One of every three Montanans doesn't have a place to call home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

A huge majority of those folks would beg to differ, of course. It's not that so many are homeless, but that so many homes aren't in a "census designated place" that appears by name on the federal population charts.

When Montana's population figures were released last month, so was a list of 275 places. They ranged from Billings (pop. 89,847) to Kerr Census Designated Place (pop. 17). Kerr doesn't show up on the Official Montana Highway Map, except as the site of Kerr Dam south of Flathead Lake.

The next-smallest place is Ismay, with 26 people east of Miles City. Ismay is an incorporated town, so it automatically makes the list. A lot of other communities, villages, crossroads and other places have at least 26 people, but they were not put on the official place list.

"Local participants make that decision," said Pat Ream, of the Census Bureau's geography division in Denver. "We send them maps out, they make their designations on the maps, and that goes into the TIGER database (the official map file of census data). The bureau rules say a place must have retail, commercial and residential activity. But we reinstated quite a few places this year that participants wanted to delete but we felt there was historical significance in keeping them."

The rules for getting on that list changed in other ways between 1990 and 2000, according to Dave Martin at the Montana Census and Economic Information Center. In the last decade, an unincorporated area had to have at least 1,000 people to become a place. That limited the list to major suburbs of large cities, such as Orchard Homes west of Missoula or the Southeast Helena Valley.

Incidentally, Orchard Homes lost 50 percent of its population between 1990 and 2000 – mainly to annexation by the city of Missoula.

Before the 2000 census, Martin said the threshold was initially set at 100 residents for unincorporated areas. Then the Census Bureau decided to allow a variety of state and local officials to recommend placehood for their communities. As long as the community had distinct boundaries and a significant permanent population, it stood a good chance of making the list.

As a result, 116 new places appeared on the 2000 population chart compared to 1990's list. The new Montana 2001-02 Highway Map includes 89 of those, while the rest are expanding suburbs or American Indian communities (which received particular attention in the effort to correct for the estimated 9.2 percent undercount of American Indians in Montana).

Ironically, place status means little in the great number-crunching effort. What really counts, literally, are the figures in census blocks, block groups and tracts. Those make up the geographic building blocks the Census Bureau imposes on the landscape.

The smallest unit, the block, is simply a place with people in it that has a definable boundary. It can be a city block, a 20-story apartment building, or a huge swath of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. A census block's administrative purpose is not so much to define a "place" as it is to help census field workers organize their census form collection efforts. Martin said the blocks function as a sort of checklist to ensure every bit of geography is searched for residents.

"Sometimes I think all that mind-numbing gridwork doesn't take into account the human nature of a place," said University of Montana history professor Dan Flores, who specializes in environmental history of regions in the West. "Places come more from people than administrative decisions."

Losing that people connection makes deciphering the origins of some communities difficult. For example, the 2000 census place list includes Heron and Herron. What at first seems a bureaucratic typo is really two separate communities. Heron (with one "r") is in northwest Montana, near the Cabinet Gorge Dam. The community of Herron, with 100 people, is a suburb west of Havre.

And there are some confusing distinctions: The road map considers Bonner and Milltown separate communities, while the census combines them into Bonner-Milltown (pop. 1,693). West Riverside didn't make the cut by either the Census Bureau or the road map, but East Missoula debuted as a place in 2000 (pop. 2,070).

The places that didn't make place status include many of recent fame or notoriety. One of the first phone calls of dismay after the Missoulian published the place population chart came from a resident of Wolf Creek, where author Norman Maclean courted his wife in his book "A River Runs Through It."

The census didn't find Jackson or Polaris, although the Rainbow Family of the Living Light did last summer. Many of the rumored 23,000 attendees of that gathering got their gas and groceries there before heading into the Big Hole.

It missed Polebridge, gateway to northern Glacier National Park and commercial center of the North Fork of the Flathead River. And it missed Babb, on the other side of the park, whose residents have poked fun at their own official insignificance with bumper stickers reading "Where the Hell is Babb?"

Dell didn't show up, despite its international airport with a runway big enough to land bombers and corporate jets. Nor did Conner, although its grocery store was the major message station for families displaced by last summer's forest fires.

Historical significance didn't matter much, or Montana's first territorial capital, Bannack, might have made the list. Even ancient history didn't help Bynum, discovery site of science-shaking dinosaur eggs.

Rimini earned recent infamy as home of Russell Weston, the man accused of killing two security guards in the U.S. Capitol in 1998. And Ida Hunnewell wasn't able to get Olney federal recognition, despite her years of columns in the Whitefish Pilot detailing the lives of its residents.

Perhaps we can take comfort in the fact the Census Bureau did not remove any places from Montana's list, although the state itself struck nine names from the road map last year because they had no residents. The state added in 78 new place names.

If you're interested

To see how the U.S. Census Bureau breaks up territory into blocks and tracts, check out the state Census and Economic Information Center's collection of county census maps. Find it on the Web at: www.ceic.commerce.state.mt.us/C2000/c2000maps/index.htm.

For concise lists of what cities and towns qualified as places in Montana, check: www.ceic.commerce.state.mt.us/C2000/PL2000/ctyplace9000.htm.

For quick facts about Montana's 2000 population, racial characteristics and growth rate, see the Census Bureau's Quick Facts service at: quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/30000.html.