Native American Lands

Culture

An Introduction to the American Communities Project

by American Communities Project September 12, 2018

What’s the American Communities Project all about?

We know that people in different places experience the world very differently, even in the age of the Web; we seek to understand just why and how.

Consider that within the same state, community differences can be stark. The differences between a metropolitan area and a rural locale 50 miles away can be greater than that same city and another metro area 500 miles away. Often these different traits are not properly understood in the policy world where problems are frequently judged by looking at national or state phenomenon or data.

Understanding the different types of community that make up America will help us develop new and better ways of recognizing and measuring what works and what does not in a range of disciplines — health, diversity, economics, culture, law, technology, etc. — and their intersections.

What is a community type?

The American Communities Project (ACP) classifies the 3,100 counties in the United States into one of 15 different kinds of counties called community types. The community types are based on a vast array of data, including election results, economic numbers, consumer surveys, and polling.

What are the 15 community types?

(Click type names to see more on each.)

African American South: Places with large African American populations. Lower incomes and higher unemployment.	Exurbs: Wealthy communities usually on the edge of metro areas, Largely white with lower crime rates.	Military Posts: Located around military installations. Younger, middle-income, diverse communities.
Aging Farmlands: Sparsely populated and overwhelmingly white. Low unemployment, agricultural economy.	Graying America: Places with large senior communities. Generally rural and less diverse, middle-income.	Native American Lands: Places with large Native American populations. Young communities with lower incomes.
Big Cities: Counties holding the nation’s largest cities. Dense and diverse.	Hispanic Centers: Large Hispanic populations in mostly rural communities. Younger with lower incomes.	Rural Middle America: Largely rural and white communities. Middle income and average educational attainment.
College Towns: Urban and rural communities that are home to campuses and college students.	LDS Enclaves: Places dominated by Latter-day Saints adherents. Younger and middle-income.	Urban Suburbs: Educated and densely populated communities around major metros. Racially and economically diverse.
Evangelical Hubs: Places with above-average numbers for evangelical adherents. Largely Southern with fewer college grads.	Middle Suburbs: Middle-income, blue-collar communities mostly around metro areas.	Working Class Country: Rural, blue-collar communities. Low incomes and college graduation rates.

Who are the American Communities Project’s partners?

The ACP is based at The George Washington University’s School of Media & Public Affairs. Other major partners are the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; Gallup; Public Opinion Strategies; Peter D. Hart Research; the Pew Research Center; and Simmons Research, a marketing data firm. ACP’s data library is always expanding.

How can you use this website?

Play with the map here or on the homepage.

Hover over a county to discover which community type it fits into. Zoom with the + and – buttons.
Click on a county to take you to the page with more characteristics of that county’s community type.
Click on a community type in the map key to see its spread across the country (homepage map only).

Navigate with the hamburger menu. Visit one of the 15 community type pages and learn more about the characteristics of a specific kind of community. Visit the Storybank for stories, insights, and analysis written by ACP authors and guests; find relevant data sets within individual stories and apply them to your work.

Scroll down the homepage for ACP’s recommended articles.

Stay tuned for more. Read the ACP’s reports about health and related issues, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Data sets and multimedia will be available within the reports.

African American South Aging Farmlands Big Cities College Towns Evangelical Hubs Exurbs Graying America Hispanic Centers LDS Enclaves Middle Suburbs Military Posts Native American Lands Rural Middle America Urban Suburbs Working Class Country

Community Snapshot

Dotted primarily across the west, these 45 counties are marked by large Native American populations – more than half the people who live in these counties overall are indigenous Americans.

The Native American Lands are one of the smallest community types, home to about 914,000 people. These are not wealthy places, with a median household income of about $47,300. Health behaviors fare worse here than across the other types. About 28% of adults in the Native American Lands are current smokers, 12% more than the national average. Obesity is also a problem in these communities, with cases of adult obesity rising 7 points above the 32% national average. The people in these areas have limited access to exercise opportunities, with only 42% of the population receiving adequate access to facilities for physical activity. Likely due to the poor health behaviors, more than 20% the population reports fair or poor health, above the national average of 12%. Broadband access sits at 70%, which is the lowest rate among community types and 17 points below the national average. The voter turnout rate is 54%, sitting 14 points below the national average.

Health

Who’s Sleeping the Most and Least in America?

by Ari Pinkus May 03, 2018

Now’s the time when students of all ages are cramming for end-of-year exams through the wee hours. But it’s not just students sleeping poorly—and it’s not just in May. A health problem that’s been building in America for some time, insufficient sleep was classified as a public health epidemic by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2016—and continues to be a pain point.

