For a little while now, when you search for a US town or city in Google Maps, it has helpfully highlighted the boundaries of the place in question rather than just dropping a marker pin somewhere in the middle.
I’ve noticed that lots of these boundaries are extremely complex, and are full of holes - little islands of territory that are seemingly not part of the city.
An example: Columbus, Ohio. (The boundaries may be clearer if you switch from aerial to map view.)
What the heck is going on there? There are vast numbers of “holes” in the city territory. Quite a few of them seem to correspond to schools (why would schools not be part of the city that surrounds them?) but many are just seemingly unremarkable residential areas that don’t look any different from those adjacent to them. In a few cases it even looks like a single house is excluded from the city, but it’s hard to verify that as the boundaries disappear when you zoom in too far.
As an example, look at this house and zoom out a few levels until the boundaries reappear.
What kind of Orwellian bureaucratic nightmare is this? Is it gerrymandering gone mad, or something less sinister?
The general story is that a city will try to annex existing settlements as it expands outwards. Most of these settlements will have the incentives (hook up to fire, police, and utility services, etc.) to agree to be annexed, but sometimes a few will not – usually, because they have enough of their own wealth that they can provide for their own services, and would prefer to not pay the higher taxes that usually cones with being part of a large city.
My neighborhood is a bit of an island but people around here want to be in our city because it has great schools. Since it’s a new neighborhood and there’s not many places in the city left to build a lot of homes, I expect the city annexed the land so the developer could build homes that would be in the city.
There is a school a half mile away that is not in the city. It serves the county residents
Around these parts at least, the newly annexed homeowners can be assessed tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of having water and sewer lines run through their neighborhood, whether they choose to hook up or not. Even if they are allowed to finance the assessment, the finance payments plus the regular water and sewer fees are likely going to cost them more, at least in the short run, than sticking with the well and septic system they likely already had. Throw in the extra city taxes on top of that and being annexed is often least palatable to the people without a lot of money to spare.
Good point. I bet this applies in many situations. There are definitely examples, though, of wealthy settlements choosing to not be annexed by a growing city.
As for Colophon’s question as to why just a few-blocks area would end up thus…that’s a very good question, and I’m looking forward to others’ responses on this. Sometimes, I’m guessing, it could be that it IS a school, say, which serves a nearby settlement…perhaps in an unicorporated part of a county…and the big city’s built-up area has reached the school, but not yet the population center of the settlement the school serves. (ETA: I see that Fubaya already sort of alluded to this possibility.)
I’m tempted to suggest that it can sometimes have something to do with individual landowners refusing to become part of a city, but I don’t think it ever works that way. Even a developer who temporarily owns a large area can’t do this him/herself (AFAIK), but of course they could have a lot of influence at township or county board meetings and the like.
Some of them might be parks that existed before the city expanded that far and so remained affiliated with the state instead of the city. But mostly I expect JKelleyMap has it right – they’re small enclaves of a preexisting municipality that didn’t join up when the city expanded.
If you click on the second link and go out nine levels you see that the irregular boundary of Columbus, which is marked by a thick pinkish line, has some sections in white with little detail. It’s especially noticeable to the southwest of the intersection of I-70 and I-71, labeled South Hilltop and Riverbend.
I don’t know enough about Columbus to know if these are formal subdivisions or not. Cleveland doesn’t show any, but Cincinnati has a couple of them. Norwood is labeled on the map, and it’s a separate city that happens to lie entirely within the boundaries of Cincinnati, what is technically known as an enclave. The world has zillions of enclaves. And exclaves, too.
They all exist because of quirks of history, areas that refused to be overrun, or incorporated, or annexed, or who gained independence later on. Each has its own long story. Maybe some expert on Columbus history can explain these.
Quirks of history is probably the only generalized answer that can be offered. I don’t know how it works in other states, but in Ohio, once a jurisdiction has been “incorporated” in the form of a city or village (the distinction between city and village is based solely on population), it can no longer be absorbed by a neighboring incorporated city or village.
Also, generally speaking, a city will usually try to annex areas that are already developed or are about to be developed – that is, that it already has roads, utilities, commercial development, and residences. It takes a certain level of tax base and population density to make it worthwhile to annex an area. So, when annexation lines are drawn, they will avoid areas that are still primarily farmland.
Taking one case in the Columbus area as an example, when the Village of Bexley was first incorporated, it was likely nearby or adjacent to the City of Columbus. As Columbus grew through annexation of unincorporated jurisdictions (townships), it simply went around Bexley, eventually making it an enclave.
In Ohio, it’s also common for unincorporated jurisdictions to incorporate in anticipation of annexation by a nearby city. That’s what happened with the City of Huber Heights in 1981. At the time, the residents of Wayne Township, Montgomery County, Ohio, feared annexation by the City of Dayton. The law at the time allowed Dayton to veto an attempt by Wayne Township to incorporate, but the state representative for that area, Tom Fries, managed to get legislation passed that would allow Wayne Township to incorporate, and it became the City of Huber Heights, blocking annexation by Dayton.
