Effects of merging suburban and inner city governments?

Factual Questions
1

It seems that in America, that the city proper and the surrounding suburbs are often administered by separate local governments with no powerful, unified, overarching metropolitan authority between the county level and the state.

For example, Seattle’s metropolitan area is made up of 3.3 million residents in 3 counties across 15,000 sq. km. And the Oklahoma City metropolitan area is made of 1.3 million residents in 7 counties across 17,000 sq. km. The Los Angeles metropolitan area has 12.9 million residents distributed over 5 counties and 13,000 sq. km. And New York’s Metropolitan Area consists of about 19.1 million residents in 23 counties across 17,000 sq. km. in 4 different states!

Are there examples of major city expansion recently in the US (or other parts of the world)? Or the creation of powerful inter-county unions that basically stripped the counties and towns of power and transferred it to the city? I’m aware that something like this happened in New York, but I don’t understand why it has seemed to stop.

In present day Greater New York’s case, convincing states to give up precious, wealthy taxable counties (that generate a net profit to the state) to another state (or convincing all states to give up land to make a new independent federal city) is probably a political impossibility. But what about a situation without crossing state lines, like Atlanta? Or Chicago? If the state or federal government stepped in and mandated that Atlanta, for example, would have its city limits expand dramatically to nearly engulf the entire suburban ring around it, what would be the effects with regard to tax structures, infrastructure projects, mass transit, population growth, economy, school districts, government efficiency, etc?

Would the majority of people go for it?

If it went through, how would local politics be changed across the US? I imagine the mixing of traditional Red suburbs and Blue inner-cities would result in closer local races.

If this trend were to really ramp up, with cities swallowing up more and more previously independent suburban towns and counties, would cities come to dominate over state governments? Would the suburbs be tapped dry and neglected development? Would this leave the non-urbanized countryside with even less political power? Would the political future of the US resemble some strange Greek collection of a few hundred or so powerfully large city states rather than a union of fifty states?

If we were today to unify all suburban towns/counties with the CBDs of our major cities, what percentage of the population would be in these new, larger cities?

Could absorbing the suburban ring be a potential budget remedy for some dying cities?

Thanks

2

Sounds like an interesting term paper.

Politically speaking, this is a non-starter. Most of the ‘burbs were explicitly created to escape being part of the mother city’s tax and political system. Most of the governing law on merging municpalities is defined at the state level and by and large it requires both the consumer and the consumed to agree to the transaction. Which ain’t gonna happen, period.
The rural areas’ outsized political power today is a result of the state- & federal-level legislatures’ districting. Changing how cities were organized would have little direct effect.
If in some magical world we got to singly-governed megacities I could imagine pressure building to marginalize the rural folks by redistricting the state & federal legislatures on strict population lines. And eliminating things like Senates which are explicitly not based on population. However, that’s so far away from what the USA is today you’d hardly be able to call the result “the USA”. It’d be a new form of government occupying the same land the USA used to.
IMO, if anything is going to happen in the future, it’ll go the opposite way. The increased online connectivity means your life can be less and less tied to your locality.

Ultimately, the logical basis for geographically-based government districts of any kind is the idea that people who live near one another have common problems and need common solutions. As long as everybody farmed or worked at the big plant on the South side of town, or worked in the local shops which sold things to the plant workers, that model worked well.

But when I live here, telecommute halfway across the country & buy most of my goods directly from factories in China via the Internet, and my physical neighbors mostly do the same, there’s not a lot of reason for us to think of our physical proximity as producing any sort of commonality of interest, or even sense of community.

NEVER underestimate the power of human selfishness.

3

This thread will probably be moved, despite the few points that have factual answers.

When I see places like Los Angeles, San Diego, and New York city (versus the communities in SE Michigan), I already imagine that what you describe has happened. New York already consists of boroughs that would seem to me (as an outsider) to already be separate cities with only a vague relation to one another but yet unable to have any home-rule, i.e., they’re dominated by a single “New York City.” In the case of the two California examples, each of those “cities” governs an expanse so vast that it seems impossible (to me as an outsider) to allow any sensible type of local rule. If you live in La Joya, for example, you’re still stuck with San Diego taxes supporting San Diego infrastructure. I’ve read several online newspaper article about California cities constantly wanting to annex other towns to suck up their tax revenue, as well as communities wanting to secede from these mega cities. It almost never happens, because these massive governments need to tax.

