San Antonio weighs annexation plan

[chris08876]

I'd be cool if NYC had a plan to annex Hudson County. The 6th Borough Fantasy I guess, but JC is starting to feel more and more like NYC with all of the transplants and commuter towers sprouting up. Bump the population past the 9 million mark.

[plinko]

For those into numbers (who here isn't?), this would also knock Phoenix out of the top 10 for largest cities by land area.

I don't view annexation as necessarily a bad thing, but it really depends on the situation. If this 60+ sqmi comes with 200,000 people, it also comes with a lot of existing infrastructure. Are the long term maintenance costs really worth the added tax base? Will the added population severely alter citywide politics? Will the added land and population make it easier to govern the region as a whole? If the answers to all of these questions are the right ones, then why not?

[mhays]

In the local tax structure, is it better to have more residents or more commercial? Property tax, sales tax, income tax, business taxes? How prosperous are the residents? What sort of crime rate? Is the infrastructure fairly recent or in need up updating? Are the schools funded mostly locally? Stuff like this all plays a big role in whether it makes financial sense...does it bring in more revenue that it will cost.

[hauntedheadnc]

Originally Posted by Pinion

Annexation is not good. That is how you end up with people like Rob Ford as mayor. I'll take my 22 small cities any day.

But that's how you end up with a hot mess like suburban Atlanta, whose literally hundreds of various governmental entities would rather die than cooperate with each other, let alone the City of Atlanta, which thrives and succeeds in spite of its situation, not because of it. More than two dozen tiny counties + numerous governmental entities (villages, towns, townships, cities, etc.) per county + hostile to urbanity state government = urban dysfunction.

I'm speaking from a perspective forged in a state that had liberal annexation laws, and then suddenly did not once an anti-urban GOP government swept into power. Used to, cities in North Carolina could force their parasitic suburbs to help support the city that spawned those suburbs in the first place -- and it was always amusing to hear the suburbanites bitch about how their suburb was a standalone place that would have grown and thrives just fine without that big, evil, wasteful city there. Why should they have to pay for those lazy urbanites, they would ask. Why should they subsidize that city, just because the city had to fund a police force big enough to protect a population that included both the residents and everyone commuting in for work during the day? Why should they have to fund roads that see traffic from residents and commuters alike? And so on and so forth.

But now we don't have to worry about it, because it's now effectively illegal for a city in North Carolina to expand its borders. Not a terribly bad deal for cities such as Charlotte that already occupy the vast majority of their county's land space, but it's a shitty deal for cities like mine that now have no control whatsoever over the suburban growth accreting to its flanks. The suburbanites get a free ride: they get access to the city and all its amenities without having to fund it. That burden falls on the small population of city residents who now have to fund their own amenities, plus everything the commuters use. In my particular city, that means that about 85,000 people have to fund services used by a daytime population of about 200,000.

[Pinion]

Originally Posted by hauntedheadnc

But that's how you end up with a hot mess like suburban Atlanta, whose literally hundreds of various governmental entities would rather die than cooperate with each other, let alone the City of Atlanta, which thrives and succeeds in spite of its situation, not because of it. More than two dozen tiny counties + numerous governmental entities (villages, towns, townships, cities, etc.) per county + hostile to urbanity state government = urban dysfunction.

That's not how it works in my city. There are a few weird things like garbage collection on one side of the street one day and the other side on another day, or amalgamated police departments but not fire departments, but in general it benefits every resident. Those of us in the urban area get the progressive, transit-oriented government we want and those in the burbs get the car-dependent sprawl they want.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by scalziand

Most of the neighbors of Boston are the rich ones that resisted annexation in the past; Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Newton, Medford, Arlington.

I'm not sure this is true. Most of the cities you listed, except for Brookline, and Newton, aren't rich. And Brookline and Newton are rich specifically because they're suburbs. If they were part of Boston, they wouldn't be as rich (because rich suburbs in the U.S. largely exist because of top-tier public schools).

What about all the working class towns on Boston's doorstep? Winthrop, Chelsea, Revere, Malden, Lynn, Quincy? These are all pretty modest towns.

Think if NYC annexed Hudson County and lower Westchester. Would it be a richer city? I think highly debatable, probably no. If SF annexed Daly City, South SF and the like, would it be richer? Almost certainly no. It isn't clear one way or the other whether annexation is a net positive for a city. I really think it depends on the specifics, and the places most likely to be tax revenue positive (places like Brookline and Newton) would have the most to lose from annexation and would fight the hardest.

