There’s a historic trend in the US where incorporated cities (which often carry with them increased tax) are supposed to cover only the actual urban area and not the surrounding countryside. Considering that we have 50 states and all of them have the sovereign right to divvy up local government as they see fit, we have a lot of variation. Here in Virginia, the City of Virginia Beach includes quite a bit of rural countryside that is legally part of the city (so City Police have jurisdiction, kids go to City Schools, etc.), while the County of Arlington is mostly urban city streets but is completely unincorporated. But essentially, local borders are a game and politicians may want to add that land or dump that land for purposes other than making the most elegant map or best serving citizens.
In the United States, the only unchanging borders are the state borders (state borders may change, but it is quite rare these days for there to be significant changes in state borders).
And a lot of the system developed during a period when “uninhabited” land was being settled by whites. People would move in to an area that was governed as part of a large, unincorporated territory. As time went on and population densities increased, the areas with population would be cut off into smaller jurisdictions. As the densities became high enough to constitute urban areas, they became “incorporated” with a full municipal government. So even now, as a settlement grows, it may be up to the residents themselves to decide what kind of government they want – a full municipal government, or a bare-bones county/township government.
So for any single state, you can look at historical maps that start with a handful of large counties, which were subsequently subdivided as the population grew.
Now, the exact process for how this works differs on a state-by-state basis, but even now something like this process continues throughout most of the country.
Speaking very generally, a state is divided into counties. County governments are typically smaller and provide relatively few services and taxes are low. Counties may be further subdivided (in Ohio, these unincorporated subdivisions are called “townships.”).
If an urban spot starts developing in a township, then at some point, the residents of that spot may seek to become an incorporated municipality (in Ohio, a “village,” which automatically becomes a “city” when it reaches a certain population).
Most of the time, the incorporated municipality remains part of the surrounding county (in some states, like Virginia, cities and counties are separate jurisdictions), but becomes separated from the surrounding township (and sometimes it remains part of the surrounding township). As the area becomes more and more urbanized, the incorporated municipality can continue to swallow up surrounding unincorporated areas.
Taxes may be levied at several levels (income tax, sales tax, and property tax) – state, county, township, municipality. Generally speaking, municipality taxes are higher than county and township taxes, to pay for more extensive police, fire, emergency, water, power, sewage, garbage, etc., services, than is available in unincorporated areas.
To clarify, when I said “you pay your taxes to the district (etc) council”, I meant the “council tax”, which is based on the value of your property and pays for council services, rubbish collection, street maintenance, police etc. Income and sales tax are collected at the national level and don’t vary between council areas. Water/sewage and power are privatised so you pay those directly to the private companies.
Not correct. Champaign and Urbana could merge and in fact voted on the matter twice, once in the 1950’s and once in 1978, when I was a student there. Both cities rejected the merger both times.
Illinois cities can have holes. The cities of Norridge and Harwood Heights together form a large hole in Chicago. The only requirement in state law is that cities must be contiguous, which is why Chicago had to annex a block-wide strip between Rosemont and Schiller Park in order to annex O’Hare.
Well, in the United States, everyone pays federal income tax and payroll taxes (social security, Medicare, etc.). That’s the only blanket statement you can make. People might pay state income, sales, or property tax. They might pay county sales tax. They might pay municipal income, sales, or property tax. They might pay township property tax.
It just depends on what jurisdictions you live in and what taxes have been instituted in those jurisdictions.
Trash collection, fire/ambulance services, water, sewage, and power might be provided by government services or by private services (and some fire/ambulance services are run by volunteers). Again, it all depends on where you live. There is no uniformity. (Indeed, in some places, liquor can be purchased only from the government. And there are some “dry” jurisdictions, where you can’t buy any alcoholic beverages at all.)
Stockton is full of County holes, and here the wishes of the residents are very much relevant. It’s only been in the last ten years that the City had an ordinance stating that if we ran sewer or water lines out to new development, that development would automatically become part of the city whenever the city wished it to.
That’s not going to help the old holes, but it should minimize the number of new ones. Sometimes, someone in the City will start looking at the holes and thinking of the possibilities. It doesn’t help that some of those holes include influential people and that the County supports these areas staying strictly County as long as they prefer it.
The comments about the cost of annexation are apt. San Joaquin County does not require streets to have sidewalks or storm drains. The City of Stockton does. So when Stockton annexes an area, the city will eventually have to reconstruct the streets to include sidewalks and storm drains. And if the added storm drains would overclock the existing system, drainage basins and pump stations will need to be added. A million dollars would cover about four blocks of street reconstruction, maybe five if we got lucky.
Not that the City has a deadline to install the improvements. But it would be foolish to annex an area when there was no possibility of funding the transition for more than ten years. People get testy when they pay increased property assessments for years and still don’t have their sidewalks.
ETA: Acsenray, don’t forget assessment districts. Those can be any shape or size, voluntary or involuntary. The assessment gets collected with your property taxes. They can fund additional streetlights, levees, school improvements, just about anything.
I’ve actually never heard of assessment districts. So that’s another thing to add to the table in some states. Another thing is school districts, which in some states are completely unrelated to other kinds of jurisdictions. In Ohio for example school district boundaries do not necessarily follow county, township, or municipal boundaries exactly.
