Cities on Borders

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

In the IMHO thread (Is Charlotte (NC) Big Enough To Not Need A Qualifier?) the fact that Charlotte is on the border of NC and SC was mentioned as a possible reason why Charlotte might need the state qualifier when it’s being referred to. So as not to hijack that thread, but to address the issue of cities that happen to be on the border between states or countries, here’s a new thread for that purpose.

Memphis, Bristol and Chattanooga in Tennessee have that distinction. Memphis is on the Mississippi border and across the Mississippi River from Arkansas.

Bristol is on the Virginia border and is part of the tri-cities region, along with Kingsport and Johnson City, and that region of Tennessee is near enough to the North Carolina border that the whole region may have trouble deciding which state or states it’s part of.

Chattanooga is as much a Georgia city as it is a Tennessee one. There have even been some political issues over it switching states!

Even Mobile, Alabama is near enough to the Florida panhandle and the Mississippi Gulf Coast that it might as well be considered a border city.

If you (or your friends or relatives) live in a “border city,” please share your thoughts and ideas about how your city deals with its state affiliation(s).

I’ll try to locate and link to some old threads I’ve started that get into these issues, but let’s see what new ideas come to light in this one.

A few candidates for discussion:

New York City
Washington, DC
Chicago
Detroit
Buffalo
Kansas City
St. Louis
San Diego
Las Vegas
Augusta, GA
Columbus, GA
Louisville
Cincinnati
El Paso
Laredo

and the list goes on in the USA.

Cities in other countries are surely open for discussion, too.

2

I really hope it is dealt with better in a large town that it is where I am. I’m in a little offshoot of Georgia that borders North Carolina, according to Wikipedia, the county I live in used to (many, many ages ago) be in NC but was given to Georgia. I have a home in Georgia, a NC phone number, which makes it impossible to call Georgia government offices (in-state toll-free numbers) My power company is in NC, my daughter goes to school in GA. I’m in the process of bribing the GA phone company to give me one of their lines. Oh, the GA agency that regulates utilities, told me, when I called to ask what I needed to do to have a GA phone number…told me I should move.

My physical address not only has moved towns, it has moved states. Not surprisingly, my house has not actually moved even an inch in at least 40 years.

It is a damned mess here. The good news is, everyone knows it is a damned mess and deals with you accordingly. (I have a NC phone, a GA address and Louisiana cell phone.)

3

From my standpoint (native South Carolinian, lived all my life in the Carolinas), Charlotte is hard to consider a border city. Downtown Charlotte is almost 10 miles from the state line. Augusta, on the other hand, leans up against the Savannah River like a drunken prom date.

4

Fargo, North Dakota & Moorehouse, Minnesota border each other.

5

Yeah, Charlotte has far suburbs in South Carolina, but not like Augusta. Augusta and North Augusta are both “Augusta” to me, but Charlotte is indisputably North Carolina.

6

Cincinnati sits at the point where Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky come together. The airport is in Kentucky. A side effect is that people can live or put businesses in Northern Kentucky and reap the benefit of taxes paid by people in Ohio. A prime example of this was when they put a tax in place to put a shiny new stadium on the river in Ohio. Of course there was no where left over to put dining and entertainment, so the main beneficiaries of this were in Newport and Covington, Kentucky.

7

Hey, Auntbeast, if you haven’t already been, the Dillard House is a family-stle restaurant that is an interesting place to go. I’ve never seen so much food in my life!

8

DC is its own animal. I lived in Vienna, which (in some places) is within walking distance of the Beltway, and the character of that area (and the Maryland suburbs as well, I imagine) is distinctly not Southern. I was raised in Virginia, and still live here, but I’m a Yankee through and through. And my roommate insists that Northern Virginia is part of the South, despite me telling him that it’s not…

9

I’ve lived here (actually in Cleveland, a little north of Chattanooga) for over twenty years and have never known anyone to consider it a Georgian city, especially since North Georgia outside of the Atlanta metro area is pretty sparsely populated, and a large percentage of people there drive here to work.

10

“The Chicago area” includes at least six counties in Illinois, Lake County in Indiana, and a tiny strip of southern Wisconsin. (North of Kenosha, you’re in Packer, Brewer, and Badger country, and if you think you’re still in the Chicago area, you’ll get flogged with bratwurst.)

