Cities can expand by incorporating land outside their current borders. Can they reverse this? I can’t recall ever hearing of a city doing this. It may not be legal in some jurisdictions.
Note that I don’t mean disincorporating the entire city, just reducing the city’s footprint. The city must still exist after the reduction.
The District of Columbia did this in 1847:
But at the time, the District was not coextensive with the city of Washington.
Some states have land that is not incorporated. Most of the pre-colonial northeastern states have no unincorporated land. In New York, where I live, all land is incorporated into cities, towns, hamlets, or villages. However, a New York state law allows for municipal dissolution. A village can unincorporate, and dissolve its government. All of the land is then either merged into an existing municipality or new municipalities are created. The usual reason for this is financial, letting the town or county run the finances and provide the services a small place can no longer afford. All parties involved have to approve these changes via referendum.
Over the past several years, New York State has taken considerable steps to eliminate
or reduce the number of local governments — streamlining the law to make it easier
for citizens to undertake the process as well as providing financial incentives for
communities that undertake consolidations and shared services. Since 2010, the
residents of 42 villages have voted on the question of whether to dissolve their village
government. This average of 4.7 dissolution votes per year is an increase over the .79
a-year-average in the years 1972-2010.1 The growing number of villages considering
dissolution is attributable to the combined influence of declining populations, growing
property tax burdens, and the passage of the New N.Y. Government Reorganization
and Citizen Empowerment Act (herein after the Empowerment Act), effective in March
2019, which revised procedures to make it easier for citizens to place dissolution and
consolidation on the ballot. While the number of communities considering and voting
on dissolution has increased, the rate at which dissolutions have been approved by
the voters has declined. That is, 60 percent of proposed village dissolutions bought
under the provisions of the Empowerment Act have been rejected at referendum (see
Dissolving Village Government in New York State: A Symbol of a Community in Decline
or Government Modernization?)
Many other special purpose districts are incorporated. School districts are most noticeable but fire, water, sewer, street lighting, garbage collection, and park or playground districts can stretch across municipal boundaries, and are often unincorporated and revised as populations and needs change over time. New York City has its own special districts.
All local powers devolve from state governments and constitutions. Every state has a unique set of laws governing these areas and presumably can undo what a previous legislature did, subject to the provisions of the state constitution. I wouldn’t presume to understand the laws of the other 49 states (does anyone understand New York State laws?), but my guess is that all cities today can unincorporate land according to local rules.
I can’t speak for any other state but a few years ago my town voted to transfer a strip on the city limits to the town next door. If they can do that, I imagine they can transfer it to into at least a contiguous unincorporated area.
This same thing happened in the Bay Area in the '70s. A neighborhood that was part of a far-westward-extending arm of San Jose voted to join the adjacent city of Cupertino because Cupertino’s services were closer and its sphere of influence was stronger. I don’t live in California, but I’m guessing state law allows it.
OK, the question is aimed at states that have unincorporated land. So New York and most of, if not all, New England is out. As are some of the midwestern states. However, it could apply to Canada, if any of the provinces have unincorporated land (and I think most, if not all, do).
Also, the question is not about transfering land between cities.
I found a specific statute in Missouri.
Any county governing body may, in its discretion, on the application of any person or persons owning a tract of land containing five acres or more in a town or village, used only for agricultural purposes, to diminish the limits of such town or village by excluding any such tract of land from said corporate limits; provided, that such application shall be accompanied by a petition asking such change and signed by a majority of the voters in such town or village. And thereafter such tract of land so excluded shall not be deemed or held to be any part of such town or village.
So the answer in Missouri is yes, provided that the area to be unincorporated is used strictly for agricultural purposes.
There are also provisions for “adjusting” boundaries between incorporated and unincorporated areas, but they’re too murky for IANAL to make sense of. It does seem that one of the criteria for adjustment is the ability of the city to provide services to an area.
