An American Suburb, 2018

[bnk]

Originally Posted by dc_denizen

This nice house in dolton would be worth 1.7 million in Vancouver and 900k in scarborough:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1.../4243222_zpid/

Maybe we could entice some fed up ontarians to live to inner suburban cook county. The bus service might be slightly less frequent, but there is much more diversity (dolton is 80% black) and the price to income ratio is fantastic

That's insane prices. The house is probably 10K over priced on Zillow in Dolton. There are tons of houses under 100K there. https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sal...ct/13_zm/1_fr/

Check out this 6 bedroom home. I have no idea how they fit 6 bedrooms in there. Could have been a Typo. Perfect for the Hispanic expanded family. Likely was a white steel workers house with a large family, built in 1959. You don't see too many more of those blue collar jobs that could support a family with the man in the house working in a steel mill having a large family. Hopefully this family got dad to retirement age and the kids are doing well and educated and living elsewhere now. \

BTW They still make a hell of a lot of steel in the area [ The largest Steel mill in the USA is in the area, NW Indiana, but the number of workers needed are almost 1/10th of what they need to produce even more metric production. Dolton is not convenient to Chicago via transit. Old Dolton residents worked in the Mills and factories within 15 miles. Obviously lots of those jobs are not coming back.

Some as inexpensive as a new car.


Everything is relative though.


In Detroit that house would be 40K.

[llamaorama]

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

Why don't Chicago and Cook County merge? In fact, I believe the US would greatly benefit turning counties into the last tier of administration. It would eliminate overlapping in several areas, saving lots of money.

There is nothing preventing cities and counties from merging voluntarily, in fact there are many examples of this happening. Denver, Indianapolis, and a number of smaller cities in the state of Virginia merged with their counties.

Forcing places to do this would be a very bad idea, however. The legal powers, scope, and responsibilities of county government varies by state. In Texas, we have counties with a few hundred people and the traditional role of county government is more limited than municipal government. It needs to be considered on a case by case basis whether or not consolidation makes sense.

Usually when counties and cities merge, the boundaries of the city does not grow. Instead county functions are just dissolved into the city government, eliminating a redundant layer of government. This is probably a better approach than the reverse, where cities are dissolved into a county. The remainder of the county usually stays behind. This is how Denver is. The actual city and county of Denver is relatively small compared to its metro area, and its suburbs are still part of Arapaho county, etc.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by 10023

The problem is that the areas that would be beneficial for Chicago to annex don’t want to be annexed, and the ones that would want to be annexed would be a drain on public services. So it’s a non-starter unless the state forces amalgamation somehow, which isn’t going to happen.

This is the crux of the issue. Why would desirable Chicago suburbs (or Chicago proper) volunteer for higher taxes and worse services, even if it were (arguably) for the region's overall benefit?

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Crawford

This is the crux of the issue. Why would desirable Chicago suburbs (or Chicago proper) volunteer for higher taxes and worse services, even if it were (arguably) for the region's overall benefit?

Would Chicago proper really have a problem with it? This actually used to be the rule of thumb in the 19th and early 20th century.

The problem is that in the early 20th century most statehouses in the Midwest made it unreasonably hard to consolidate municipalities once it made sense to do so. This is why there are places like Highland Park, MI and Hamtramck, MI, that are completely surrounded by the city that they should've merged with a century ago.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Would Chicago proper really have a problem with it?

yes. the city of chicago is not going to willingly take on even more deeply struggling communities than the ones it already has to deal with on the south and west sides.

it probably should, but it would only work with some kind of chicago-cook county merger so that chicago got the good along with the bad.

but a city-county meger is NOT going to be happening in any of out lifetimes. there are way too many entrenched interests in the status quo to ever allow that to happen.

the only realistic governmental restructuring that could possibly aid a place like dolton would be a merger with nearby similarly struggling burbs to consolidate services.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

yes. the city of chicago is not going to willingly take on even more deeply struggling communities than the ones it already has to deal with on the south and west sides.

it probably should, but it would only work with some kind of chicago-cook county merger so that chicago got the good along with the bad.

but a city-county meger is NOT going to be happening in any of out lifetimes. there are way too many entrenched interests to ever allow that to happen.

the only realistic governmental restructuring that could possibly aid a place like dolton would be a merger with nearby similarly struggling burbs to consolidate services.

With 2020 coming up, Chicago should not be so dismissive of ways to boost its population.

According to Wikipedia, income stats for Dolton are nearly the same for Chicago as a whole. So it's not exactly like Dolton would just be a leech on services.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

With 2020 coming up, Chicago should not be so dismissive of ways to boost its population.

it's not going to happen.

you can want to happen.

we can even agree that it would be good for it to happen.



but it's not going to happen.

[lio45]

Why would Dolton need to merge with other communities to start sharing services with them? I know of various examples (here in Quebec) of several municipalities pooling their resources sharing police services and also fire dept services, with official names like "Intermunicipal Police Corps of X".

(The alternative for those municipalities which are too small to each have their own police force would be to use the provincial police and get billed for it.)

