Allegheny City Redux
Stories over the weekend on the history of Allegheny City and its merger with the City of Pittsburgh. My own comments on this were in this older post: The Neverending Story. If you ask me, the most important consequence of the Allegheny City merger is very counterintuitive. It expanded the city, but at the same time set in stone the opposition to future municipal consolidations not just here, but across the state. Thus the reason the region and state remains as fragmented as it is in terms of local government can all be traced to changes made to the PA Constitution as a result of opposition to the Allegheny City merger. Also here is the complete timeline of the territorial growth of the city of Pittsburgh ... something I made into an approximate dynamic graphic that looks like this:
6 Comments:
Cool, that's a very neat graphic.
Chris,
Great graphic! Help me understand the current annexation rules for PA. Where I come from in Texas the big cities continue to grow by swallowing up the attractive suburbs (i.e. good tax revenue). This apparently used to be the case here in PA but I have to assume somewhere along the line the legislature shut this down. Can you provide some perspective here?
Thanks
"O" is right. Consolidation will never be taken seriously until we annex Mt. Oliver.
Mt. Oliver delenda est!
ha... sounds like you know that down in Texas, places like Houston can absorb their suburbs virtually at will and without much consent.. and has some powers that extend beyond its own boundary. Can you imagine what that would mean here if city council could decide whether to make Fox Chapel part of the city proper.
but in less than 10,000 words how about this.. all that happens down in Texas, figure out what the opposite would be and that is what you would get.
I dunno about Mt. Oliver. I think they have a part time police officer that may try to defend it.
More seriously though... people get emotional over how city neighborhoods are defined but the confusion over municipalites goes way beyond that.. and it's not just Mt. Oliver's weird geography. I swear I was in the City County building not too long ago and I heard a city receptionist taking a call from someone who was quite insistent she could help with some potholes in Bellevue. No joke.
I thought the idea was to have the county take over the city, not the city take over more suburbs. Am I just projecting?
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