WI: Montgomery County didn't split off from Philadelphia County?

Southeast PA residents, UNITE!

Just like it says on the tin. Say Montgomery County and Philadelphia County are never separated. Philadelphia county is now nearly 700 square miles, about half the size of Cook County.

How does this affect Philadelphia? The Far Northeast was annexed by the city in the Consolidation Act in 1851, but does this happpen ITTl? Even today there are large areas of Montgomery County, like Conshohocken and Norristown, that are denser than the Far Northeast. Do areas that are part of Montgomery County IOTL, like Lower Merion, Conshohocken, and Norristown, get annexed by the city at a later date? Does the city do better now that it has the ability to annex affluent suburbs and affix their tax base to itself?

Does this have any other knock-on effects? If Philadelphia starts annexing the Main Line, does this drive residents to adjacent areas of Delaware County? Instead of areas like Drexel Hill being swamped by expats from West and Southwest Philly, do they get colonized by Main Liners not wanting to pay city taxes or deal with the Philly School District?
 
Unless you're some kind of disgusting amorphous blob like Los Angeles, city-county consolidation for a major city is functionally inevitable and necessary - so as to the things you hit on in OP, I would assume a greater amount of towns may be annexed but ultimately there will still be a split.
 
Unless you're some kind of disgusting amorphous blob like Los Angeles, city-county consolidation for a major city is functionally inevitable and necessary - so as to the things you hit on in OP, I would assume a greater amount of towns may be annexed but ultimately there will still be a split.
The analogy I was thinking of was Chicago and Cook County, which is about 2.5 times the size of the Chicago city limits
 
Probably not much happens, very little or none at all. The problem the North East US has compared to the South and West is that cities have much fewer options on being ALLOWED to expand. See: Boston, Buffalo, Albany, even NYC hasn't annexed anything past the original consolidation in 1898. Whereas Atlanta, LA, Kansas City, and other young cities have been allowed by their states to continue expanding (Kansas City, Missouri is a prime example- spreads over 5 counties). It is the prime reason southern and western cities can claim to be "growing" in population where as northern cities shrink in population. It's all about annexing new territory, not about being "more popular" in getting new residents.
 
"Unless you're some kind of disgusting amorphous blob like Los Angeles, city-county consolidation for a major city is functionally inevitable and necessary"

?????

To get a sense of this, I went to the Wikipedia list of metropolitan statistical areas and took the core incorporated cities out of the top thirty listed, as of the 2015 census estimate:

City and county the same:

New York (five counties within the city) #1
Washington (DC) #6
Philadelphia #7
Boston (Suffolk) #10 (Suffolk does have a small non-Boston portion)
San Francisco #11
Denver #19
St. Louis #20
Baltimore #21


City within a larger county that also has parts not within the city:

Los Angeles (Los Angeles) #2
Chicago (Cook) #3
Dallas (Dallas) #4
Houston (Harris) #5
Miami (Miami-Dade) # 8 (organized somewhat differently)
Atlanta (Fulton) #9
Phoenix (Maricopa) #12
Detroit (Wayne) #14
Seattle (King) #15
Minneapolis (Hennepin) #16)
San Diego (San Diego) #17
Tampa (Tampa) #18
Charlotte (Mecklenburg) #22
Orlando (Orange) #23
San Antonio (Bexar) #24
Portland (Multnomah) #25
Pittsburgh (Allegheny) #26
Sacramento (Sacramento) #27
Cincinnati (Hamilton) #28
Las Vegas (Clark) #29
Kansas City (Jackson) #26


Metro area with no large core city:

Inland Empire (Riverside, San Bernadino) #13

The odd thing about the comment is having a large incorporated city nestled wtihin a much larger county is the standard form of local government in the US. As the list shows, consolidated county-cities are a feature in only 8 out of the 30 largest MSAs, or 7 out of the top 20 if you prefer that. Either way it happened only about a third of the time.

Having Philadelphia as a city within a larger county would actually have been the standard way of doing things. Its an interesting POD.
 
Its an interesting question as to the different effects of having a city-county as opposed to the more standard incorporated large city within the larger county model.

This is not about having a metropolitan area wide government, which is un-American. Actually metro-wide transportation agencies are common out of necessity in the USA, and actual metro-wide governments or something close have been done with Miami, Jacksonville, and Indianapolis, the latter two not making the list of the top thirty MSAs. But these things are pretty common outside the USA and rare in the USA, where you are more likely to get a metropolitan area split between different states (out of the list of top thirty MSAs this happens at least half a dozen times).

Restricting the question to county-city as opposed to city-within-county, I suspect the main differences are:

1. Greater chance of home rule or autonomy for the city government, since there is not an additional tier of government between it and the state government. Note though that Chicago, within Cook County, has much more home rule than does New York, where on paper the city government is on the tier higher than five (skeletal) county governments.

2. City borders are more likely to change than county borders, so you have a greater chance of suburbs being annexed or split off with cities-within-counties, also more irregular borders.

In the case of Philly, on #1 you have to compare Phllly with Pittsburgh, which is a city-within-a-county (Allegheny). My impression is that Phlly does in fact have more autonomy or separation from the Commonwealth with the current arrangement.

On #2, yeah I'd suspect that you would see the city extend more to the northwest and less to the northeast.
 
"Isn't that really just a far extension of the Los Angeles/Orange area?"

The Inland Empire is listed on the MSA list as its own entity.

