Federal rural development grant programs have stringent requirements for establishing eligibility for funding. Unfortunately, the data sets required to be used to establish eligibility render most rural communities "statistically invisible" For example: To find a community of 600 in a rural county of a western state, the closest you can get is census tract, block group or zip code, all of which are hundreds, sometimes thousands of square miles larger than the rural community needing federal assistance. This skews income data as well as the ability to identify the rural, unincorporated community in question.

It would be much more useful if Census data were provided with rural communities in mind, not just heavily populated urban areas.