The Chicago area may as well be a state of its own. It has nothing in common with downstate Illinois or Indiana. My location field says “Illinois” because I don’t live in Chicago proper, but the only time I felt Illinois was real was when I was downstate at the university. Up here, it’s just lines on a map and a governors’ wing in the federal pen.

11

For additional notions, these old threads may strike a chord or two:

Crossing Borders: Can you tell?

The strangeness of boundaries

Border dwellers: These questions are for you

If it isn’t obvious, I have a fascination with these issues. :slight_smile:

12

My sister lives in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, which is right next to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. The two cities are separated by the St. Mary’s River and joined by the International Bridge. Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, is the larger city. We generally say “Soo, Michigan” and “Soo, Ontario” to distinguish them; without qualification, “The Soo” means both cities taken together.

13

Baarle-Hertog is a truly bizarre case. This article (PDF) discusses that example and also other enclaves in Europe.

14

Portland, Oregon is quite close to the Washington border. (The town on the Washington side is Vancouver.) The two states have very different tax structures. Oregon has a state income tax and no sales tax; Washington is the other way around. You could save a fortune by living on the Washington side and making any big purchases from stores in Oregon. I don’t know the details, but I imagine the states have measures in place to prevent this, especially on big-ticket, traceable items like cars.

When I first moved to Boston I had a job near the New Hampshire border. At least one of my co-workers lived in NH. I was quite surprised to find out that people in that situation are still required to pay Massachusetts income tax. (Seems to go against the whole “no taxation without representation” thing.) Are you spared if you live in Massachusetts and work in New Hampshire? Of course not.

From what I can tell, the rules for non-residents who work in-state are pretty complicated. I think the state where you live gets first crack at you, and then if the Massachusetts tax is higher, you pay the difference here. I’ve even heard that players from visiting football teams have to pay Mass. income tax on 1/16 of their earnings (their yearly salary pro-rated to having played 1 game out of 16, and earning that money, in-state.) Not sure if that’s true or not.

15

I was thinking more of the south side of town. Hopefully, this map shows enough of how Chattanooga sprawls into north Georgia (use the zoom feature to get a better look at the border section), and the “important suburbs” in this article help to clarify what I was trying to present.

I don’t mean to argue with a resident of the area, but I do seem to recall some squabbles over whether at least parts of the city ought to be ceded to Georgia. I don’t remember the main issues, nor how it was resolved, nor even how far back all of that was, but it’s a memory nevertheless. Maybe somebody can clear that up for me.

16

Historically, it was part of the South. Don’t forget that Lee’s estate was in what is now Arlington County, and that he grew up in Alexandria. Now, it is definitely a border region.

The DC Metro area is three jurisdictions. The District proper, Northern Virginia, and Southern Maryland. Northern Virginia feels different from the rest of the Commonwealth of Virginia and in turn is culturally different from Maryland and DC, although less so than before.

17

Lloydminster is a joint city right smack dab on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. There is a Lloydminster, Saskatchewan, and a Lloydminster, Alberta, but through an inter-provincial agreement, it’s effectively one city.

maybe Quasimodal will come by shortly to sing its praises…

18

I don’t think Vegas qualifies as a border town

19

Cities/towns on or near the border in Northern Ireland include Derry, Newry, and Strabane. I believe Derry’s suburbs stretch into the Republic and Strabane has a sister town, Lifford on the other side of the border. In years gone by these borders were manned by the British Army and the two states use different currencies (Euro, British Pound) but many towns in the North, especially Newry accept Euro for transaction. This past Christmas Newry was a boom town because of the relative cheapness of consumer items there and its relative proximity to the Republic’s population centres. The VAT rate is different in the North and Sterling is relatively weak at the minute so most goods and services are cheaper up there.

20

Technically, as defined by the Census Bureau, the Washington Metro area runs south to Fredericksburg, and west to encompass the two easternmost counties in the West Virginia panhandle, as well as “central” Maryland and most of northern Virginia.

Not a major issue – but given that we’re talking abstract concepts of what is or is not part of a given city’s metro area, I’d feel that the Census Bureau definitions are as close to an objective standard as can reasonably be found.

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Most “border cities” are actually two legal entities – one in each state – that typically share some or all services. There is, IIRC, one exception to this rule – a small city on the Saskatchewan border (I forget if with Alberta or Manitoba) that is legally in both provinces, not divided by the province line. Maybe some Canadian can nail this down better than my admittedly-hazy memory.