of 1,000 people for recognition as CDPs; there is no minimum population requirement for zonas urbanas.
The population minimum for CDPs is 300 in the Outlying Areas of Guam, the Virgin Islands of the United States, Palau, and the Northern Mariana Islands; there are no CDPs in American Samoa because incorporated villages cover the entire territory and all of the population. (For details, see Chapter 7, “Puerto Rico and the Outlying Areas.”)
Before the 1980 census, the Census Bureau had offered tribal officials the opportunity to delineate CDPs on Indian reservations. To be recognized in the data tabulations, such CDPs had to conform to the national minimum population size of 1,000. Also for 1980, tribal leaders were given the opportunity to identify small geographic areas within reservation boundaries as subreservation areas. Data users found that subreservation areas often were useful for identifying small settlements of several hundred people. For 1990, the Census Bureau discontinued the subreservation area program, but gave tribal officials the opportunity to delineate clusters of population as CDPs. To help this process, it lowered the minimum population size for CDPs on American Indian reservations from 1,000 to 250. (For further information, see Chapter 5, “American Indian and Alaska Native Areas.”)
The Census Bureau recognizes CDPs using population counts from the decennial census. The Census Bureau establishes potential CDPs before the census; these potential CDPs reflect the proposed CDPs and CDP boundaries submitted by program participants. The Census Bureau then tabulates the population of the census blocks comprising these potential CDPs. If a potential CDP meets the required minimum population size, it qualifies as a CDP and the Census Bureau includes it in its data tabulations and publications. For the 1990 census, the Census Bureau used postcensus local review counts to identify qualifying CDPs so it could include them in early decennial census data products, including the Public Law 94-171 data
