urbanized area has a weighted density of 2,362 ppsm, which means the average Texan — East Texas farmers and West Texas ranchers included — lives at a higher density than the average resident of Atlanta’s urbanized area.

I guess Texas’s standard density of 78 ppsm doesn’t quite convey how the average Texan lives.

All data from the 2000 Census.

(My eyes were a little blurry when I wrote this last night.  Maybe I’ll check my numbers once again.)