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  #41  
Old Posted Jun 7, 2022, 11:17 PM
galleyfox galleyfox is offline
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Originally Posted by Buckeye Native 001 View Post
Rural areas, they absolutely make sense.

Most of the townships I'm thinking of (Anderson, Miami, Symmes) are suburbs of Cincinnati in Hamilton County, Ohio. All within at least a 20 minute drive to downtown. Just seems redundant to me.
They are redundant mostly because the fragmented suburban municipalities are too small to assume full fiscal responsibility and dissolve the township.

Unfortunately, Suburban townships are the remnants of a bygone rural era that survive because of municipal inefficiency.
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  #42  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 1:22 AM
jd3189 jd3189 is offline
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Originally Posted by Yuri View Post
Sizes aside, I HATE those bizarre boundaries. I cannot even stand to look at the City of Los Angeles map. In a site with such beautiful well-defined natural boundaries, how come they came up with such horrible shape?
Yeah, I fully agree with you on that. If it were up to me to redraw LA's city proper boundaries, I would let go of the San Fernando Valley and annex the whole basin instead. Places like Long Beach, Santa Monica, San Pedro, Compton, South Central, etc would be either neighborhoods or secondary divisions/boroughs of a greater City of Los Angeles along with Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

The poorer cities would be able to benefit from the tax base of the West Side. The city would also become more cohesive than it is right now. Beside maybe Chicago and Brooklyn and Queens, LA probably has the largest continuous urban density expanse in the country. The mountains and the ocean are the only real barriers to the expanse of the basin that flows into Orange County and even the Inland Empire.
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  #43  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 1:22 AM
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Originally Posted by IcedCowboyCoffee View Post
Despite the metro area being, on a functional level, one massive contiguous city, it's really a collection of a couple dozen small cities. Dallas proper is so small that it's easy for people to live just outside the city and enjoy the city's amenities without paying into the city's taxes whatsoever.
I wouldn't exactly call Dallas a "small" city proper, at least not relative to other US municipalities.

Of the 333 US municipalities over 100K people, Dallas is the 11th largest in land area with nearly 340 sq. miles.

It might not be super-jumbo sized like Jacksonville or Houston, but it is still a pretty big land monster.

What makes the metroplex a little unusual is that there is another giant municipality of roughly 340 sq. miles (Fort Worth) only 35 miles to the west of Dallas.
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  #44  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 1:41 AM
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Originally Posted by jd3189 View Post
Yeah, I fully agree with you on that. If it were up to me to redraw LA's city proper boundaries, I would let go of the San Fernando Valley and annex the whole basin instead. Places like Long Beach, Santa Monica, San Pedro, Compton, South Central, etc would be either neighborhoods or secondary divisions/boroughs of a greater City of Los Angeles along with Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

The poorer cities would be able to benefit from the tax base of the West Side. The city would also become more cohesive than it is right now. Beside maybe Chicago and Brooklyn and Queens, LA probably has the largest continuous urban density expanse in the country. The mountains and the ocean are the only real barriers to the expanse of the basin that flows into Orange County and even the Inland Empire.
I’d be more ambitious: Los Angeles could be the whole LA County south of San Gabriel Mountains.

It’d be awkward not having New York as the US most populated city, but they could turn Nassau and Westchester counties into boroughs to make things even.

And Chicago should merge with Cook County.
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  #45  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 2:57 AM
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Yeah, urban areas in America are extremely fragmented. Tons of special little towns with their own mayors and city councils and special rules just for themselves.