I've actually sometimes seen all of Southern California listed as a metropolitan area, or Orange County, the Inland Empire, and Los Angeles combined into one metropolitan area, usually with claims that this is the biggest metro area in the US, and this stuff is usually just boosterism. People have a poor grasp of geography and don't realize just how big the place is. It would be like listing all of the Florida peninsula as one big metropolitan area.
 
Its an interesting question as to the different effects of having a city-county as opposed to the more standard incorporated large city within the larger county model.

This is not about having a metropolitan area wide government, which is un-American. Actually metro-wide transportation agencies are common out of necessity in the USA, and actual metro-wide governments or something close have been done with Miami, Jacksonville, and Indianapolis, the latter two not making the list of the top thirty MSAs. But these things are pretty common outside the USA and rare in the USA, where you are more likely to get a metropolitan area split between different states (out of the list of top thirty MSAs this happens at least half a dozen times).

Restricting the question to county-city as opposed to city-within-county, I suspect the main differences are:

1. Greater chance of home rule or autonomy for the city government, since there is not an additional tier of government between it and the state government. Note though that Chicago, within Cook County, has much more home rule than does New York, where on paper the city government is on the tier higher than five (skeletal) county governments.

2. City borders are more likely to change than county borders, so you have a greater chance of suburbs being annexed or split off with cities-within-counties, also more irregular borders.

In the case of Philly, on #1 you have to compare Phllly with Pittsburgh, which is a city-within-a-county (Allegheny). My impression is that Phlly does in fact have more autonomy or separation from the Commonwealth with the current arrangement.

On #2, yeah I'd suspect that you would see the city extend more to the northwest and less to the northeast.

What effect does this have on development? Say the city line follows whatever they call Cottman Avenue outside the city until it reaches the OTL city line where it follows Pennypack Creek. Would I be right in assuming that Bustleton, Somerton, and the amorphous nameless blob near the Franklin Mills Mall where my grandparents live would be less developed, possibly undeveloped enough that you could expand Northeast Philadelphia Airport to replace Philadelphia International airport? Perhaps Lower and Upper Merion and areas adjacent to the Schuylkill up to Norristown are more built-up as a result, and what we call Gladwyn gets converted into an extension of Fairmount park.
 
My gut feeling is that Lower Merion is the only part of Montco that really "feels" like part of the city, but if the Far Northeast was included in the 1854 consolidation the rest of Montco could be. I don't know enough specific local history to tell you what was out there at the time, but I know there was very little of the city west of the Schuylkill other than garbage dumps and insane asylums and the like.

Why did they split the counties in the first place? Wasn't it around the time of the revolution? A lot of Montco is a long way from the city and I'm guessing it was split because the farming communities out there had their own center of gravity.

If Philco and Montco don't split, I guess Chesco and Delco can stay together as well so all of SE PA is just three counties.
 
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What effect does this have on development? Say the city line follows whatever they call Cottman Avenue outside the city until it reaches the OTL city line where it follows Pennypack Creek. Would I be right in assuming that Bustleton, Somerton, and the amorphous nameless blob near the Franklin Mills Mall where my grandparents live would be less developed, possibly undeveloped enough that you could expand Northeast Philadelphia Airport to replace Philadelphia International airport? Perhaps Lower and Upper Merion and areas adjacent to the Schuylkill up to Norristown are more built-up as a result, and what we call Gladwyn gets converted into an extension of Fairmount park.

This makes a certain amount of sense, but you have to remember that a lot of what drove suburbanization in the Northeast postwar was white flight city workers needing to live within the city limits. Otherwise, there's limited appeal to living in what's basically the suburbs but with city taxes.
 
Very minor nitpick: Baltimore is not part of any county. It's an independent city. Baltimore County and the city of Baltimore have been entirely separate entities for generations: so much so that you can tell the difference easily when, say, driving north on York Road: the pavement, street signs, and all manner of things change at the city / county line.
 
Very minor nitpick: Baltimore is not part of any county. It's an independent city. Baltimore County and the city of Baltimore have been entirely separate entities for generations: so much so that you can tell the difference easily when, say, driving north on York Road: the pavement, street signs, and all manner of things change at the city / county line.

I think he was saying that Baltimore City is a county equivalent, which makes the whole Baltimore City/Baltimore County thing even more confusing.
 
I think he was saying that Baltimore City is a county equivalent, which makes the whole Baltimore City/Baltimore County thing even more confusing.

Baltimore is a county equivalent it seems, but otherwise an independent city. Philadelphia is a consolidated city-county. My understanding thus is that in Philly's case Philadelphia is a county and there's the city of Philadelphia, and they occupy the same borders since 1854. Later on the city and county administrations were merged. So it's de facto a special case within the state, even if there's technically Philadelphia county and Philadelphia. However Philadelphia county lacks townships and boroughs. In the US there are only 41 independent cities and 38 of them are in Virginia.

Furthermore "county equivalent" seems to be a Census thing more than anything in actuality.
 
I've been to Philly but never lived there. It is just my understanding that cities in PA are part of their respective counties, with Philadelphia being a bit of a special case given its size.

Looking at Wikipedia it seems that most of what are classified as cities in that state however are simply Home Rule Charters but now I'm even more confused. Other states should just do what Virginia does to make understanding all of this just a bit easier :D
 
I think he was saying that Baltimore City is a county equivalent, which makes the whole Baltimore City/Baltimore County thing even more confusing.
In effect, that's fair to say: functionally it amounts to the same thing. Perhaps years ago when the two became separate entities politically, the county should have changed its name to "Patapsco County" or something like that (I grew up there so I can say that).
 
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