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I don't think it makes a huge difference when you compare like to like. I've owned houses in the same price range in three different states in the Midwest. I had the same insurance house/car from the same company in all three. All the towns were small and auto dependent. All had a hospital, doctors, restaurants, lawyers, movie theater and annual events. From my personal experience the difference was not as much in the state income tax, or the price of a gallon of gas, as it is in health standards and education across the board.
Twenty three of Top 25 Hospitals in the United States are in California or on the East Coast. There ae only two in the Midwest: Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and Barnes-Jewish in St.Louis. With 35 years of experience I think rural health care is not very good anywhere in America. States with a larger population seem to fair better than their low population, low income neighbors.
The health care, unemployment and poverty are costly to all states. Some states have more roads and bridges. Some states have more schools. Some states offer more services to handicap children and seniors. Some states have more prisons. Some states generate less income from exports. Some states have weather that is more harsh. Some states experience a greater incidence of natural disasters. Someone pays for these things. It isn't the insurance companies that post billion dollar quarters, and it isn't the state legislatures. They burden falls on mom and dad.
It depends on the average income a person makes. If there are states with high incomes, those places would be expensive. The states with lower incomes are more affordable.
Compared to most Northern cities, that is relatively recent. I can't think of any city in NY State that has annexed anything after WW2, if not earlier. My point is that it has more land to work with, comparably speaking. It is good that they are taking advantage of that now.
Technically, Indianapolis didn't annex Marion County, but consolidated - a merger between the city, county, and several smaller municipal governments within the county. A few municipalities - like Beech Grove and Speedway - decided to not participate. When the consolidation took effect, it fixed the city limits where they are presently, and that will be it for land area expansion.
At least two cities in upstate NY (Buffalo and Syracuse) studied the idea of city/county consolidations at some point in the 1960s or 70s and decided for whatever reason to not pursue it. It's still a legal procedure in NY State; technically NYC is a consolidated city, or 5 consolidated cities merged into a larger entity.
Elsewhere in the Northeast, Nantucket and Philadelphia are both consolidated city-county governments. Pittsburgh has studied it, and may pursue it. Given Harrisburg's recent bankruptcy, I would bet that it's an idea that gets some consideration there as well.
Technically, Indianapolis didn't annex Marion County, but consolidated - a merger between the city, county, and several smaller municipal governments within the county. A few municipalities - like Beech Grove and Speedway - decided to not participate. When the consolidation took effect, it fixed the city limits where they are presently, and that will be it for land area expansion.
At least two cities in upstate NY (Buffalo and Syracuse) studied the idea of city/county consolidations at some point in the 1960s or 70s and decided for whatever reason to not pursue it. It's still a legal procedure in NY State; technically NYC is a consolidated city, or 5 consolidated cities merged into a larger entity.
Elsewhere in the Northeast, Nantucket and Philadelphia are both consolidated city-county governments. Pittsburgh has studied it, and may pursue it. Given Harrisburg's recent bankruptcy, I would bet that it's an idea that gets some consideration there as well.
Consolidation makes a city better. simple as that.
well use Indianapolis as an example.
#1 in Indianapolis there is less *government waste* as both the country and city governments are merged you are able to trim some *fat* so to speak.
#2 it allows for more federal funding. The Urban Transformation of Indianapolis could NOT have happened without Richard Lugars Unigov consolidation.
#3 it allows for a lower tax rate and cost of living. Chicago is a good example of insane taxes from a city that is not consolidated. Crook County and Chicago both charge different and high tax rates and have very wasteful governments. hence why property taxes and cigarette taxes and just taxes in general in Chi-Town are going up. Government waste=higher taxes. Hence why youll drop 30% in your cost of living and taxes if you move from Chicago to Indianapolis.
#4 it also allows for a city to control suburbanization and White Flight. Population loss doesnt become an issue when you consolidate with a city-county and it helps again get federal funding to gentrify areas of your city. Fountain Square and the Near East Side legacy project from Super Bowl 46 are some examples in Indy. formally bad neighborhoods that are on the rise and are a work in progress.
Finally #5 Consolidation allows for more people to live in the city but have a suburban lifestyle. so more reprensentation in your city and more people to vote and give opinions etc.
