Is there a list of counties considered suburban?

[Frozen Sky Ever Why]

Well?

[Adam Griffin]

The term is of course subjective, depending on how you define it.

For my metro/rural polarization project, I used the urban county cluster delineations provided by jimrtex to break each state down into two groupings. A good start may be to take these and subtract the counties from each cluster that are generally considered "urban".

[RINO Tom]

I have always wished someone would do an actual city/town map of the United States with "urban cities" colored gray, "suburbs" lighter gray and "small towns" white or something ... everything else in green.  I tried to do something along these lines on Mapline, but the way different states have their towns drawn kind of ruins the visual appeal of the map.

[muon2]

As Griff says, there's no clear answer on what is suburban. It can either mean the communities outside of the central city, or lower density areas within the urbanized metro area. The community definition is much broader, because it places communities like Cambridge MA and Oak Park IL as suburbs since they aren't Boston or Chicago.

The density definition gives a better match to what feels like a suburb. In making the UCCs we identified counties in a Census metro area where the urbanized population either exceeded 25K or 40% of the county population. Those can be divided by density, perhaps with a line at 2000/sq mi or perhaps 1000/sq km.

Part of the answer depends on what info you want to extract about them.

[cvparty]

well for one no one can ever agree on what exactly a suburb is

[Del Tachi]

County-wide classifications are also challenging because development/growth doesn't always follow municipal boundaries.  Take somewhere like Harris County, TX, which definitely has urban, suburban, exurban as well as rural areas, how should it be classified?  Houston is definitely urban, but most of the population in Harris County probably lives in more suburban/exurban communities.