https://www.amazon.com/Clustering-America-Michael-J-Weiss/dp...
which was not an unsupervised clustering but rather a grid subdivision into communities over a few variables. Then they gave catchy names like "Shotguns and Pickups" and "Blue Blood Estates" to the boxes.
The current study divided first into three categories of growing, stable and shrinking and then split the growing communities into high, middle and low income.
That kind of division is more likely to be meaningful than an unsupervised clustering (e.g. I can explain the structure in a sentence so of course it is meaningful.)
I was running reasonably complex models of household types around stores to build marketing campaigns for consumer goods. It was very effective.
I met Prof. Webber a couple of times, and he explained that the genesis for these systems was for siting public transport stations in the right places to optimise usage patterns and ensuring they had sufficient usage to make the investment worthwhile, well, IIRC, that was 30 years ago…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(geodemography) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_(demographics) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Webber_(demographer)
Perhaps its redneck elitism but "rural" implies you'd have to work at least a bit to hit a neighbor with a rifle shot. Don't think Ohio has had much land like that for a while; sure there's vast fields but no one lives there, the communities are gathered up into the places that were harder to till. and those were "tiny towns" back unto the 1800s afaik.
"Rural" might mean the only government services one can expect are USPS mail and a county property tax assessment. If someone wants a permit to build something on a plot of land, its too citified. If a firetruck might show up because of your bonfire, its iffy how "rural" you are.
I can't help but feel this "Study" was done by someone living in a skyscraper in the center of a metropolitan city that has never seen a live cow or horse before and that somehow feels wrong to me.
