Of course it would, because suburbanites would get to vote in it and, in most American metro areas now, have the advantage of numbers, over the inner-city residents.
So replace them with an elected metro government, which would be better than Met Council and also better than none at all.
What makes you say it will fail?
That’s an easy question to answer. As BrainGlutton pointed out above, the metropolitan areas would consists of the continguous urbanized areas (ie the city itself, the suburbs, and any unincorporate but developed areas) along with possibly a greenbelt.
Nothing would change the suburbs (or cities)-nobody’s talking about demolishing the suburbs or forcibly moving populations around.
They aren’t running fine now.
To reorganize government, in order to make its jurisdiction be based on current demographic and economic realities rather than outdated ones laid down in colonial times.
In that case, if we had actual metropolitan-area consolidated governments that people took seriously and could vote for, the interests of suburbs would be fully represented.
Only if the state says they do. Otherwise they have the same rights as any other voters in the state to elect legislators, vote in referendums, etc. that will protect their town’s existence. If there was a constitutional amendment in Ohio to get rid of Cleveland’s city government, and 100% of non-Clevelanders voted for it and 100% of Clevelanders voted against it, Cleveland would cease to exist.
Again, you can’t just wave away fifty years of civil rights law. You live in a heavily white city that’s never had a black mayor, so you may not be that exposed to the issue, but going from a black mayor’s office and a majority-black city council to a white mayor and a majority-white city council in, say, Atlanta would be a huge Voting Rights Act red flag. (So, too, would the elimination of Cleveland as a city.)
Certainly, it would be portrayed in much of the media as an argument that African-American communities cannot govern themselves.
What makes you say it will succeed? Surely some would fail, and some would succeed.
In CA - people routinely commute 60+ miles to go to the city and work. In that time, they will pass through many other urbanized areas. Eventually, you would have eliminated local government in favor of a monolithic state. If that doesn’t register as automatically a bad thing then we are essentially speaking a different language.
What this really boils down to is urban areas that are unable to support themselves taking by force what they couldn’t achieve on their own. Instead of forcing surrounding areas to be a part of their expanding tax base, maybe these urban areas should consider spending less.
Of course, nothing is going to be successful 100% of the time.
How is it different from larger units of government such as the state? Certainly the metropolitan government won’t be the smallest unit-there will be smaller units such as wards.
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In many cases, considering that the surburbanites often take advantage of the amenities of the city (ie going to work there, shopping there, depending on it for certain services or using cultural venues there), I dare say that tax payment by the surburbanites for the good of the whole metropolitan area is to be expected.
You do realize plenty of spending cuts have occurred often to the detriment of services such as education and the police?
BrainGlutton, I don’t live in London, England or the United Kingdom so any damns I have left to care about what they do over there is simply related the general feeling of goodwill I have towards my fellow human beings. Whether or not the people surrounding London resisted being incorporated isn’t really relevant to what happens in the United States. As for towns not having any rights, fine. I didn’t say towns have rights so I don’t know why you feel the need to lecture me on that fact. I asked about the people living in those towns, who, you must agree, certainly do have rights. Even if one of those rights isn’t to decide for themselves whether to be incorporated with another city.
And state’s rights were invoked when many northern states balked at being required to capture/assist in the apprehension of runaway slaves. It wasn’t successfully invoked but it was invoked.
I’m having a hard time viewing suburbanites as people who take advantage of city amenities without offering anything in return. For every amenity I take advantage of in the city they are getting paid either in sales taxes, property taxes, the money I pay to take advantage of those cultural venues and of course the money spent that helps keep their economy vibrant and they don’t have to educate my kids or provide me with the basic services I expect a city government to provide. Yeah, the suburbanites take advantage of the city but it’s not exactly a one way street.
Why don’t these “autonomous cities” we call suburbs ever seem to pop up anywhere completely separated from core cities with their poverty and social problems that the suburbanites want to avoid having any responsibility for? Where is something like the “city” of Eden Prairie, but ringed by either wilderness or miles and miles of farmland in every direction? It doesn’t exist and pretty much cannot exist, at least not until robots can do all service sector jobs. In the meantime, you are going to have low wage workers (because suburbanites aren’t going to be willing to pay the price for high wages), meaning you have working poor, who have to live somewhere.
So what the opponents of this kind of thing really want is a kind of apartheid (or the modern equivalent as seen in Israel/Palestine), even if they don’t consciously realise it. Better build those walls high and the gates strong! And make sure you have enough security manning the checkpoints to search your servant class thoroughly without making them late for work.