Consolidation makes a city better. simple as that.
well use Indianapolis as an example.
#1 in Indianapolis there is less *government waste* as both the country and city governments are merged you are able to trim some *fat* so to speak.
#2 it allows for more federal funding. The Urban Transformation of Indianapolis could NOT have happened without Richard Lugars Unigov consolidation.
#3 it allows for a lower tax rate and cost of living. Chicago is a good example of insane taxes from a city that is not consolidated. Crook County and Chicago both charge different and high tax rates and have very wasteful governments. hence why property taxes and cigarette taxes and just taxes in general in Chi-Town are going up. Government waste=higher taxes. Hence why youll drop 30% in your cost of living and taxes if you move from Chicago to Indianapolis.
#4 it also allows for a city to control suburbanization and White Flight. Population loss doesnt become an issue when you consolidate with a city-county and it helps again get federal funding to gentrify areas of your city. Fountain Square and the Near East Side legacy project from Super Bowl 46 are some examples in Indy. formally bad neighborhoods that are on the rise and are a work in progress.
Finally #5 Consolidation allows for more people to live in the city but have a suburban lifestyle. so more reprensentation in your city and more people to vote and give opinions etc.
It depends. For instance, I believe that Richmond VA consolidated at one point and experienced White Flight. I think with #5, I wonder if consolidation could hurt representation in terms of say certain ethnic/racial groups, depending on the area. There are other issues/aspects that could be mentioned as well.
It depends. For instance, I believe that Richmond VA consolidated at one point and experienced White Flight. I think with #5, I wonder if consolidation could hurt representation in terms of say certain ethnic/racial groups, depending on the area. There are other issues/aspects that could be mentioned as well.
For Detroit, consolidation has been contemplated with Wayne County. Though of course, Detroit is majority black city and most of the suburbs within the same county are majority white. Though when you look at the numbers, it's not really that large of a gap. Wayne County is 49% white and 40% black (out of 1.8 million). Don't know if any other county in the country has a more even percentage, but that seems pretty good to me. I wonder how many people would see it that way. A lot of people have a lot of pride in being separate from the city of Detroit without having to deal with the same problems. However, much of the county hasn't been growing save for the very exurban areas. The aging of the inner-ring suburbs are starting to show through and it'll be interesting to see what happens as time goes on.
But I could see how Broad's other 4 points could benefit Detroit.
It depends. For instance, I believe that Richmond VA consolidated at one point and experienced White Flight. I think with #5, I wonder if consolidation could hurt representation in terms of say certain ethnic/racial groups, depending on the area. There are other issues/aspects that could be mentioned as well.
Actually Richmond never consolidated. There was a vote, in 1961, to consolidate the independent city of Richmond with neighboring Henrico County, but the referendum failed.
In Virginia, several cities were created between 1950 and 1972 through city/county consolidations - Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Suffolk, Hampton and Newport News. When the consolidation was approved by voters and then the legislature, they then became independent cities (like Baltimore, St Louis, or Carson Citiy), and the pre-exiting county became extinct. This is a quirk of Virginia law - VA has counties, towns (which are part of the county in which they are incorporated), and cities (which are considered independent of surrounding counties and are regarded by the US census bureau both as cities, and as county-equivalents).
Cities that have held referenda on consolidation, and had the vote fail would include Sacramento, Oakland CA, Albuquerque, Des Moines, St Louis city/St Louis county, Pensacola, Tampa, Tallahassee, Charleston SC, Wilmington NC, Charlotte, Durham NC, Asheville NC, Roanoke VA, Fairbanks AK, Frankfort KY, Syracuse, Memphis, Fort Wayne, Evansville, Richmond VA, Albany GA, Knoxville, Kingsport TN, and a few others.
Cities that have studied the idea, but rejected the idea before it came to a vote would include San Diego and Buffalo.
Cities that have successfully consolidated between the 1890s and now would include Jacksonville, Athens GA, Augusta GA, Cussetta GA, New Orleans, Philadelphia, NYC, Indianapolis, Louisville, Lexington KY, Kansas City KS, Tribune KS, Butte MT, Anaconda MT, Nashville TN, Lynchburg TN, Juneau, Anchorage, Sitka, Honolulu, San Francisco, Camden (village)/Camden County NC, and several others.