Sleep in American Communities

Now that the American Communities Project (ACP) is bringing its lens to the 2018 County Health Rankings, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program, the ever-present problem comes into sharper relief. ACP found that insufficient sleep is an issue in all 15 community types, but it is a matter of degree.

One group stands out for being particularly sleep deprived: the African American South, often found in more rural areas from Virginia through Texas, where African Americans can make up more than 40 percent of the population and the median household income is at the lowest level of all types. Here the insufficient sleep average jumps to 38 percent. These counties show more evidence of other health problems laid out in the rankings, including high rates of obesity (35 percent) and physical inactivity (31 percent). Among the community types, it also ranks highest in income inequality, signaling socioeconomic distress.

On the other end of the scale are more homogenous places. The sharpest example occurs in Aging Farmlands, where the insufficient sleep rate drops to 27 percent. These counties in the Great Plains are home to about 576,000 people, 92 percent of which live in rural areas. They tend to be the oldest and least racially and ethnically diverse places in America, with more than a quarter over age 62 and 96 percent white. A slower, quieter life without work stress may contribute to better sleeping patterns. Graying America—where nearly a quarter of the population is 62 and older, and there’s also less diversity than the nation writ large—the rate holds at 31 percent on average. For that matter, Rural Middle America, where nearly 22 million people live, clocks in at 31 percent as well. These counties are a bit wealthier, more rural, and less diverse on average.

Sleep deprivation is slightly less prevalent in LDS Enclaves at 29 percent. Since the early 2000s, the Mormon Church has devoted some attention in its publications to the importance of sleep and rest.

Aside from LDS Enclaves and Aging Farmlands, the percentage of people in American communities not getting enough sleep remains above 30 percent on average—underscoring that the problem is justified to merit national attention. In fact, many different kinds of communities hover around the one-third figure. In the affluent Exurbs, 33 percent of residents on average report an insufficient amount of sleep. Hispanic Centers and College Towns, both of which have high percentages of youth, stand at 32 percent. Working Class Country, Native American Lands, Big Cities, and Urban Suburbs are at 34 percent.

Why Sleep Matters

Since 2016, the County Health Rankings have included insufficient sleep in a host of measures about one’s life quality and length. The report cites many reasons:

“Sleep plays a key role in maintaining proper growth and repair of the body, learning, memory, emotional resilience, problem solving, decision making, and emotional control.
Ongoing sleep deficiency has been linked to heart disease, depression and anxiety, risky behavior, and suicide.
A lack of sleep can also affect others’ health. Sleepiness, especially while driving, can lead to motor vehicle crashes.”

To obtain a measure, the rankings incorporate a key question from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey: “On average, how many hours of sleep do you get in a 24-hour period? Think about the time you actually spend sleeping or napping, not just the amount of sleep you think you should get.”

Insufficient sleep translates to the percentage of adults who respond that they get less than seven hours of zzzz a night on average. In 2016, about one third of adults reported getting insufficient sleep. In some counties, it was almost one in two residents.

That same year Arianna Huffington’s The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life One Night at a Time debuted and became a national best-seller. In it, she describes collapsing from exhaustion in 2007.

African American South Aging Farmlands Big Cities College Towns Exurbs Graying America Hispanic Centers LDS Enclaves Native American Lands Rural Middle America Urban Suburbs Working Class Country

Politics

How New Tax Law May Deepen America’s Political and Geographic Divides

by Dante Chinni April 17, 2018

This federal tax season marks the last one with a full dose of SALT – state and local taxes. Next year the new Republican tax plan will place a $10,000 cap on the deduction households can take on their property and state and local incomes taxes, and those changes will fall hardest on the most urban places.

Data from the Tax Foundation analyzed by the American Communities Project finds it is the Big City and Urban Suburb communities that pay the most in SALT taxes, followed by the Exurbs. All those types have an average median SALT amount of more than $3,000, meaning many people in those communities are most likely to feel the impacts of the new law, according to 2014 data from the foundation.

Sitting on the other end of the spectrum in the ACP: the Native American Lands, Aging Farmlands and Hispanic Centers. All have an average median SALT amount of less than $1,000.

