The annexation threat: local government boundary changes, race, and the formation of new cities

ABSTRACT

One prominent explanation for municipal incorporation – i.e., the formation of new cities – is that it is a defensive response to the threat of annexation posed by neighboring cities. In this paper, we conduct cross-sectional regression analyses to examine the relationship between race, municipal annexation, and municipal incorporation between 2000 and 2010. Our results suggest that annexation by neighboring cities plays a key role in driving municipal incorporation activity in the U.S.; cities that are next to unincorporated majority-white communities tend to annex more aggressively than those next to majority-minority communities, likely as a result of racially selective annexation efforts; majority-white communities are more likely to incorporate in response to the encroachment via annexation of the nearest city; and communities that have higher shares of non-Hispanic whites than the annexing city are especially likely to use incorporation as a defensive strategy to prevent annexation.

KEYWORDS:

• Cities
• municipal incorporation
• municipal annexation
• race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. These data are available here: https://www.census.gov/geographies/reference-files/time-series/geo/bas/new-annex.html

2. We also tested alternative regression models using only annexation activity that occurred during the 2000 to 2010 time period. The results were similar, though the coefficients were attenuated, likely due to measurement error in the calculation of local annexation activity.

3. Municipal boundary changes primarily occur due to municipal annexation, although they can also result from deannexation or from corrections due to previous boundary errors. Prior research on annexation also relied upon analyses of changes in the geography of municipal borders (Durst, 2018; Lichter et al., 2007; Wilson & Edwards, 2014).

4. In a limited number of cases, the distance between the NIM/CDP increased between 2000 and 2010. To allow for a square root transformation, the change was recoded as zero. The results remain substantively unchanged if these observations are excluded from the analysis.

5. This difference is therefore even larger than it appears. Squaring these numbers illustrates that the PM near the average NIM annexed approximately 14 times (3.8 squared is 14.4), while the PM near the average CDP annexed approximately 5 times (2.2 squared is 4.8).

6. This is likely an underestimate of the impact that the encroachment of nearby PMs plays in contributing to municipal incorporations because our measure of encroachment is based on changes in the borders of PMs between 2000 and 2010 rather than in the ten-year period prior to incorporation. Measuring the annexation threat in the ten-year period prior to incorporation would likely lead to increases in the magnitude and precision of the estimate.