more on how political geography affects life

[calimac]

This article on the tiny municipalities of St. Louis County, Missouri, and how they feed off traffic tickets and fines imposed on their poor black residents. You have to have a street map of the area handy really to appreciate this, and one which shows municipal boundaries, so Google maps is out: some of these municipalities are literally only two blocks long.

If there weren't so many tiny feudal realms, the article concludes, there wouldn't be so much trouble. But not none, because Ferguson, where the troubled headlines have been, is actually a sizable town. Some of the smallest ones are almost entirely black, which Ferguson is not, but there can still be racial tension, because while the elected officials may be black, the cops and city attorneys often aren't.

I'm fascinated by these tiny cities, because I wonder why they're there, and because we don't have them in California. There are only a few small-population incorporated cities in our urban areas, almost all in LA. But they're not so geographically tiny, and rather than having poor tax bases, they're either industrial areas or wealthy suburbs that incorporated to preserve high tax bases from the adjacent larger, poorer suburbs.

I first became aware of tiny cities when I visited my cousin in the Kansas suburbs of KC and discovered that she lived in an all-residential municipality that was ten short blocks in one direction and two long blocks in the other, and that there were two even tinier ones right next to it. What the hey? I subsequently learned from maps that there were quite a few of the same kind around Louisville, Kentucky, and the most of all outside St. Louis (as well as a few, here and there, around some other cities, notably Denver). This article explains why they're there, and what harm their presence does.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

It took a while to get to that; at least, if I'm understanding correctly that the state has few restrictions on incorporation as a new municipal government, and that gave white flight an unusual form.

The current pattern looks not so much like anything that was intended back in those days, as like something that grew up by people taking advantage of an existing system that was capable of being exploited. The result looks on one hand kind of feudal and on the other like classical rent-seeking.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Racial segregation as an aim, perhaps?

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Phrased abstractly, yes. But at the level of actual process, there seems to be a world of difference between a tiny municipality inhabited entirely by moderately well off white people using the municipal government to zone to exclude black people, and a tiny municipality inhabited overwhelmingly by much less well off black people with a municipal government using them as a source of revenue through abusive law enforcement. The people who set up the one could hardly have been envisioning the other.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Quite specifically so. Suburban subdivisions would incorporate themselves so that they could zone as single-family housing to keep housing projects from being built there as blacks moved westward. That would not, however, prevent some blacks from buying houses, and then "white flight" would begin. They'd move further west and start over with another town. Apparently there's been two major waves of this.