Now I’ll note that California wasn’t a PLSS state prior to statehood (it observed the Spanish land grants), and that New York never was, and so maybe what I see as “chaotic organization” is a result of the history of that. Compare that with Michigan which has always been a PLSS territory. It’s organized into nice, neat, autonomous townships, which fit nicely into counties. Where cities exist, they occupy part of or all of a township (in fact, if the entire township is absorbed into the city, the township ceases to exist except as a geographical reference). Cities have been able (in the past) to annex land from townships, but as townships have increased populations and funded their infrastructures, the state has provided for “charter townships” which are not able to be annexed.

The result of all of this, of course, is that home rule has become a fundamental part of how we govern ourselves. Old Tip O’Neill wasn’t wrong in his belief that all politics is local.

In the case of Detroit, there’s already been a history of “white flight.” While this was driven by racial issues and spurred by the riots, the division between the attitudes of the suburbs and the city proper has strengthened. Many of us in the suburbs are already held hostage by the fact that our potable water system is owned by Detroit, for example, with no county representation. Detroit also has a city council that’s elected at large, rather than on a district basis. While that currently sucks for the nice parts of Detroit (really, there are some!), integrating all of the suburbs would utterly destroy Detroit’s culture (but could fix their corruption problems). But there’s nothing to be gained by the suburbs from doing so.

I wonder, other than some resource sharing that could reduce some expenses in the short term, what would be the benefit of consolidating distinct, local, communities into a larger, faceless bureaucracy? Heck, some of the proposals for “saving” Detroit including shedding territory and returning to a core city!

I’m looking forward to following this thread.

Edit:

I kind of see you’re of the opposite opinion on “community.” What about “our neighborhood” and “our parks” and “our schools” and “our quality of life” and “our libraries” and “our values”? There are a lot of things besides consumption and jobs that make a community.

4

Well, I don’t know if I’m the best person to answer all of the questions, but the Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia governments went through a forced amalgamation exercise in a number of municipalities about 10 years ago; the results have been mixed.

If you were part of the former suburbs you saw tax increases with zero benefits to you. On the other hand, the argument was made that suburbanites were taking advantage of city services anyway, transportation, libraries, roadways, etc. but were not paying their fair share of the various infrastructure taxes.

Initially I presumed (in Ottawa) that administrative head counts and costs would decrease after amalgamation of some 12 communities into one, but that just never happened. All the former town halls (customer client centres) remain open and I’ve seen no benefit to me, as a rural homeowner amalgamated into the city. No public transportation reaches me, and I really don’t use any city services, so I’m feeling a little bitter about the whole thing, although I can certainly understand the rationale behind amalgamation.

In 20, 30 years I think we’ll all be glad that amalgamation was forced on us, but the short term pains for suburban folks is a bitter pill to swallow.

5

This is the key here - and there’s no way the majority would be in favor of it. (Assuming that you need the majority of each separate entity.)

I’ll use my local example of Indianapolis. It suffered through the White Flight of post-desegregation like most other major metropolitan areas, resulting in a pretty extensive case of donut-itis, creating satellite suburban municipalities. The draw of those suburbs are demographic homogeny, low population density, little-to-no industry, and as a result, lower taxes (due primarily to a decreased public utility burden).

Merging the suburbs with Indianapolis would result in such widespread redistribution of resources (primarily from the suburbs into the lower income areas of the city), that it would cause mass revolt. It would also increase the tax rate of the suburbs (primarily property taxes, but also sales and other taxes). This would anger many many people.

However, the effects would be positive overall. Centralized city government would better be able to plan a comprehensive mass transit system reaching across the entire population (rather than just the city municipality - which is the reason it’s never been implemented at all), there would be less inequality across school districts, and there would be an increased demand in mixed-use zoning in the city proper (due to the fact that there are now less incentive to live in the suburbs).

6

We’re considering merging some services here in Columbia - ambulance service has been merged for some time, and a lot of people are talking about now being the right time to merge the city police with the county sheriff’s office. There would be a lot of upside and a lot of money saved. I think it might actually happen, since (unrelatedly) the police chief just got fired and the time is ripe.

