Should a city have limits? | CharlotteObserver.com: "The city of Charlotte often expands, gobbling up new territory to increase its tax base. The city's footprint has grown thanks to North Carolina's aggressive annexation law, which allow cities and towns to absorb nearby communities without the consent of the impacted residents. Supporters of the 1959 annexation law say it's an important reason why, for the most part, the state's cities are financially healthy. They argue that without the law, N.C. cities would resemble places such as St. Louis and Cleveland, where a small, struggling city is surrounded by a ring of more affluent suburbs. But there is a band of opponents who say municipalities have far too much power in their annexations, and they want to give residents a say."
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Liberals (David Rusk and Myron Orfield, for example) tend to favor these aggressive annexation laws because big cities can eat up their suburbs, along with the people and assets that have moved there. They want cities to have "elastic" boundaries, as David Rusk puts it, so everybody in the metropolis can be forced to live under one big general purpose city government that redistributes wealth, runs a welfare state, and controls everything through master planning. Conservatives and libertarians (Bob Nelson, Peter Gordon, Fred Foldvary) generally oppose all this stuff because it is wasteful, inefficient, and undemocratic. At the extreme, they want small private governments all over the place that respond to mobile consumers who can jump elsewhere to find what they want. That way government is small and efficient. So this debate over Charlotte is part of a larger ideological struggle.
2 comments:
If you think that's bad, the industry folks are seeking to give HOAs the same power in Texas. See, e.g.,
http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/80R/schedules/html/C4802008082011301.HTM
Does no one except the victims question the constitutionality of statutes that authorize a private person (the HOA) to take what belongs to others and particularly to take without compensation? When any other private person does this it is actionable as both a civil and criminal offense.
The possibility of authorizing HOAs to annex additional areas (this was the topic of the hearing even though it was generically cast as "extending" deed restrictions to areas that "need them") by power of statute must certainly trigger a state action doctrine at some point.
In some instances, the residents of the geographic area in question are the only ones permitted to vote on such a change.
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