Where do cities come from?

Jenn Henry

Cities don’t come ready made.

Municipal boundary lines are made by three major legal processes: incorporation, secession (or detachment), and annexation. California is one place where city boundary politics come into clear view. After World War II, California–especially Southern California–experienced a massive population boom. Cities sprung up rapidly, sometimes without coordination. Jurisdictions overlapped.
In the 60s, parts of California experienced “annexation wars” in which adjacent cities jockeyed for control of land. In the last six decades, California has passed a series of laws to make city boundaries more orderly, discourage urban sprawl, and preserve agricultural land. These laws include that annexation (adding territory to an existing city) and incorporation (creating a new city) are processes controlled by each county’s Local Agency Formation Commission (“LAFCO”). City boundaries can be intensely political.

So political that Neal Broverman of Curbed LA recently compared Calabasas to a “nineteenth-century European colonial power” in an article about Calabasas’s plans for annexing territory. Annexing means tax revenue for cities and tax liability for residents. Several cities southeast of Los Angeles (including Bell of corruption fame) had engaged in talks about a potential merge of city jurisdictions.

City boundaries also mean voters and votes, as well as municipal services — or lack thereof. In fact, one Los Angeles neighborhood hoped to leave Los Angeles and join the City of Beverly Hills.

The streets have fewer potholes on the other side?

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Image courtesy Konrad Summers.

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