[eschaton]

Just curious about the opinions here on the subject of when to consider, and not to consider, city limits.

When making comparisons across metropolitan areas, I personally absolutely believe city limits should be ignored. Many Sun Belt cities are essentially unconstrained in their ability to snap up unincorporated county land (some non Sun Belt cities as well, like Columbus). Hence when you look at just city population, it can make a city seem quite substantial...until you discover it's really something like Jacksonville (a mid-sized metro which happens to have a city-county merger at its core).

That said, there are lots of ways in which city limits are absolutely 100% important.

First, white flight happens on a city (or more properly, school district) basis, not a metro basis. In some metros the dividing line between the urban and suburban schools will shift from majority black to majority white in a single block. White flight has had all sorts of negative implications for city finances, urban revitalization, blight and disinvestment...you name it.

I'm originally from Connecticut, albeit closer to NYC, but Hartford is a great example of this. Hartford had almost complete white flight - the north side of the city is black, and the southern side is Latino (mostly Puerto Rican and Dominican). The West End is the only portion of the city which still has some majority-white blocks, aside from a very early-stage revitalization of Downtown. Hartford does have some diverse suburbs (Bloomfield to the north is a black suburb - the only majority-black municipality in the state. Windsor and East Hartford are also pretty diverse) but to the west/south the city directly abuts suburban areas which are 80%-90% white. Like all of Connecticut, these areas are highly fragmented among different towns.

So people always use Hartford as an example of a place you need to consider the metro, not the city, since it's a city of 121,000 which anchors a metro of nearly 1.5 million. Except...arguing it's really a city of 1.5 million doesn't really work, because there's really not much of anything "urban" outside of Hartford proper (excepting other small, somewhat less troubled cities like New Britain). Top Hartford suburbs like Simsbury and Avon are backwoods areas with no definable town centers. East Hartford is the only one which really has anything resembling a nice downtown. If you have to relocate to the Hartford MSA and want an urban environment with "good schools" you're kinda screwed.

On the other hand, broad city limits can also make a big difference in some ways. Indianapolis is a great example of this. In 1970 Indianapolis had a city-county merger, which became known as Unigov. While municipal consolidation in general is a good thing, this was driven directly by the county Republican Party. Indianapolis had been governed by a GOP political machine, but white flight from the old urban core had given Democrats control of the city proper. With the city-county merger, a Republican-led "suburban" coalition controlled the city as a whole until around the year 2000. Even setting aside political ideology, the interests of the suburban base of the majority were directly in conflict with the urban core. They wanted a downtown which was quick to get in and out of, they wanted to have destination entertainment like new stadiums, and they didn't care what got demolished in order to construct this. So the city had resources due to the city-county merger, but those resources were effectively controlled by the "suburbs."