[10023]

Originally Posted by dc_denizen

This nice house in dolton would be worth 1.7 million in Vancouver and 900k in scarborough:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1.../4243222_zpid/

Maybe we could entice some fed up ontarians to live to inner suburban cook county. The bus service might be slightly less frequent, but there is much more diversity (dolton is 80% black) and the price to income ratio is fantastic

Sorry to dig up an early post, but the fact that it’s 80% black means that it’s not very diverse at all.

What’s the foreign born population? How many speak another language at home? Are there people from different socioeconomic strata?

Diversity doesn’t mean a higher percentage of non-white people. It means lots of different kinds of people (even lots of different kinds of white people).

[Doady]

It's odd that someone would think that an extremely segregated community is more diverse. Segregation is the opposite of diversity.

[Emprise du Lion]

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

Why don't Chicago and Cook County merge? In fact, I believe the US would greatly benefit turning counties into the last tier of administration. It would eliminate overlapping in several areas, saving lots of money.

Because everyone wants their own fiefdom, and currently there's no reason for the suburbs in Cook County that are doing well to want to become Chicago. Even Norridge and Harwood Heights, which are both surrounded by the city and each other on all sides, don't want to join Chicago. The only suburbs that might be open to joining are the struggling ones, which Chicago wouldn't want to be a drain on its own resources.

This isn't a Chicago only thing though. St. Louis County is in desperate need of consolidation (approximately 90 municipalities in a county of 1 million that only covers 523 SQ miles), and they don't even want St. Louis City to be able to rejoin the county as a mere municipality.

[Yuri]

Maybe a federal law should be enacted to end those multiple layers of administration. Republicans always talk about efficiency, a less expensive public sector and that alone would save hundreds of billions. 50 states and 3,000 counties/cities. That's enough.

And poor and rich communities should live under the same jurisdiction. That's how you finance improvements.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

Maybe a federal law should be enacted to end those multiple layers of administration.

maybe it should, but it's a complete non-starter.

we might as well wish for rainbow colored unicorns who shit gold coins out of their ass to come and save us.


and conservatives also tend to be pro states right on many (though certainly not all) issues, and my guess is that municipal incorporation law would be seen as something that is absolutely best handled at the state level by most conservatives.

[JManc]

Federal law has no jurisdiction in matters of local governments (except for DC) and that's solely left up to the states. Cities and counties exist at the pleasure of their respective state governments.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

Maybe a federal law should be enacted to end those multiple layers of administration. Republicans always talk about efficiency, a less expensive public sector and that alone would save hundreds of billions. 50 states and 3,000 counties/cities. That's enough.

While the multiple layers are a problem, that isn't the central issue. A consolidated Dolton would still be undesirable.

Dolton is troubled because it's a poor, black municipality on the undesirable side of town, not because it's too small, with duplicative services. If Dolton were on the North Side, or not 80% black, the issues would be mostly solved.

[Yuri]

Originally Posted by Crawford

While the multiple layers are a problem, that isn't the central issue. A consolidated Dolton would still be undesirable.

Dolton is troubled because it's a poor, black municipality on the undesirable side of town, not because it's too small, with duplicative services. If Dolton were on the North Side, or not 80% black, the issues would be mostly solved.

If Cook County was a city/last tier of administration, the wealthiest parts of this 5.2 million people city would finance improvements in the poorer neighbourhoods, Dolton being one. Moreover, they would have one single public machine, instead of 31(?) today. Public administration in all this area would be twice as cheaper. At least.

EDIT: there are over a hundred administrative divisions in Cook County, not only 31, which is the number of townships. It's a nightmare.

[Vlajos]

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

IfEDIT: there are over a hundred administrative divisions in Cook County, not only 31, which is the number of townships. It's a nightmare.

It is terrible, but way too many politicos would lose power with consolidation, so it will never happen. I bet Dolton's pols don't want it to happen.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by yuriandrade

If Cook County was a city/last tier of administration, the wealthiest parts of this 5.2 million people city would finance improvements in the poorer neighbourhoods, Dolton being one. Moreover, they would have one single public machine, instead of 31(?) today. Public administration in all this area would be twice as cheaper. At least.

OK, but Dolton would still be poor, black and on the wrong side of town. Maybe property taxes would be slightly reduced, and municipal services would be slightly better, but the fundamental issues will remain.

Again, if Dolton were on the North Side of Chicago, homes wouldn't go for 90k. If it were on Long Island (which has even smaller jurisdictions and more duplicative services than Chicagoland), homes wouldn't go for 90k. But if it were in Indianapolis (which does have consolidated govt. and is overall far more efficient) homes would likely be even cheaper.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by JManc

Federal law has no jurisdiction in matters of local governments (except for DC) and that's solely left up to the states. Cities and counties exist at the pleasure of their respective state governments.

They can't and shouldn't legislate it at a federal level, but they can attach strings to federal funds based on it, like they do with transit funding.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Crawford

OK, but Dolton would still be poor, black and on the wrong side of town. Maybe property taxes would be slightly reduced, and municipal services would be slightly better, but the fundamental issues will remain.

Again, if Dolton were on the North Side of Chicago, homes wouldn't go for 90k. If it were on Long Island (which has even smaller jurisdictions and more duplicative services than Chicagoland), homes wouldn't go for 90k. But if it were in Indianapolis (which does have consolidated govt. and is overall far more efficient) homes would likely be even cheaper.

Efficient delivery of services IS a fundamental issue. Sales prices are cosmetic.