Actually, I think it would have impacts. The San Francisco Bay Area MSA currently has all or part of 7 congressional districts, based on me looking at the maps. If it became a state, it would almost certainly have 6. San Diego looks like it would lose a seat, too, from 5 to 4.
I live close to Boston and work out by Rt 128, the major ring highway. If my city was annexed by Boston and I didn’t like it, I’d just move outside 128 and commute in rather than commute out. You’d have to keep expanding the size of your city until you had urban cities and rural countryside in the same government entity, which is to no one’s benefit.
Make cities better and people will live there. It’s not really a complex equation. The answer isn’t to create a new layer of government with an incentive to grow and few checks and balances.
But, I’m talking about reducing the number and the layers of municipal governments in the U.S.
They tried this in Montreal a few years ago, and the people hated it so much that most of the newly-annexed suburbs forced through a procedure to allow them to vote on de-merging from the enlarged city, and then went on to approve de-merging.
There are some people in Colorado that like that idea: Northern Colorado Secession: Most In Favor Of 51st State At First Public Meeting
I’d like to hear more about this (I assume you’re not talking about Detroit, which is all the “urban revitalization” news I’ve heard recently). What areas are being revitalized, how are they measuring success, and what have the results been?
To mention the most obvious example, New York City from the late 1970s to present.
But it is a well recognized trend, with basically everyone who looks at the issue saying that we’ve entered a golden era for cities. Here’s a book about it, urban population growth is off the charts, while poor people are spreading into suburbia, and it’s happening in Canada, too.
OK, then you are removing local representation by taking away peoples’ ability to manage their own community. I strongly dislike the idea of annexation as a way for cities to grow. People will vote with their feet if you take away their vote at the ballot box.
Addition problems include the many cities that exist on state borders. While you might get things to work inside a single state the problem becomes much more complex when you cross state lines. There are metro authorities in cities like NYC that involve multiple states but the body is much less powerful than the one you describe.
But, you’d still have a vote at the ballot box, you’d just be electing a bigger government.
Go back to the thread you started on it, there’s lots of cites there.
I’m down with turning the country on its head, making a new map, and centering states around a single large urban area. So, for example, the US might have 250 new metrostates.
But if you want something that’s actually going to happen and not some pie in the sky ideal, you’re out of luck. St. Louis city can’t even get St. Louis county back. There’s no way you’re going to get New Jersey absorbed into NYC without a violent revolution.
As for whether it should happen? Eh. I can see it either way. St. Louis kinda gets the shit end of the stick here, with only 300k or so living in the city despite being the 19th largest metro area in the country, ahead of Denver, Baltimore, and Portland. It could certainly use some more respect (and tax money).
But people move out of the city for a reason. And they should have a say in how their local area is governed. More of a say, in fact, than some bureaucrat downtown. And if the suburbs end up better than the city while the city declines – I say that’s too bad for the city, but it’s nobody’s fault but their own.
Poor government is no excuse to conquer other areas and claim them as your own – for monetary reasons or otherwise. Even if the conquest is bureaucratic rather than military.
Imagine that I’m an ordinary guy living in Brentwood, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville. When I compare my suburb to the big city, I see that I pay lower taxes, my kids attend better schools, my roads are in better repair, my crime rate is lower, and my parks and libraries are in better condition.
You tell me that I should want to merge the governments of Brentwood and Nashville so that I could vote for positive change in Nashville. But what’s in it for me? The idea that the merger would quickly raise Nashville to Brentwood’ s standard of living looks quite implausible. At best we could hope that the newly merged city would have taxes, schools, parks and so forth halfway between what the two cities currently have. For residents of Brentwood, that’s a pretty raw deal.
Some may say that this is selfish thinking, and I’d agree. But in a democracy one usually expects folks to vote for “their own safety and happiness”, as the Declaration of Independence puts it.