Annexation in Ohio has gotten progressively more difficult since the mid-20th century. When Columbus first started moving outwards, it was able to annex an entire township (Marion Township) and a couple of villages (East Columbus and Hanford, which I think were both near Bexley), so there aren’t many holes in the older parts of the city. (The villages may have gone willingly, but I read once that Marion Township didn’t know what was happening before it hit them.)
If the school was there before the city arrived, then it might have just been that the school district that runs the school didn’t want the land in the city for some reason. (I don’t know if school districts are taxed or not. They’re separate entities from cities, though, so the city limits don’t usually matter. The Columbus City School District has entirely different boundaries from the City of Columbus, although some strange agreement, unique in the state, means that land in Franklin County annexed since the early 90s gets moved into the Columbus district, so the Columbus school district has weird little islands far away from the main area. There are still huge areas of Columbus that have a suburban-sounding school district like Westerville or Dublin or Hilliard.)
Same in California. For example, the New Haven Unified School District covers all of Union City and a little piece of Hayward.
I just looked at Stockton on Google Maps and I see what you mean. There’s a tiny hole right here comprising most of Wright Avenue. I had a look on Street View to see if there was any difference, and sure enough the sidewalk runs out pretty much right on the boundary. (Scroll forward a couple of steps from that view.) Weird.
As others have said, this will vary state-to-state – and in Florida, due to the vagaries of county government, from county-to-county as well. My previous house was on a street where the city had annexed most of the properties, except mine and the house on either side.
There was no good reason for the residents to allow annexation; the only service we weren’t being provided by the city was garbage collection, and since we were the only such houses on the block, the garbage men mostly didn’t know any better and picked up our garbage anyway. We paid the county for our water, and county property taxes, so it was cheaper for us to stay outside the city.
This is an issue in Florida, and here is a good journal article outlining why.
The Rivendale School District is an interstate body, covering towns in NH and VT. There’s no end of oddball setups.
When I worked for the City of Rochester, I once had a project that required showing that we had a good title to every city-owned park or park-like area. 107 of them. That meant two big jobs: one, figuring out what exactly the boundaries were; and two, going back into 19th century City Council records to see if and when the transactions were recorded.
As anybody who works with titles knows - and which I had to learn - older titles were often vague and imprecise and sometimes plain inaccurate. They really did record a plot of land as starting from the big elm tree and proceeding six chains north by northeast. Street names changed over time. In fact, streets appeared and disappeared. Numbering systems changed. Plots were divided and subdivided and bought and merged. The earliest parks had no legal history at all: they were open areas when the city incorporated in 1834, like proverbial village commons areas. Later ones might be mentioned with a name but no boundaries.
In brief, cities grow one parcel at a time. And the slightest irregularly in recording one means that every other one becomes progressively more off. This is true even in the cities that were made out of the Northwest Territories, which unlike the east, were surveyed and gridded before selling the land. In reality, the surveys of the early 19th century just weren’t good enough to achieve perfect results, especially if the land was uneven or riddled with waterways.
And when cities grew, getting the area incorporated precisely accurate to the last plot of land was a time-consuming chore that often got fudged. Boundaries didn’t necessarily match or butt perfectly up against one another, and some land got included or not included that wasn’t in anybody’s mind when they looked at it across ten miles.
I found the history aspects of that project to be fascinating. The fussy minutiae of getting every last inch of boundary footage correct drove me crazy and I didn’t have the time or expertise to handle it. We got down to that level of detail only when absolutely necessary, like when we found that people had built their houses across a park boundary line. And even those got shuffled off to the lawyers.
But I completely understand why city borders can look like fractal art. People didn’t look at the big picture. Still don’t. It’s always piece by piece.
Every state is different but in a lot of states, cities have the right to annex land from neighboring counties. The cities aren’t interested in keeping things nice and neat, they are interested in drawing in the neighboring areas that bring in the most money and they aren’t iterested in areas that require services but don’t provide cash. Some cities annex only the road surface between itself and some area they want, so the city might be bar-bell shaped.
An interesting example. Virginia is the only state with independent cities, cities that are NOT part of any county. In every other state, a city is part of the county (or similar) it is in. The interesting thing about Virginia Beach is that it used to be a county and was incorporated into the city in the '60s as part of the battle over segregation. In order to prevent neighboring Norfolk (mostly black) from annexing parts of old Princess Anne county (mostly white) and then bussing the students there, the tiny city of Virginia Beach just took over the whole damned county.
Almost true. There are 42 independent cities. Virginia has 39. The other three are Baltimore, Maryland, St. Louis, Missouri, and Carson City, Nevada.
In my area there is the weird case of Metuchen. It is the hole in the donut that is Edison NJ. Edison is a township of 100,000 with the totally independent borough of Metuchen in the middle, population 13,000.
Los Angeles has a whole bunch of cities within it’s borders. I have no idea how that works.
That’s a list of cities in Los Angeles County, one of which is the City of Los Angeles. There’s nothing unusual about that.
But Los Angeles itself is a very bizarre shape, with holes in and a skinny southward extension to San Pedro.
If this were true, Piedmont would be part of Oakland.
Shouldn’t that list include New York, which covers multiple counties, and San Francisco, which is legally a city and a county?