As regards Greenville, I suspect the small slivers along the river are down to mismatches between different layers of digital mapping, rather than actual tiny slivers of city/non-city land.
If one looks towards the southern portion of the city, along Davenport Farm Road, about 1000 ft. NNE of South Central High School is a one-acre section that is contained within the city limits of Greenville. If one zooms in, one finds that this one acre section that spans two properties. Neither house is in Greenville, and each driveway makes a circuitous path to the street, avoiding the city limits of Greenville.
At the western edge of the city limits, there is a 1.5 acre detached sliver of Greenville that is about 830 (east/west) feet by 75 feet. It is just 600 ft. west of Frog Level Road and 1000 ft north of Barrington Drive. It appears to be part of a 10? acre field.
In each of these cases, if one zooms in GoogleMaps, the area is slightly darker than the surrounding area.
All I can say is … WTF?
In that case, it appears to be an error in Google’s data. According to the county GIS site, one of the properties is in Greenville and the other is not. The driveway location seems to be a coincidence.
Another case of a mistake in Google’s data; according to the county GIS that strip of city territory is actually a neighbouring lot, and it looks like Google has it offset from where it should be.
That’s Google’s symbol that it uses for areas that are part of a city. It’s just that Google has its city boundaries a bit wonky.
That may be true, but you’d never guess it from ground level. The school districts tend to have names like “Lakewood City Schools”, which sure makes it look like they’re, well, city schools.
ctnguy; thank you for that input, and I agree with your findings. To some extent it makes sense.
I the first case, why would one house be within the city limits, while all the neighbors are not? It sounds really odd.
In the 2nd case, the 1.5 acre parcel is now about 300 ft north, and just part of a different field. In looking at the property lines on GoogleMaps, it appears that the filed has three different lots, with one of the lots within the city limits … The ultimate in Garrymandering.
In Missouri (I don’t know about other states) annexing an area requires consent by voters both in the city and in the piece of land. So the city may annex a farm on the north, then a farm to the west, then a farm to the south. Meanwhile, the farm in the middle has voted against every annexation proposal that included it, so the city simply excludes it from the next annexation proposal and it ends up as an enclave.
Ever wonder why there’s a Missouri bootheel that sticks down into Arkansas? It’s because a guy by the name of John Hardeman Walker didn’t want his land to be in Arkansas.
Looking at the county GIS viewer, we learn that’s 558 Davenport Farm Rd., home of Darren & Carla Davenport. It’s one of Greenville’s satellite annexations. Why that one parcel out of several on the same road? There’s undoubtedly some local story. They may have agreed to annexation to get city water or fire protection, or because one of them works for the city, or as a part of a development agreement for some other part of the family farm.
Google Maps does the best it can trying to cover the entire world with a relatively small team of analysts, some good algorithms, and the purchase of datasets. But it’s not an authoritative source regarding current city boundaries. For any number of wonky reasons, datasets drawn from several different places don’t always match up properly.
I think it’s a legacy from when school districts were more connected to the local government. A “city school district” or “exempted village school district” is one that isn’t supervised by a county school board. (If it was, it would be called a “local school district.” And to make it especially confusing, county school boards are not county-level bodies any more than city school districts are city-level bodies.)
Looking at the city GIS viewer, that does indeed appear to be the case. The slivers along the river don’t actually exist. It seems to be down to a mismatch in the lines of the river bank, which for some reason get assigned as city land.
Edit: actually, having said that, if you zoom in far enough, there are a few slivers. I still reckon it is an artifact though, as they are not labelled with parcel numbers. Imgur: The magic of the Internet
I’m not sure you can make any general statements about school districts ( or really any local government agency). Because there are indeed city school districts that are city-level bodies and at least one that is under mayoral control rather than a school board’s.
Thats extremely common when it comes to actual waterways… and certainly to navigable waterways. (not just some creek which might not have got onto maps.)
Navigable rivers are state territory since there is no freehold on the waterway… the state land titles office couldnt produce a title to give control of it to the city/county
My house is in a little unincorporated island surrounded by city. I’m sure there’s some reason for it but the houses and demographics are the same here as they are across the road where it’s incorporated.
Biggest difference is that we don’t have public water or sewers and instead have a community well and personal septic fields. Since we’d otherwise be on the Lake Michigan supply, this is a pretty dramatic difference. The well water isn’t bad for drinking, etc but it is very hard. No curbs, sidewalks or street lamps. Policing is done by the county police rather than the local force (although I suspect if I called 911, whoever is closest would still respond).
On the plus side, I can burn leaves in the fall.
Sometimes slivers are legitimate. The city of Lebanon, Ohio has a long tentacle stretching to the southwest because the city purchased the defunct Cincinnati, Lebanon and Northern Railway from Conrail in 1985. Google Maps
It’s possible in Ohio for cities to own land outside of their boundaries (and indeed even in other municipalities, as Cincinnati owned the Blue Ash Airport until it was closed and they sold it to Blue Ash, now Summit Park Google Maps ), but city boundaries themselves are supposed to be contiguous. Clayton however has three separate pieces, and I’m not quite sure how they managed that. Google Maps The only thing I can come up with is that in 1998 they annexed the remainder of Montgomery County’s Randolph Township, and in Ohio townships are only unincorporated, so once all the land is incorporated the township dissolves. Maybe there was some sort of exception made for this particular purpose, because scattered bits and pieces of unincorporated township are difficult to manage and provide services for, such as Columbia Township near Cincinnati. Google Maps
A municipal-township merger (not the same thing as annexation) allows the municipality to do that. The entire unincorporated area of the township becomes part of the municipality, even if it’s not contiguous. Trotwood and Riverside have multiple pieces too, from the same process.
The state legislature also passed a special law allowing Dayton to annex the airport at some point, even though it’s pretty far from the city limits.
I don’t think you can, either, other than that there are general regional tendencies. On the East Coast / in the North East, they tend to align with cites or states. In the South, they tend to align with county boundaries, and in the West/Mid-west, you tend to have more “unified” school districts, which may include various cities and unincorporated areas (E.g., L.A. Unified, which includes the cities of Bell, and Huntington Park, but not Culver City, etc.). You may even have separate school districts for the high schools and the lower schools in the same geographic area.
Los Angeles has a long narrow strip–at some parts only a few blocks wide–which extends south so that the city can include the port of San Pedro, and still be contiguous.
San Diego did something similar but extremely crafty. In order to include the international border with Tijuana as part of San Diego, even though two other cities intervene in between by land, they extended a narrow strip of city limits through the bay, so they wouldn’t have to go though those other two cities, and still be technically “contiguous.”
According to this map, L.A. Unified School District includes San Clemente Island (but not Catalina Island), which belongs to the Navy. I don’t know why it’s even part of the district, since I don’t think there’s any school there.
Around the country there are several examples of metro area airports that are well-removed from the core city proper and yet belong to the core city.
Most of these are historical, where the city bought land out in the boonies for an airport and only decades later did separately incorporated suburbia expand / encroach all the way out to the airport.
A few are, like Dayton, an incidence of legislative fiat. Often when what was originally a privately-owned airport finally outgrew the private owner in either capital required or regional importance.
With the term “core city” so often standing in for decline, decay, and social and economic disaster areas these days, it’s hard to recall the '60s and before when the core city was the fount of all economic power and growth. With the political power and upwardly striving behaviors to match.
And in Colorado, the city can annex that enclave without owner permission.