The Town of Glastonbury, Connecticut is running fine now. It has great schools and an affluent community. The City of Hartford is in much poorer shape. Why would the Town of Glastonbury, which predates the City of Hartford both as a settlement and an independent municipality, want to merge its government with that of the City of Hartford?
The question remains:
You mean, like the current existing suburbs?
By “take advantage” do you mean, pay for? What does the city provide to a resident of the suburb that the suburban resident does not pay for either directly for services rendered or indirectly through taxes levied?
Let’s take Chevron for example. Their world wide headquarters is in San Ramon, a suburb of San Francisco. Or is that a suburb of Oakland? Or is that a suburb of San Jose? Who gets to annex San Ramon to make all those residents and businesses pay for the cities that surround them? Who gets to decide who annexes who? Maybe San Ramon can get together with the other surrounding suburbs and annex Oakland, the shithole cesspool that it is. Wait, no one wants Oakland.
Whenever talks of actually cutting spending it seems the first and only thing that can be cut are police and teachers. I’m surprised you didn’t say firefighters. Cuts can happen while leaving police and teachers alone. Or they can be cut too, I couldn’t care less. If urban cities have a problem that their tax base can’t cover their spending, it’s time to cut spending.
The first example that comes to mind is Boulder, Co. with a median income of 57K. Eden Prairie’s is only 54K so Boulder is wealthier and with a population of 97K comapred to 60K it’s a little bigger so I’m not sure at what point Boulder become too much of a city for you. Boulder is disconnected from Denver and most people who live there have nothing to do with Denver except for using the airport. Depending on the direction you go it’s surrounded by farms and wilderness on three sides and there are alot of farms to the south of Boulder between it and Golden. I can come up with more if youre interested.
Why is it hard to understand? People who live in the suburbs have the services and amenities of a major city without having to pay taxes for them.
So the bankrupt city could shutter it’s police stations and schools, and turn off its water supply, and stop collecting garbage, and just let people live in Haiti-like conditions, and that would be fine with you? i get that you are aggressive about feeling no compassion for those people; but even selfishly: do you really think that this will have no effect on surrounding areas? Is your plan just to build big walls around your suburbs and have lots of cops with bayonets at the ready? What if you want to drive to somewhere else? Will everyone drive in armored personnel carriers? With solid rubber tires and perhaps even tank treads to navigate the potholes that are more numerous than the asphalt?
Let’s say your state adopts such an extreme individualistic approach, and the federal government somehow allows it as well. If another state like Minnesota sticks with the more communitarian approach, do you really think businesses will flock to your state just for lower taxes* and less regulation? I submit that those who will are the ones that may threaten to move to the Third World at any moment anyway and do not provide well-paying jobs. Similar to what we see in the South now.
Why don’t we skip another step and just have the country divided into Federal Administration Districts and eliminate not only cities, but States? All decisions related to population centers (the former cities) can be made by a District bureaucracy, answerable to Washington. That way, you don’t have all this messy stuff like Cities and Suburbs and politics and stuff to deal with. Everyone everywhere treated exactly the same by the impartial Bureaucracy.
Sounds ideal to me, like the departments in France.
I’ve only been to downtown Minneapolis voluntarily once in the past few years (don’t work there, don’t go to sports games, don’t go to bars, there’s a McDonalds and Walmart in the suburbs which are all I need for food and shopping). I guess it counts that I go to the Chain of Lakes parks once a week. They’re free, but if they wanted to implement a user fee for suburban residents I’d gladly pay it if it meant we could keep our separate suburban government. Even if in theory it would be responsive to the needs of the suburbs, I’m not one bit convinced that in practice it would be dominated by big city liberals and be anti-highway, anti-growth, anti-former surburbs in general.
And people who live in cities have the services and amenities of the suburbs without having to pay taxes for them. So what?
Regards,
Shodan
Around here at least, the vast majority of the suburban cities were towns in their own right before they became “suburbs”. Most still have an “old downtown” section which is usually now full of restaurants and stuff, as well as the city hall, etc…
Very few spring up from whole cloth as suburban towns- you can see by the school district names that they’ve been either incorporated towns or at least unincorporated municipalities long before becoming “suburbs”. A few, like The Colony or Kingwood or The Woodlands did, but the vast majority (Richardson, Plano, Frisco, Alief, Katy, Sugarland, Spring, Tomball, Round Rock, Buda, etc…) were towns first, and then morphed into suburbs over time.
What tended to happen around here is that people wanting new homes and/or not to live in the inner city moved to new developments in these (at the time) rural towns, which over the years have become part of a larger conurbation.
Wow, sounds like you’re living the dream. I had better really rethink everything I’ve been saying.