[L41A]

Originally Posted by Pinion

That's not how it works in my city. There are a few weird things like garbage collection on one side of the street one day and the other side on another day, or amalgamated police departments but not fire departments, but in general it benefits every resident. Those of us in the urban area get the progressive, transit-oriented government we want and those in the burbs get the car-dependent sprawl they want.

And it's more like how it works in Atlanta as well despite what the other poster stated.

[llamaorama]

In the local tax structure, is it better to have more residents or more commercial? Property tax, sales tax, income tax, business taxes? How prosperous are the residents? What sort of crime rate? Is the infrastructure fairly recent or in need up updating? Are the schools funded mostly locally? Stuff like this all plays a big role in whether it makes financial sense...does it bring in more revenue that it will cost.

I think most of the areas under consideration for annexation are middle class exurbia and newer tract home subdivisions. Generally the north and northwest parts of greater SA are the good parts. The south and eastern parts of the metro are kind of grody.

Schools: Not relevant at all here. In Texas, education is almost always handled by independent school districts which levy their own taxes and govern themselves, and city or county boundaries don't really affect them.

I don't really know much so I shouldn't comment, but IMO this empowers SA to tame a rapidly growing, sprawly part of the metro and prevents the emergence of competitors.

Quote:

Originally Posted by hauntedheadnc View Post

That's not how it works in my city. There are a few weird things like garbage collection on one side of the street one day and the other side on another day, or amalgamated police departments but not fire departments, but in general it benefits every resident. Those of us in the urban area get the progressive, transit-oriented government we want and those in the burbs get the car-dependent sprawl they want.

I think there's more to it than urban planning visions at city hall. If anything, worse case scenario there are tools like TIRZ's for US cities, where some central neighborhoods could go it alone and tax themselves to build relatively inexpensive things like bike share systems or improve sidewalks. And these days I think urbanistic plannning ideas are more accepted.

Instead I'm more worried about more basic public services and the trend of suburbanization of poverty. In fractured metros, what's stopping some of these tiny municipalities from being pockets of blight? Especially if trends caused a collapse of tax revenue sources, like internet harming brick and mortar retailers in already vulnerable surroundings. Also, the ability to take out debt affordably comes with the solvency which larger communities with diversified revenue bases have.

Also I'm sure a lot of local government functions would cost taxpayers less if there were economies of scale.

[tech12]

This is why it's not a good idea to measure cities by the population within city-limits. Not that it really matters, though a lot of people who aren't nerds about urban stuff do get the wrong idea by looking at city limits stats.

[KevinFromTexas]

Here's the link without the paywall.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/san-anto...lan-1419205551

Of course knowing this is Texas there probably will be more sprawl with this, but at the same time it doesn't have to mean there will be. I see a positive from this since it means it will place that territory under the authority of San Antonio. It is a good idea about future development guidelines and conservation. And when I say that, I mean well into the future - decades or even centuries. Look at the cities of Europe. They're huge. London is 671 square miles - it's larger than Houston. Of course, I'm not comparing the intensity of London's density with anything in America, just the authority to say what goes where and how and what to keep the same.

Originally Posted by xzmattzx

I like using county populations; either you get the entire (or "entire") city, like Philadelphia, San Francisco, Indianapolis, etc; or you get the inner suburbs, but leave out the far-flung places that can count in MSA and CSA populations (like Elkton and Cecil County, Maryland, as part of Philadelphia's MSA).

Even that doesn't work, though, because county sizes aren't the same. Counties in Texas average 1,000 square miles. Harris County where Houston is is 1,704 square miles - about 500 square miles bigger than Rhode Island. That still leaves a lot of land for far flung suburban development to be counted.

Anyway, I'm still a statistics geek, but I care very little about populations anymore. Back in "the day" when I first stumbled onto this website, I did care more about it. Population isn't everything, though, and I suspect that has nothing to do with this move either. I think it has everything to do with tax revenue.

[bobdreamz]

Originally Posted by chris08876

I'd be cool if NYC had a plan to annex Hudson County. The 6th Borough Fantasy I guess, but JC is starting to feel more and more like NYC with all of the transplants and commuter towers sprouting up. Bump the population past the 9 million mark.

NYC already stole part of New Jersey! It's called Staten Island!

[softee]

Originally Posted by Pinion

Annexation is not good. That is how you end up with people like Rob Ford as mayor. I'll take my 22 small cities any day.

That's far too simplistic. Before Rob Ford, the same "suburbs" elected super left-wing mayor David Miller, and now centrist John Tory.