7

We have had examples of cities merging with their suburban areas. Normally it’s the county.

  • Athens–Clarke County, Georgia
  • Augusta–Richmond County, Georgia
  • Butte-Silver Bow, Montana
  • Indianapolis, Indiana
  • Jacksonville-Duval County, Florida
  • Louisville-Jefferson County, Kentucky
  • Nashville-Davidson, Tennessee

Then you have other examples like Carson City, NV which simply annexed the county and is now an independent city

As others have stated, there’s no benefit really these days to small cities giving up their independence. In the old days cities like Chicago could use things like access to drinking water and ability to run a trolley line, to entice small areas over into be annexed. Now this doesn’t work. In fact in Chicago, the inner suburbs will often use it to their advantage. Like cheaper taxes mean business in these suburbs get more business.

8

Nope. Indianapolis did implement a unigov merge, but the municipalities that were absorbed would be hard-pressed to be considered “suburbs”. I’m curious where you got your list from.

9

In Upstate New York, the cities are dying horrible deaths and there is constant discussion, especially in Buffalo and Rochester, of merging something, anything that might help the cities survive.

Some services would make sense to consolidate. There is no need for separate water authorities. Many of the towns in the counties already contract with the sheriff’s office to provide police services.

Everything larger than that is politically impossible.

Race is the hugest factor, although that is heavily interlaced with class and money. Inner cities are predominantly minority, mostly black with many Hispanics. They are desperately poor, with all the problems and baggage that entails. You can’t have good schools without good parents and therefore the school systems are failing visibly. Crime is always an issue, and that involves shootings, drugs, random violence, and petty thefts. Like Detroit, huge areas of Buffalo and Rochester have so many abandoned houses that it would be best to tear down the few remaining ones and turn them into greenlands without people.

Even considered rationally, these would be incredibly overwhelming problems for those not living there to try to take on voluntarily. When the emotional issues of race and class are included, they go from implausible to three steps beyond impossible.

It’s easy to say that just consolidating governments would make a difference. And it’s true that spreading the money more equitably would be a help. But that doesn’t begin to solve the actual problems involved, which are almost entirely due to the lack of decent jobs. Rochester lost 50,000 well-paying secure jobs just from Kodak, one-sixth of the total, plus tens of thousands more from firms like Xerox and Bausch & Lomb. Buffalo, unimaginably, is even worse off from the collapse of the steel and chemicals industries. Nothing can fix these cities until new jobs replace the losses.

And what if those jobs never come back? That’s the nightmare scenario. It is also by far the most likely one. I worked for city government. I’ve been deeply involved in every issue and I’ve continued to follow it closely since. I have never seen an answer to this. None. Not from anybody in the professional governmental world or from think tank or politician or entrepreneur. As of today the situation is hopeless and the future is worse. The only tiny glimmer of hope I can have is to know that the future is always unknowable and that unexpected things happen that cause major change.

Consolidation is charity. It’s insufficient to solve the problem. Forced charity is not charity but theft, and would be seen that way by everyone involved. It might have worked several decades ago. It’s too late now. It gives me no pleasure to say this. I live in the city and I despair.

10

That’s not how it usually works. It’s usually the sum total of all voters, which is why it’s so easy for large cities to just come by an annex unincorporated areas. It’s also why it’s exceptionally rare for pieces of a city to secede. I like to preach how the USA isn’t a democracy, that democracy is only realized at the local level, that its by design to prevent a dictatorship of the masses, but you can see that in some cases, you just can’t avoid it, even at the local level.

One could realize benefits of shared, pooled resources without giving up individual self-rule. We have a regional transportation authority, for example, although the several counties do have to agree to their share of the funding. On other other hand, we’re slaves to Detroit Water, as the city doesn’t wish to participate with the other communities.

As for schools, schools are another local concern. My property taxes support my local schools. Too bad that Detroit schools are so crappy and they have no tax base to improve their school system and the quality of the students that go to their schools. Would we, as suburbs, really want to be part of a system that allows that to happen in the first place? Further, do we want to subsidize their mess? One could argue and develop a model the may suggest its in everyone’s best interest to do so, but as with so many things that have to do with economics, no one will care.