I spent four years in Urbana/Champaign, IL. Someone once explained to me that it was impossible for the towns to merge, although they shared a common border for a couple miles (e.g. my office was in Champaign, but my dept. office across the street in Urbana). The reason they gave was there was a state law that required that a town have no holes (it was described to me as requiring towns to be simply connected) and there was some unincorporated property (I think it was a cemetery) between them that would cause a merged city to violate the law. So in Illinois, at least 50 years ago, it was not allowed in Illinois.
In my experience, the question of annexation never falls to the desires of the neighborhood being considered, so the description you give is somewhat accurate but completely inverted.
What it always comes down to is the wishes of the annexing city. The wishes of the residents are less than irrelevant.
And the wishes of the annexing city almost always comes down to the revenue (taxation) potential of the candidate neighborhood.
So in the latter case, the well-off settlement, with good services and low (presumably mostly paid off) development debts would be annexed in a second. The city is thinking “yummy yummy property tax assessments, and no expensive debts to assume!”. The residents of the neighborhood, OTOH, would be saying “Crap. Now we have to put up with city-provided ‘services’. Which we know are inferior to what we’re paying for now. But that’s ok, because we’ll pay more taxes for the privilege of inferior services. Yaaay.”
OTOH, an independent subdivision still reeking with development debt will be avoided by the city like a dead skunk on a hot day. A city isn’t going to annex a subdivision out of the kindness of its heart. If it’s not a money-making proposition, they’re not doing it.
It’s gotten to the point that well-to-do neighborhoods in severely outlying portions of the county are annexed, even against the rule that annexed territories have to be capable of some contiguous boundary with the city, by also annexing a narrow uninhabited strip along the road between the nearest city boundary and the subdivision. Paying road maintenance on 100 yards of a street to get access to several tens of millions of dollars of revenue-positive taxable residential property seems to be worth it.
This is entirely a state-decided measure. In most of the northeastern states, when the affluent suburbs began resisting the efforts of cities to annex them - and this was in the late 19th/early 20th century - they got laws passed requiring that both areas had to agree to an annexation, usually with a full referendum. (Or any of a dozen other small variants.) Therefore, annexing stopped cold in almost all cases because the suburbs didn’t want the problems of the cities.
This includes a large swath of the country. What you’re talking about seems to be true only of newer cities in the Sun Belt where subdivisions keep popping up.
In the U.S., your local situation is almost never a guide to how the rest of the country functions.
This whole concept seems totally alien from a British point of view - cities “annexing” surrounding land etc. Over here, a town is in the district and county it’s in, and that’s that. You pay your taxes to the district (or borough, or city) council. Obviously some cities are big enough that they constitute an entire council area on their own, but you don’t have islands of non-city area within them.
I confess to having no clue how taxation etc at the local level works in the US.
What happens when rural farmland outside a city gets converted to city streets or suburbs and de facto becomes part of the urban landscape? Is there a process to add the land to the city or does it just stay the way it always has?
E.g.:
John: “Why don’t we move into the new apartments opening up across the street?”
Mary: “Those apartments are legally rural. They aren’t part of the legal city and will never be so. We wouldn’t be able to send our kids to city schools.”
Everywhere in the UK is already part of a council area (city, borough or district - the names vary), so it makes no difference. Farmland or housing, it’s still part of the same area for tax purposes.
For example, I live in Hart District, in the county of Hampshire. Hopefully the border shows up on that map link. As you can see, much of it is fairly rural but there are also several towns. Regardless of where you live in that district, you pay the same taxes etc (obviously dependent on property value). Schools have geographic catchment areas that don’t correspond to council boundaries etc.
Sometimes boundaries do get adjusted so that a given town isn’t split between two counties, but often that doesn’t happen. If the district boundary shows up on this link you can see that it ploughs straight through the middle of the suburbs, such that neighbouring houses on the same street are in different council areas.
In that case it’s usually just a matter of the quirks of history. The city previously annexed some of the surrounding neighborhoods but for some reason those few blocks were left out. Maybe nobody was living there then. Maybe the city couldn’t afford it then.
There’s a small neighborhood of unincorporated Santa Clara County that San Jose has been trying to annex for a few years now. It’s only a few blocks.
One thing to bear in mind is that the administrative hierarchy varies a lot from country to country. As a professional in the GIS industry this is something that I deal with a lot. As you’ve discovered, there is a significant difference between the UK and the US in this respect. Every place in the UK is part of a council area, but not every place in the US is part of a city or town.
ETA: This makes an address-search algorithm (for a GPS system, for example) that works on a world-wide basis very challenging.
The Chicago suburb of Wheaton was dry until the 80’s, but there was this one bar that was in a tiny little building-sized exclave. I’m not sure if the situation was that they couldn’t annex that parcel because there was a bar there and the town was dry or if some opportunist opened the bar in the exclave.