It influences how people perceive the world around them too, which helps perpetuate the civic division, which contributes to a relative lack of good things (like good public transit, for example). "I don't live in city X, you're wrong! I live in city Y!" (...which is a totally dependent suburb of city X lol)
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  #46  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 3:41 AM
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Yeah, I'm in St. Louis University City right now and... the fragmentation here is absolutely insane.
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  #47  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 3:54 AM
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Yeah, I'm in St. Louis University City right now and... the fragmentation here is absolutely insane.
Yeah, to be honest St. Louis should have a city proper of at least one million.
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  #48  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 3:57 AM
Buckeye Native 001 Buckeye Native 001 is offline
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Then again, we have several large (populations of 100k+) cities in Maricopa County (Phoenix Metro) all seemingly fighting each other all the damn time over projects and developments. There's no perfect solution to fragmentation.
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  #49  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 4:24 AM
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Yeah, to be honest St. Louis should have a city proper of at least one million.
The city and county should rightfully be uni-gov merged.

Boom, 1.3M St. Louisans!
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  #50  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 12:44 PM
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Originally Posted by Buckeye Native 001 View Post
Then again, we have several large (populations of 100k+) cities in Maricopa County (Phoenix Metro) all seemingly fighting each other all the damn time over projects and developments. There's no perfect solution to fragmentation.
Sure there is......well perfect may be an overstatement; but apart from the Toronto area having several larger consolidated cities and/or regional municipalities.....the infighting over attracting out of region investment has largely waned.

This is because all the area cities/regions got together and founded Toronto Global which represents the entire area with one voice.

https://torontoglobal.ca/

That's not to say area governments still don't get competitive over senior governing funding their pet infrastructure project (worthy or otherwise); although it rarely leads to any us vs them bad blood.
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  #51  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 1:16 PM
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Originally Posted by IcedCowboyCoffee View Post
Dallas proper is so small that it's easy for people to live just outside the city and enjoy the city's amenities without paying into the city's taxes whatsoever.
This is a major annoyance I have as a Philadelphian. The merger of the pre-1854 City of Philadelphia (what is now considered Center City) and Philadelphia County made total sense, but Philadelphia County is the 2nd smallest county in PA and the smallest of the five-county PA portion of the Philadelphia area. Most of the region's critical infrastructure--freight and passenger rail lines, most of the airport, major bridges, ports, etc.--resides within the city. As a resident of Northwest Philly, I hate that someone can cross the Green Lane Bridge, live in Lower Merion Township or Gladwyne, and enjoy all that the city has to offer without contributing to the upkeep of infrastructure.

If I could extend Philadelphia's borders, I would acquire everything up to the Blue Route (I-476) between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers. That would not only provide us a larger tax base along the Main Line, but would also give us the densely-developed suburbs of Eastern Delaware County that are already just as densely developed as the city. Additionally, this would solve the issue of PHL's expansion, as part of the airport lies within Tinicum Township, which is opposed to PHL's expansion.
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  #52  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 1:51 PM
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There is admittedly a downside of broad city limits though - that the voting majority of the city ends up being in the suburban portions of the city, which means that there (until quite recently) was not a lot of focus on rebuilding the urban core.

The classic example of this is Indianapolis. The city was historically Republican, but had swung to the Democrats. The 1970 city-county merger effectively kept suburban Republicans in charge of the city until around 2000. The voting base of the GOP majority on city council (and the GOP mayors, who controlled the city for 30 years) didn't care about the core urban area except insofar as it was a place to put the stadiums and commute into.
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  #53  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 2:13 PM
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Originally Posted by Steely Dan View Post
The city and county should rightfully be uni-gov merged.

Boom, 1.3M St. Louisans!

when you get done there come talk to cuyahoga county. and lake, summit and lorain counties for that matter. talk about useless fragmentation, ne ohio is a poster child for that.
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  #54  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 2:24 PM
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Originally Posted by summersm343 View Post
Yep. A lot of municipalities in Pennsylvania make no sense. A lot of "boroughs" are surrounded by townships which go by the same name as the borough, but are technically separate municipalities with their own governments. It's really silly. I've long thought a lot of these townships should be dissolved into the borough they surround, municipalities merged, etc.