Contrary to popular belief, Toronto didn't annex a multitude of small, "right wing" suburbs. The two-tiered Municipality of Metropolitan Toronto (consisting of the old City and five multicultural boroughs), dissolved the upper tier of government and amalgamated the semi-autonomous boroughs together with the old city into a single-tiered city with the exact same borders as the former "Metro" municipality.

[mhays]

The point is still the same...the electorate of the old municipality can be greatly diluted or counteracted when a ton of suburbanites are added. That doesn't become false just because the suburbanites agree with the urbanites on some issues.

(Urban and suburban aren't defined by administrative lines obviously, but I'm using those terms here for convenience.)

[JManc]

Originally Posted by Eightball

If San Antonio does this and gets a top 5 city population there should definitely be an asterisk involved.

Why? Most cities got to their current state by gobbling up their immediate surroundings and neighbors increasing populations, land area and tax bases. Texas' cities are just the latest to do it because the state is one of the last few to still allow it but I bet if others still allow it, big cities elsewhere would entertain the idea.

Besides, city proper populations no longer really mean anything, it's the metro figures and San Antonio is still small potatoes. They are decades from filling in the gap between them and Austin, their nearest big city neighbor and they have no significant suburbs of their own to speak of.

[Leo the Dog]

Originally Posted by Eightball

If San Antonio does this and gets a top 5 city population there should definitely be an asterisk involved.

This coming from an LA resident.

San Pedro?
The Valley pop 1 million+

Who cares? If it works for SA then go for it. If it allows SA to densify these areas with less red tape and increase the tax revenue, why is this a bad thing?

[Owlhorn]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

I guess there's the notion of preventing competition. Dallas is probably worse off that Plano exists and poaches jobs constantly. And it's mayors haven't necessarily been that amazing. San Antonio has had more progressive leadership despite being closer to a uni-city.

Houston gobbled up it's suburban rivals and it did end up with suburbanite leadership for a time in the 1990s. That former mayor, Bob Lanier also just died recently. BUT he was an old-school progressive who pushed for all kinds of improvements for poor neighborhoods and was only "conservative" in the sense of being anti-rail and suburban minded in his vision for the city/region.

But then yeah, Fort Worth seems like a stick in the mud. Splashy vision for downtown, but mediocre investment into ordinary neighborhoods or everyday public services compared to what the other cities in the state do.

True Dallas has a ton of suburban competition. Hard to compete with all of the incentives Irving, Plano, Frisco and Richardson throw at companies. Doesn't help that Dallas has such huge swaths of unusable land as well. That land needs to be replaced with taxable land.

Fort Worth is doing the same thing SA and Houston are. They have recently annexed a huge amount of land on the north side of the city. It sprawled.

If you've ever been to San Antonio, there will be no control to keep the land from sprawling. It will sprawl.

The advantage is basically taxable land and some control over these new areas vs having developers develop the infrastructure first. This affords the city time to create proper draining and water connections along with getting the proper police and fire patrols before these areas are built out. I personally know some people that had this problem in a area annexed to Houston. The developer didn't properly built out the drainage in the area, so the city had to come back and do some huge projects to rectify the situation. If you think development is headed towards these unincorporated areas, it best to annex now. Now that I-20 is booming with logistics jobs in Dallas, I wish the city would annex some of the land to the southeast.

[Paul in S.A TX]

Originally Posted by Pinion

San Antonio drops down to 27th when talking about metro area according to wikipedia. And metro is all that really matters. I live in a city of 50,000 that's really a city of 2,400,000 in half the physical area of metro San Antonio.

Annexation is not good. That is how you end up with people like Rob Ford as mayor. I'll take my 22 small cities any day.

San Antonio is actually the 24th largest metro with over 2.3 million and the urbanized area is nearly 2 million, 1.82 million within Bexar County. There are about 1 million people outside the city proper in either central city bedroom communities or the suburbs adjacent to the city and to a lesser degree than out in the outlying areas of the metro. For example, in the 2000 census, S.A.'s city proper population stood at 1.2 million within 300 square miles, the city is actually more dense than its strong annexation plans may suggest.

[Gantz]

Originally Posted by chris08876

I'd be cool if NYC had a plan to annex Hudson County. The 6th Borough Fantasy I guess, but JC is starting to feel more and more like NYC with all of the transplants and commuter towers sprouting up. Bump the population past the 9 million mark.

Hudson County should merge with Jersey City, and become a proper city with big enough budget to do some serious construction, like heavy rail subway.

[JManc]

Cities cannot annex territory in other states. NYC annexing anything accross the Hudson will always be just a fantasy...unless NYS annexed NJ

[Minato Ku]

Well, NYS would maybe get back to the second place it lost 20 years ago, at least temporary.