Do You Live in an Urban, Suburban, Exurban, or Rural Area?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Urban

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Outer suburban. I don't really feel like my area is 'exurban', mostly because the houses here are from the 1980s or something.

hmmm? Newer houses such as from the 80s are exactly the sort of thing found in exurbs.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I don't think I've ever heard anyone use the term "exurb" outside the Atlas Forum and maybe one or two buzzwordish newspaper or magazine articles.

I've seen it in TIME magazine and the NY Times. Not that unmainstream of a word, though not commonly used in day to day convo, you'll never hear someone say "I live in an exurb" or describe some town as an exurb in real life of course. I've found that even people who play Ingress are unfamiliar with it. There was once and an argument in our team chat about if Watertown, MN (an important site for a variety of reasons) should be considered part of the metro or if it's "rural", when I explained that it's an exurb I got a bunch of replies like "wtf is that?"

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Small towns also have the urban and suburban divisions. Common features in a small town downtown area include a town square, a county courthouse or municipal offices, a post office, an (often unused) old single screen movie theater, the remains of an old shopping district that has long since been replaced by a suburban WalMart. And then on the fringes of the town, you have single family homes, often with large yards, and, in many cases, trailer parks.

There's a very distinctive small town downtown that exists just about everywhere in Minnesota that has a four digit population. It's basically like a strip mall, but with all local businesses, usually something like some real estate office, accounting or law firm, sometimes even a dentist, and also bars together. And usually some quirky gift shop type places. Even most of the suburbs have "downtowns" along the lines of this.

Small towns in southwest Minnesota also sometimes have a weird type of parking I've never seen anywhere else, basically instead of the standard parking lot you find in most strip malls or the diagonal parking you find at most of the type listed above, they instead have parking in the middle of the road and then you can walk to the businesses on either side. I have never seen it anywhere east or north of Mankato.