The latest report from the Employment Security Commission embraces a concept that the U.S. Census Bureau developed after the 2000 count of the nation’s population: the micropolitan statistical area.
Henderson is typical of the rural reality that the new micropolitan designation recognizes.
A micropolitan area is the small-town equivalent of a metropolitan area. The federal Office of Management and Budget designates a “metro” in a geographic area where social and economic life revolves around one or more core cities with at least 50,000 residents. “Micros” are the same, except the core city has 10,000 to 49,999 people.
Henderson is big enough with more than 16,000 residents to count as the core of a micropolis. But even though Henderson is a dining and retail center for neighboring counties on both sides of the North Carolina-Virginia line, only Vance County is part of the micropolitan statistical area.
For now, Granville and Warren counties don’t fit into any fancy category. Each lacks a town big enough and central enough to life to earn micro status, and as the Triangle sprawls outward, each is pulled in enough directions not fit neatly into any other metro or micro.