Cities that have partial consolidation include Charlotte, Miami, Lafayette LA, Baton Rouge, Houma LA, Boston, and Syracuse - these are cities where some services like police, fire, water/sewer, or schools are provided by a single countywide municipal entity, but individual municipalities within the county retain a certain degree of autonomy with others. In North Carolina (for example), roughly 90 out of 100 counties have consolidated city/county school districts, and the state has generally encouraged as much consolidation as possible - the state would prefer to deal with the smallest number of municipalities within the state as possible (in the early 1970s, NC retired the charters and de-incorporated about a dozen small municipalities around the state who were technically incorporated, but had not shown any evidence of any active municipal/governmental activity in at least a decade, for similar reasons).
In many of those consolidation votes that did not pass, one concern WAS the dilution of minority voting strength. In others suburban voters balked at taking on what were perceived to be 'urban' problems.
Most consolidations that passed did so for a handful of specific reasons:
Gross duplication of services to a degree that led to massive corruption, massive financial waste, or overall ineptitude in multiple individual municipalities, which led to voters viewing the theoretical improvement in streamlined service provision as a greater improvement than the loss in small, local municipal government, which is something that is *usually* favored by voters. The other instance of consolidation votes that passed with ease were consolidation efforts in rural counties, where there may only be one (or no) incorporated municipalities and an otherwise sparse population: Camden County, NC; Tribune, Kansas; Georgetown, Georgia; Lynchburg, Tennessee.
^ Great post, as I did mix up consolidation with annexation, which has occurred in Richmond. I believe in Syracuse, the only thing that is consolidated is the water district. Talk of the law enforcement agencies in the county outside of Syracuse PD, has been discussed and has occurred to some degree. Even school districts, as well as town/village have been discussed. Actually, the town and village of Seneca Falls just consolidated on New Years Day of this year.
^ Great post, as I did mix up consolidation with annexation, which has occurred in Richmond. I believe in Syracuse, the only thing that is consolidated is the water district. Talk of the law enforcement agencies in the county outside of Syracuse PD, has been discussed and has occurred to some degree. Even school districts, as well as town/village have been discussed. Actually, the town and village of Seneca Falls just consolidated on New Years Day of this year.
There have been at least a few town/village/city consolidations in upstate NY - Rome (I believe) consolidated the city and town, into an 'urban' district and 'rural' district with different tax rates (and services) under a unified government.
I know the concept of consolidation was pretty much born in the Northeast more than a century ago, then shifted to the South, Midwest, and West after WWII, and has somewhat come full circle - there haven't been many attempts at full consolidations in the N.E. in recent decades, but it's again on the radar, and several places have contemplated it as one of many possible solutions to issues specific to the region. The newspaper in Cleveland (for example) did a very extensive independent study of the costs/benefits of consolidating Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, though no municipal action was taken.
And the Louisville consolidation has been closely watched by others - specifically Buffalo and Pittsburgh - as a good template for how the process might best proceed in Northeastern states, especially in a place like Pittsburgh, where there are literally hundreds of different types/tiers of municipalities in one county, accompanied by tremendous amounts of service duplication. This actually also applies equally to some Southern states like South Carolina where annexation is EXTREMELY difficult (unlike its' neighbor to the north), and myriad municipalities (some with rather loosely defined boundaries) and urban service districts overlap in all of SC's urban counties. This would be especially important in SC, where municipalities don't have zoning or planning authority beyond their borders, and are unable to expand their borders, which sets the stage for nightmare levels of sprawl in the fastest growing urban areas, or urban blight and plummeting populations (and shrinking tax revenues) in urban areas that aren't experiencing significant growth.
Georgia also stands out as a state in which annexation has become de facto impossible, but city/county consolidation has become quite easy, so there has been a wave of (a) city/county consolidations, or (b) countywide municipalizations (specifically in Atlanta/Fulton County) as a way of sidestepping annexation laws that are very punitive to municipalities.
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