ACP Type	Average Median SALT
Urban Suburbs	$4,931.47
Big Cities	$4,042.68
Exurbs	$3,048.10
Middle Suburbs	$2,411.01
College Towns	$2,403.72
LDS Enclaves	$1,724.85
Rural Middle America	$1,618.95
Military Posts	$1,567.61
Graying America	$1,452.73
African American South	$1,089.79
Working Class Country	$1,069.95
Evangelical Hubs	$1,005.99
Hispanic Centers	$891.69
Aging Farmlands	$765.36
Native American Lands	$424.39

Much has been made of the political impacts of these numbers, how Democratic leaning communities look as though they will be hit hardest in this part of the new law. And the numbers bear that out.

In the 2014 data, there were 13 counties where the median SALT amount was over $10,000 and 11 of those counties voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. That means that more than half the households in those communities will take a hit under the new tax law. (Nine of those counties are Urban Suburbs in the ACP, three are Big Cities and one is an Exurb.)

But that broad view of the data may miss a larger point. Because of the way it targets state and local taxes, the new tax law is more than a purely partisan measure. In many ways it may deepen the urban/rural divide that has become a defining part of the American political story, making urban areas lean more Democratic.

Places with higher SALT amounts tend to be more urban because urban property values are typically higher which means urban property taxes tend to be higher, regardless of a homeowner’s political affiliation.

All those counties, even the ones that voted for Clinton in 2016, have some Republican voters in them. Many of them will pay more under the new rules as well, which may make them less likely to vote Republican in future elections regardless of political affiliation. It certainly makes them less likely to support this plan and the Republican Congress members who passed it.

And while it’s true that the SALT deductions tend to be biggest in the coastal states – such as California, New York and New Jersey – at the county level the impacts creep inward to swing states.

The 50 counties with the highest median SALT amounts include six counties in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota, three of which voted for President Donald Trump in 2016.

State	County	SALT Amount	ACP Type	2016 winner
MN	Carver	$7,643.82	Exurb	Trump
WI	Ozaukee	$7,564.69	Exurb	Trump
PA	Chester	$6,666.00	Exurb	Clinton
PA	Montgomery	$6,399.52	Urban Suburb	Clinton
MN	Hennepin	$6,302.26	Big City	Clinton
WI	Waukesha	$6,196.59	Exurb	Trump

That’s not a lot of places, but if the 2020 presidential election is as close as the 2016 race was, those numbers could matter, possibly quite a bit. And in some of these areas, all around major urban centers, there may be angry, disheartened Republicans who either stay home or voice their objection at the ballot box in November.

To be clear, the SALT issue is not over. Three states have filed suit against the federal government arguing that the new law “preempts the states’ ability to govern by reducing the ability to provide for their own citizens” and unfairly targets some states because of their higher state tax rates.

But in its current form the SALT provisions of the new tax law only seem likely to harden the community voting patterns the ACP has been noting for some time.

The Big Cities and Urban Suburbs, which have long been solidly Democratic, will have more reason to lean that way. And the Republican-heavy Exurbs, which have been somewhat skeptical of the Trump-led GOP, will have more reason to doubt the party.

Aging Farmlands Big Cities Exurbs Hispanic Centers Native American Lands Urban Suburbs

Culture

Defining the ACP Types

by American Communities Project September 29, 2000

(Click type names to see more on each.)

African American South: Places with large African American populations. Lower incomes and higher unemployment.	Exurbs: Wealthy communities usually on the edge of metro areas, Largely white with lower crime rates.	Military Posts: Located around military installations. Younger, middle-income, diverse communities.
Aging Farmlands: Sparsely populated and overwhelmingly white. Low unemployment, agricultural economy.	Graying America: Places with large senior communities. Generally rural and less diverse, middle-income.	Native American Lands: Places with large Native American populations. Young communities with lower incomes.
Big Cities: Counties holding the nation’s largest cities. Dense and diverse.	Hispanic Centers: Large Hispanic populations in mostly rural communities. Younger with lower incomes.	Rural Middle America: Largely rural and white communities. Middle income and average educational attainment.
College Towns: Urban and rural communities that are home to campuses and college students.	LDS Enclaves: Places dominated by Latter-day Saints adherents. Younger and middle-income.	Urban Suburbs: Educated and densely populated communities around major metros. Racially and economically diverse.
Evangelical Hubs: Places with above-average numbers for evangelical adherents. Largely Southern with fewer college grads.	Middle Suburbs: Middle-income, blue-collar communities mostly around metro areas.	Working Class Country: Rural, blue-collar communities. Low incomes and college graduation rates.

Community Type: Native American Lands

An Introduction to the American Communities Project