Of course, no standing politician will give up the municipality they govern.
Most of these townships should be unincorporated and governed at the county level, including policing. It's bonkers that these tiny boroughs and townships have their own services and police forces. Or worse yet, mooch off state police services.
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  #55  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 2:31 PM
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Originally Posted by summersm343 View Post
Yep. A lot of municipalities in Pennsylvania make no sense. A lot of "boroughs" are surrounded by townships which go by the same name as the borough, but are technically separate municipalities with their own governments. It's really silly. I've long thought a lot of these townships should be dissolved into the borough they surround, municipalities merged, etc.

Of course, no standing politician will give up the municipality they govern.
If you think this is bad, New York state also has incorporated "villages" that can be inside incorporated "towns". There are also areas inside towns that are not incorporated into villages that are called hamlets.
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  #56  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 2:45 PM
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If you think this is bad, New York state also has incorporated "villages" that can be inside incorporated "towns". There are also areas inside towns that are not incorporated into villages that are called hamlets.
Most hamlets rely on town for services but might have their own zip code (post office) and volunteer fire department.
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  #57  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 3:48 PM
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My home state of Nebraska has a law on the books that allows its two biggest municipalities, Omaha and Lincoln, to annex any abutting municipalities unilaterally - up to 10,000 people for Omaha and (I believe) 900 for Lincoln so long as they are in the same county (Neb. municipalities cannot cross county lines). That means Omaha and Lincoln can acquire all of a city's land and government functions (except the school district) without having to ask or even consider the input of the city to be annexed.

Omaha last used this power in 2007 when it annexed the City of Elkhorn, who at the time had 6,000 people. Elkhorn very much did not want to be annexed into Omaha and fought it in the courts, but that didn't matter. They now cease to exist and are simply another neighborhood within the City of Omaha.
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  #58  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 3:51 PM
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Originally Posted by Steely Dan View Post
The city and county should rightfully be uni-gov merged.

Boom, 1.3M St. Louisans!
I agree, St. Louis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and all the other Rustbelts would probably benefit greatly from a Unigov system. It's helped Nashville, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, and Louisville to consolidate governments and streamline services.
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  #59  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 4:32 PM
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I agree, St. Louis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and all the other Rustbelts would probably benefit greatly from a Unigov system. It's helped Nashville, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, and Louisville to consolidate governments and streamline services.
and it might help change some perceptions a bit too.


city proper census 2020 #s:

jacksonville: 949,611 (747.3 sq. miles)
Indy: 887,642 (361.6 sq. miles)
Nashville: 689,447 (475.8 sq. miles)
Louisville: 633,045 (324.9 sq. miles)

Detroit: 639,111 (138.7 sq. miles)
Milwaukee: 577,222 (96.2 sq. miles)
Cleveland: 372,624 (77.7 sq. miles)
Cincinnati: 309,317 (77.8 sq. miles)
Pittsburgh: 302,971 (55.4sq. miles)
St. Louis: 301,578 (62.7 sq. miles)
Buffalo: 278,349 (40.4 sq. miles)



UniGov'ed rust-belters census 2020 #s:

Detroit: 1,793,561 (612.1 sq. miles)
St. Louis: 1,305,703 (569.5 sq. miles)
Cleveland: 1,264,817 (457.2 sq. miles)
Pittsburgh: 1,250,578 (730.1 sq. miles)
Buffalo: 954,236 (1,042.7 sq. miles)
Milwaukee: 939,489 (241.4 sq. miles)
Cincinnati: 830,639 (405.9 sq. miles)
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Last edited by Steely Dan; Jun 8, 2022 at 6:55 PM.
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  #60  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2022, 6:30 PM
Buckeye Native 001 Buckeye Native 001 is offline
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Originally Posted by mrnyc View Post
when you get done there come talk to cuyahoga county. and lake, summit and lorain counties for that matter. talk about useless fragmentation, ne ohio is a poster child for that.
Ditto Southwest Ohio but moreso the townships and cities (Norwood) in Hamilton County than trying to unigov Hamilton, Warren, Butler and Clermont counties. The Bengals will win a Super Bowl before that ever happens.

Oh, and also the added bonus or frustration of having an entirely different state across the river that comprises a large part of the metro plus the damn airport...
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