Quote:
Originally Posted by Liberty Wellsian
I'm super jealous of the whole City and County of Denver thing. 13 of the 26 largest cities in Utah are in Salt Lake County. Every city has it's own plan for a "Downtown". They all compete for sales tax revenue(the municipality gets a share). It has its upsides but I would trade our political borders tomorrow for something more like what Denver has. That annexation in the fifties probably helped Denver more than most realize.
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Being a city-county does have its advantages, politically.
Denver City/County is 154 square miles of which 54 square miles is Denver International Airport.
Of the remaining 100 square miles (what we think of as the "city" where homes, businesses, etc. are located), approximately half of that, or 50 square miles, is pre-WWII "old urbanism" neighborhoods characterized by walkable rectilinear blocks with alleys, etc., and the other half/50 square miles characterized by typical automobile-oriented post-WWII suburban development.
By comparison, Salt Lake County is 807 square miles.
It's interesting to contemplate how the non-airport post-WWII annexations in Denver, which allowed the city to go from approximately 50 to 100 square miles in size, has influenced the culture of Denver. What would Denver be like if we hadn't annexed the suburban areas from the late 1940s through 1974 and, instead, consisted today of only the "old urbanism" parts of the city?