Shared sheriff services are kind of like the water system, though. The contracting community decides on their own to use the sheriff department rather than fund a township department. Presumably they could always allocate funds to form a township department at some future date. Consolidation takes that right to make a decision away.

11

Hmm…

Those are just the ones listed by Markxxx (minus the Montana one, which I couldn’t find info for). If you have info on more examples that might suggest it’s usually done by majority vote on one ballot, that’d help.

12

If this were to happen you would see white flight at light speed for sure. Even a hint that it could happen would empty SE Michigan quickly.

13

This is not true in much of the country. I don’t think it’s true anywhere in the Rust Belt states. New York requires a majority of each individual municipality involved and has for more than a century.

That’s why annexation essentially stopped in the Northeast. As soon as suburban areas became distinct from central cities - which happened much longer ago than people think, well before WWII - they started refusing to be swept up in what they had deliberately left behind.

And there are no unincorporated places in the densely crowded northeast. That’s strictly a Sun Belt issue. Even there many annexations are stopped because individual majorities are needed.

Look at One city’s battle changed state law for some of the issues and passions raised in Colorado and the resulting restriction of annexation powers.

14

Columbus, OH is only the largest city in Ohio because it absorbed all of its suburbs some time ago. From what I understand, the city used the water utilities to force the merger: Basically, they said that the suburbs could stay independent if they wanted, but that the city would no longer sell water to them if they did. It’s not practical for a suburb to put in its own water utility, so they all ended up agreeing.

I’ve heard arguments that it’s been very good for both the city and the former suburbs, and has helped alleviate some of the problems associated with urban sprawl, but I don’t remember the arguments very well, and anyway it’s all somewhat subjective.

15

I admit I don’t have any cites readily handy. I just remember reading various articles pertaining to large, California cities and why sections couldn’t break off, and why it was easy to annex. I’ll look this up. There was a case in Michigan (last year, I think) where a very tiny portion of the city wanted to a break away. I seem to recall it was total majority, and not separate majority, although in this case it was only a single household that wanted to break away, and so there’s not really much distinction. I do feel properly chastened for spouting without a source. Let me do that.

16

From an urban planning standpoint, it seems like a huge, inefficient disaster if the outer suburbs are separate towns and cities that must be negotiated with by public transport operators for funding and route planning (separate of the main city).

I live in Shanghai, which is a single city of 19.2 million people spread about an area of 7,000 sq. km. It is split into 17 districts (and one rural island county). While the area is a factor of 2 smaller than previously mentioned examples in the US, the population is about the same as NY or LA and the diversity between the inner core districts and the suburbs are comparable enough.

I’m a big transport infrastructure geek. The Shanghai Metro started in 1995. In only 15 years, it has gone on to exceed every other metro system in the world in network length, and is probably the second or third most used system in the world now with average ridership of 6.5 million per day. The metro will further double in size in just ten years (primarily in the suburbs), and will eventually stretch out to serve each district.

Now look at the US: what kind of legal and political mess would it take to run a suburban metro line from New Rochelle to Bayonne? How much does all that negotiation add to the cost? Is it practically worth it, twenty years from now, for those separate towns and cities to have had that privilege? Do local governments have too much say over matters that should be regionally / state / nationally planned?

It seems US cities have gotten to the point where this fractured polity or ideology is choking much needed sustainable urban development. Would it be more practical to treat certain topics like urban/suburban infrastructure around a city as tasks that are larger than any one particular town (like with interstate highways under the federal government or the military) and mandate that they require a more centralized and streamlined regional authority to handle (perhaps with the authority to levy taxes and impose eminent domain)?

I think about the American commute to work, and how many separate towns or municipalities that need to be driven through. How many mayors or councils had to be negotiated with and appeased (and how many inefficiencies introduced) to put that stretch of road through? How many different local governments need to carefully coordinate with each other to make a relatively simple stretch of road consistent and useful?

Perhaps giving separate towns such autonomy over all of their development made more practical sense when one both lived and worked in that town, and when it had it’s own independent sense of community that was separate from other nearby cities. But now with faster cheap transport, we frequently work and shop in different towns at the drop of a hat. I feel the idea of picking one place to live and one place to shop and one place to work - all with different laws, taxes, agendas - is some sort of inefficient legal loophole only available to those with the means who can afford to live far enough away from work that they can live under different laws.