In Ohio this is a legal process called “detachment,” which is the reverse of annexation. It doesn’t happen much, but it’s most common when land is annexed at the request of a developer, but then the development doesn’t happen.
In some cases it can even be court-ordered, if it’s farmland and the owner proves that they pay more in city taxes than they receive in city services.
Lots of states have unincorporated places, the northeast is the exception more so than the rule. East Los Angeles is not the eastern part of the city, it’s an unincorporated place separate from LA. The best example is that many tourists go to “Las Vegas” but never actually go there. They fly into the airport, take an Uber to their casino-hotel on the Strip. Throughout all that they spend their time in a place that gets mail addressed to Las Vegas, but is in fact the CDP of Paradise.
This doesn’t quite fit the OP because it was never a city, but they were on the slate to be absorbed and resisted it. There are examples of cities that split into 2 or more, but I can’t find any that reverted to non-cities.
Also FYI, many states just have cities and not-cities. Town, village, borough, township don’t have any legal meaning. But in other states they certainly do.
Not really a good example because the District of Columbia is under federal jurisdiction. This retrocession required an agreement between the federal government and the state of Virginia. What the OP wants to know, I think, is whether a municipal government can do so unilaterally. My gut feeling would have been no, as I assumed that drawing the boundaries between incorporated and unincorporated areas requires an act of the state legislature as the higher-ranking source of law; but it may well be that some states have put in place statutes that allow for this rather than having to adopt an ad hoc statute for the specific case (as one poster has found for Missouri).
The DC retrocession is not a good example because (as I said above) at the time, the city of Washington was not coextensive with the District. The part returned to Virginia was not part of the city of Washington. I’m not sure when Washington became coextensive with DC but it was well after 1847 when the retrocession occured.
Even if the City of Washington had been coextensive with the District of Columbia in 1847, it would have required more than a vote of the District of Columbia (or the City of Washington) to cede part of its territory to Virginia. It would still have required an agreement between Virginia and the federal government (as it would today).
In Ontario (all of Canada I believe), all municipalities are creatures of the province. Governing legislation is at the provincial level, so cities can’t change anything with regard to jurisdiction without the province changing the law.
My current home, Fort Myers, de-annexed an area that it had annexed just a few year earlier. I remember the general area (north of the airport), but not the exact location. So it can happen.
At least in California, it doesn’t take a direct act of the state legislature to do this, it’s normally done by a LAFCO: Local agency formation commission. Each of California’s counties has a LAFCO, which are authorized by the legislature, and that’s where they get their authority.
Slightly off topic since it relates to the UK and not an act of unincorporation.
But there is an alleyway behind my house which keeps getting filled with crap by what in the UK are called fly-tippers.
I called the local council and they refused to do anything about it because that area was what they called “unadopted”.
So there certainly seem to be areas within city limits in the UK which are not considered “part of the city”.
Ohio does have a provision for de-annexing land (called detachment in this case). The language about it is more archaic than I’m used to seeing, so it might even date back to before Ohio became a state.
It’s an interesting political conundrum, because annexing land is an affirmative action on the part of the people wanting to be annexed and the municipality doing the annexing. The county/township may oppose the loss of that tax base, but too bad so sad. On the other hand, de-annexed land is then put back on the shoulders of the county/township whether they want it or not. That seems more fraught than the opposite, but I haven’t given it a lot of thought. It’s similar to de-incorporation or dissolution, which has happened fairly recently.
The whole country is experiencing dissolution. In fact, I can confidently predict that we will soon be considered dissolute.
Not Missouri. In all those subsections of obscure statutes I didn’t mention, the plain wording of the statute says that boundaries (which include incorporation, annexation, and their opposites, must be approved by the county.
IU don’t know how it works in other states, but in Missouri the county is constitutionally the local government, and except for a few specific instances, the county delegates control and authority to cities, towns and incorporated villages (all of which have different governmental structures and provide different services.)