U.S. rural road safety statistics, including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s annual rural/urban fatality reports, classify each fatal crash by the rural/urban variable (RUR_URB) in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS). Population research, in contrast, usually defines rural with the Census Bureau’s urban areas. We measure how well the two definitions agree for every fatal crash with a usable location from 2015 to 2024 (355,591 crashes, 386,140 deaths), placing each crash on the 2020 Census urban-area map, held fixed across years, and comparing the result with its FARS label. The two definitions agree on 88.4% of deaths (Cohen’s κ = 0.77). Disagreement runs mainly in one direction: 17.5% of deaths in crashes outside Census urban areas carry an urban FARS label, against 5.8% in the opposite direction. These crashes cluster at urban edges, with a median distance of 0.65 km to the nearest Census urban area, compared with 9.76 km for crashes that both definitions call rural. The gap widened over the decade. The FARS rural share of deaths fell from 50.1% in 2015 to 41.1% in 2024, while the fixed-map share moved from 52.0% to 48.1%. The divergence is concentrated in a few states and, in New York and California, appears as a single step between 2017 and 2018. Rural road safety trends based on the FARS label therefore mix changes in where crashes occur with changes in how they are labeled. Analyses should state their rural definition and, for trends, hold it fixed. The county panel, crash-level crosswalk, and code are openly available.

About half of U.S. renter households spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Against this backdrop, the study asks whether restrictive land-use regulations make local housing demand shocks more burdensome for renters. The analysis covers 156–163 U.S. metropolitan areas from 2013 to 2024, using the 2018 Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index to examine two sources of demand variation: shift-share predicted employment growth and pre-pandemic exposure to remote work. Employment shocks were associated with lower renter cost burdens, whereas greater remote-work exposure was linked to rising rents and burdens, especially for middle- and higher-income renters. Neither response, however, was significantly larger in metropolitan areas with more restrictive regulations, and permitting was no less responsive to demand shocks in those areas. The findings were consistent across alternative samples and a zoning measure derived from municipal code text. Measured regulatory restrictiveness therefore appears to be a weak predictor of short- and medium-term changes in renter affordability, underscoring the importance of combining land-use reform with targeted rental assistance.