Having certain suburbs “opt-out” from financing much needed infrastructure for the the city is like giving people the right to “opt-out” of funding the military because they don’t feel it’s a good use of money or is needed.

17

Keep in mind that things are potentially different in every state, but in my state (Michigan) cities aren’t the only political entity with input. There are also townships (where cities haven’t occupied them), counties (consisting of cities and townships), and then the state. For schooling in particular, there are school districts that don’t necessarily follow any type of PLSS subdivisions. So, it’s not really the disaster that you imagine. If you further consider that certain areas (such as mine) aren’t highly dependant on public transit, then the disaster is even lessened.

Local governments have say over what they spend their own money on. If the county wants to widen and pave a road, the city may welcome that since it will be county funds. If the state wants to install a new freeway using state and federal funds, then cities and counties can cooperate or try to block it. However in this latter case, even individuals can try to block it, since presumably individuals are losing land. The USA is a huge frikkin’ country; there’s very little federal planning on the local level.

Just curious as to what evidence you see of this choking occuring, as I’m not intimately familiar with any problems outside of my own area.

[/quote]
Having certain suburbs “opt-out” from financing much needed infrastructure for the the city is like giving people the right to “opt-out” of funding the military because they don’t feel it’s a good use of money or is needed.
[/QUOTE]

How would you define “the city” in, for example, SE Michigan? Detroit? Ha! If it were nuked tomorrow the only thing we’d miss is access to the tunnel and the bridge. There’s no city infrastructure that anyone requires other than (a) water (which we pay through the nose for, (b) highways, which aren’t city-funded; (c) the bridge, which is privately owned.

18

Exactly - the poster child for what you describe would be Toronto.

The Ontario government especially (Canadian provinces in general) have a lot more leeway to avoid public opinion than in the USA. A majority in the government is essentially a dictatorship until the next election; and with an appointed “municipal board” that must approve every bylaw the cities pass, the province has an effective veto over what city politicians do. The old maxim is that the public has a 2-year memory, and a majority government does not need to call an election for 5 years, so they get distasteful but ideological jobs done at the beginning of their term.

Toronto went from being 13 (IIRC) separate municiplaities (some very tiny) to a “federation” like NYC where they were ruled by a metro council (a select number of councillors from each “borough”); over the years the boroughs were reduced to 7 then eliminated entirely. By now, the area is so large that it still has the same problem with places like Mississauga and Oshawa on the outskirts.

To be fair, Toronto never had the level of “inner city decay” that US cities did; downtown was always vibrant and safe. The benefits like central planning of roads and transit were obvious and helped. Now, the problem is that the Toronto Transit Commission and such bodies do not reach far enough. One solution is to put in place (appointed) commissions empowered (debatable) to coordinate such services between the municiplaities, much like the PATH in NYC.

Also - politics, as usual, plays a role. The inner city council was seen as too radical by the conservative governments elected mainly by the more rural rest of the province. Plus, you don’t want to give a rival government politician too much of a platform to challenge you, so the city council was often kneecapped. (IIRC, Margaret Thatcher did the same to the city councils of UK).

19

Gotten to the point? We got to this point about 50 years ago. Every planner in the country knew it and every one commented on it. (Says one who had to read far too many of those comments.)

The question has always been what to do about a problem that every person is aware of.

There are no politically feasible answers in general. Local conditions have allowed some consolidations, as in Markxxx’s list, but even governmental consolidations don’t begin to touch the larger issue of development, transportation, housing creation, and race/class/creed. And poverty. Growing cities - growing in population and wealth - have an entirely different set of possibilities open to them from stagnant or declining cities. They’re the ones who need the most help and can do the least. The federal government used to supply more aid to cities but the Reagan administration made a deliberate policy of stopping that aid, which disproportionally helped Democrat-controlled areas. No president since has wanted or been able to reverse that, not even with the stimulus funds.

It might reach a point where the situation grows so bad that desperation finally allows for radical change. That will not be pleasant to live through. And no one knows what radical changes might work at that point.

In any case, from what I’ve read about urban planning in China - and it’s a fascinating read - very little of what happens there can be transferred to the U.S. Our government and the expectations of business and the public are in a different universe.