[resu_nimda]

I wondered why they would create so many unnecessary blocks.

I had interpreted a "census block" to be an arbitrary unit, but it seems to have originally designated actual city blocks. In 1990 they decided to divide the whole country into blocks. [1]

"An automated computer process looks for all visible and nonvisible features in our geographic database (MAF/TIGER) that should be a block boundary and creates a block each time those features create a polygon." [2]

Kind of an interesting extension of the "block" concept. It would seem that population density should be more of a factor. Automatically generating 5 million unpopulated census divisions seems a bit like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_block

[2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2011/...

[cowsandmilk]

Incorporating them into neighboring blocks can cause problems. The current approach does well at giving us local population density, even if it is zero in these cases. Merging all these blocks together would result in inaccurate numbers for density in many small rural towns as their land areas are artificially inflated.

[mannykannot]

The thing is, if you do the whole country through some uniform process, you don't get into an endless discussion about how you should do it - what's in and what's out? What is the appropriate size and shape of this block, and this one and this...