This looks to me like a solution in search of a problem. It sounds neat on the surface, but ultimately I think it will introduce a lot more problems than it will sove. And as someone who lives in Northern Virginia,this just sounds like a HORRIBLE idea to me for DC.
How do we decide the borders? You want to get some of the greater wealth of the suburbs into the tax base for the city, but it seems to me it would largely screw over the lower and middle classes that get absorbed into the metro jurisdiciton, where the wealthiest would be free to move as far out as they need to.
I see the proposal of borders elastic borders, but how do we decide how quickly they can expand? And if a city is shrinking, do we also pull them back in? Using DC as an example, just in the last 15-20 years, the suburban area has expanded dramatically with the huge influx of government and tech jobs. But a place like Detroit is shrinking rapidly. It would seem to me to be exceptionally crappy to buy a home in an area outside a city with certain expectations about the community, schools, government, and all of that, then some period later just have the borders of the city expand and then everything changes. Or vice-versa, have a home in the city, the border shrinks, and we get stuck in a newly created county as a wild card. So it seems to me that that would make real estate a volatile market for any communities around where the border is expected it may be for several years.
And commuting, that’s not going to be a deterent factor; it’s a way of life, at least around here. I have a relatively short commute of about 30-35 minutes, most of the people I work with are in the 45-60 minute range, there are a few who have 90 commutes, and I also know people who commute into Alexandria from one from each of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, easily more than two hours each way. Hell, there’s one here who actually lives in North Carolina, but gets to work offsite half the time and will take a hotel most nights rather than do the drive. Sure some of those extreme ones are for other reasons, like being near family, but a lot of them are simply a matter of cost of living. Speaking for myself, the only reason I’m not closer is cost of living, and if I suddenly had to pay DC taxes as well, I’d have to move farther out too.
I’m also not really sure what any of this would ultimately gain us. To a certain extent, Northern Virginia gets screwed, where our tax dollars get spent elsewhere, but that’s getting to be less and less of an issue with the area getting more and more populated. Still, even if we don’t get our fair share of taxes, I’d still take that several times over before dealing with all the crap that goes on in DC. Ultimately, I imagine this is less of an issue for major cities where the metro area is mostly or entirely within one state, like LA and Chicago, but I imagine that, because they’re in the same state, that state government has more incentive to work toward the collective problems of the urban and suburban problems facing them.
Now, all of that said, I do think there’s some merit to saying that perhaps the state and other such borders as they were created aren’t serving us as well as they were when they were drawn centuries ago, but that doesn’t really seem to be in the scope of this thread.
And have a much smaller percentage of the vote. Look, people generally like local control, the smaller the government the more responsive. (At least that’s the theory) Telling a community that is running its own affairs that they’re going to be put into a larger group against their will, where they will have less control, a smaller voice, and new rules imposed on them that may not be appropriate is going to generate resistance. And if you’re trying to annex rich suburbs those folks are going to vote with their feet/wallets and move away, making the whole operation fail.
IMO it’s a poor idea, fighting the wrong problem, and doomed to failure.
What would be fighting the right problem?
If memory serves, BG has previously called for a one-state “solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, also under the assumption that involuntarily cramming people into a single entity will end strife and lead to harmonious relations.
This has not worked on an international basis (consider the Soviet Union and its breakup into much smaller states). There is even less reason to believe that people even more accustomed to autonomy in the U.S. will agree to discard their interests to become a part of super-cities, in which they would have considerably less say-so than in current governmental arrangements.
Let the people who live in the city fix their own problems and leave everyone else alone. If they do a good job, they will attract more people and resources.
In the very thread that you linked to, I and others explained why we don’t believe Lind’s Law.
As others have said - make the city an attractive place to live, work, and spend time. It’s not easy, but big problems rarely have easy solutions.
The proposal would be catastrophic for minority voting power and thus would almost certainly run afoul of the Voting Rights Act. If it were ever seriously proposed, I expect that it would be widely denounced as racist.
Improving your city so that people will actually want to live there?