[Talk-us] Census designated place boundaries: should we care about them?

[Nathan Edgars II]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 12:07 PM, Brad Neuhauser
<brad.neuhauser at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Nathan Edgars II <neroute2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Usually a CDP is simply an arbitrary area drawn by the Census Bureau
>> for statistical purposes. Does it sound reasonable that these should
>> at least not be treated as ordinary boundaries, if not (carefully)
>> deleted altogether where not based on actual administrative
>> boundaries?
> There was a thread that touched on this a while back
> (http://www.mail-archive.com/talk-us@openstreetmap.org/msg03117.html),
> and I'll repeat what I said then: I don't think you can say "usually"
> with the Census data.  You really need to look at it on a
> state-by-state basis.  While in some states CDPs seem to be pretty
> arbitrary, in MN they follow municipal boundaries and are updated
> yearly.  There must be other states where this is the case, too--I
> can't imagine we're that far above average!

Sure - any said deletion or demotion should be handled by someone
familiar with the details. If the CDP is actually an incorporated
municipality, it should be retagged as such rather than the CDP
default (place=locality).

(There are worse problems in areas where annexations of individual
properties are common -
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=27.47254&lon=-80.34265&zoom=17&layers=B000FTF
(here Fort Pierce is a city and Fort Pierce North is a CDP) - but I
don't see any solution to this other than finding better data or
laboriously going annexation-by-annexation through the government
records.)