Annexation and San Antonio Metropolitan Growth

This paper reviews and challenges current Urban Studies literature on annexation, suburbanization, and segregation. Specifically, it investigates the economic and political forces that led to boundary changes in San Ysidro, California. Prior scholarship on municipal annexations has focused primarily on the procedural mechanics and local dynamics that inform municipal boundary changes. This paper argues that this approach is “too local,” and suggests that global capital flows and forces play a powerful role in municipal annexations. Through a world-systems lens and a legal history of cities, this paper also provides a framework for rethinking municipal annexations as reenactments of colonial enterprises at a metropolitan scale and considers the implications this framework has on ongoing debates about citizenship.

Rural Sociology, 2007

This paper examines patterns of annexation, including municipal ''underbounding,'' in nonmetropolitan towns in the South; that is, whether blacks living adjacent to municipalities are systematically excluded from incorporation. Annexation-or the lack of annexation-can be a political tool used by municipal leaders to exclude disadvantaged or low-income populations, including minorities, from voting in local elections and from receiving access to public utilities and other community services. To address this question, we use Tiger files, GIS, and other geographically disaggregated data from the Summary Files of the 1990 and 2000 decennial censuses. Overall, 22.6 percent of the fringe areas ''at risk'' of annexation in our study communities was African American, while 20.7 percent of the areas that were actually annexed during the 1990s was African American. However, communities with large black populations at the fringe were significantly less likely than other communities to annex at all-either black or white population. Largely white communities that faced a ''black threat''-which we defined in instances where the county ''percent black'' was higher than the place ''percent black''-were also less likely to annex black populations during the 1990s. Finally, predominately white communities were much less likely to annex black populations, even when we controlled for the size of the black fringe population at risk of annexation. Such results provide evidence of racial exclusion in small southern towns.

Purpose: The purpose of this explanatory study is to evaluate factors that contribute to the frequency of municipal annexation among select southern U.S. cities with populations between 25,000 and 50,000. The research method is analysis of aggregated data in order to explain factors contributing to the frequency of municipal annexation. Data on 160 cities from select southern U.S. states were compiled to understand the effect, if any, that form of government, age of municipality, demographic disparities between city and county, competition, and statutory annexation authority have on frequency of municipal annexation. Overall findings suggest that three of the five factors do not significantly contribute to the frequency of municipal annexation. However, competition and statutory annexation authority are found to be related to frequency of annexation. In particular, the effect of statutory authority on frequency of annexation is opposite of the expected effect.

This study is a preliminary assessment of the effect development sprawl (low-density development occurring outside city boundaries) has on Texas city governments. Specifically, the purpose of the research study is to explore Texas city managers’ assessments of (1) the effects of development sprawl on city finance and service provision, (2) the relationship between development sprawl and city annexation, and (3) the relationship between development sprawl and their impressions of regional governance. To satisfy the research purposes, a survey instrument was developed from the conceptual framework (working hypotheses). The surveys were administered to the most complete existing list of city managers in Texas (540). A correlation analysis of the survey data presented three major findings regarding city managers’ assessments: (1) the higher the level of development sprawl outside city boundaries, the less adequate transportation systems are within the city; (2) the higher the level of development growth outside city boundaries, the more frequently cities annex that growth; and (3) the higher the level of development sprawl outside a city’s boundaries, the more likely the city’s manager supports regional transportation planning. Study results highlight the importance of preserving city annexation authority, which captures sprawling tax bases, and suggest an enhanced role for regional transportation planning efforts. The results also provide some support for the state to reassess its role in development control efforts due to sprawl’s pervasiveness in the state

In this paper we report preliminary findings of a study that examines the historical formation of the principally Mexicano West Side of San Antonio. Our thesis is dialectical: a cultural point – counterpoint of the ‘‘socially deforming (barrioizing) and the culturally affirming (barriological) spatial practices’’ (Villa, 2000, 8) that have characterized the relationship between Anglos and Mexicans since the Mexican- American War of 1846–1848 and the Anglo conquest of the northern area of Mexico now known as South Texas, a relationship that has served to frame both groups and to re-enforce respective cultural identities. By taking a historical view of the relationship, we are attempting to ‘‘broadly identify a historical continuity between past and present circumstances influencing the production of barrio social space and its representations’’ (Villa, 2000, 8). The authors argue that barriology offers a method for understanding neighborhood formation and maintenance in a time when the dynamics of this and maintenance have become central issues in community research, thus they address the following questions:  Is there something unique about the Mexicano community in the United States that promotes social cohesion and that can therefore account for the unexpected population health status of the Paradox?  Is there something about the formation of social capital in the Mexicano community that can be understood by taking a barriological approach to the study of that community?

Public Choice, 2020

We provide the first parcel-level, time-series empirical analysis of municipal annexation behavior. We also exploit a unique natural experiment created by the incorporation and exogenous (court-mandated) dissolution of a new neighboring municipality to examine the public-choice motivations behind annexation. Our results indicate that an existing city's annexation behavior differed significantly in the areas threatened with the formation of a competing jurisdiction, yielding the most compelling evidence yet that political motivations play a major role in the annexation behavior of cities. We also are the first to construct and include measures reflecting the strategic stepwise dependence between parcels in the annexation process-in terms of what other parcels subsequently can be annexed. We find that the characteristics of a parcel itself in many cases are of only secondary importance relative to considerations regarding the other parcels to which it gives access for future annexation. Such a spatially dependent stepwise factor has been overlooked entirely in prior literature assuming that parcel annexation decisions are independent of one another.

2012

Title of Dissertation: ANALYZING MUNICIPAL ANNEXATIONS: CASE STUDIES IN FREDERICK AND CAROLINE COUNTIES OF MARYLAND, 1990-2010 Jennifer Yongmei Pomeroy, Ph.D., 2012 Directed By: Dr. Martha E. Geores, Associate Professor Department of Geographical Sciences Municipal annexations play an important role in converting undeveloped land to development, influencing landscape change. However, the existing literature does not explore the links between annexation and development. An additional inadequacy is the failure to consider environment/landscape aspect of annexation. Therefore, this dissertation proposes a new theoretical framework that is drawn upon political ecology and structuration theory to examine annexation phenomenon processes: environmental/landscape sensitivity and its causal social structures. Frederick and Caroline counties in Maryland from 1990 to 2010 were the two case-study areas because both counties experience increased annexation activities and are representative of su...

Great Plains Research, 2022

Latino Studies, 2007

In this paper we report preliminary findings of a study that examines the historical formation of the principally Mexicano West Side of San Antonio. Our thesis is dialectical: a cultural point-counterpoint of the ''socially deforming (barrioizing) and the culturally affirming (barriological) spatial practices'' (Villa, 2000, 8) that have characterized the relationship between Anglos and Mexicans since the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 and the Anglo conquest of the northern area of Mexico now known as South Texas, a relationship that has served to frame both groups and to re-enforce respective cultural identities. By taking a historical view of the relationship, we are attempting to ''broadly identify a historical continuity between past and present circumstances influencing the production of barrio social space and its representations'' (Villa, 2000, 8). The authors argue that barriology offers a method for understanding neighborhood formation and maintenance in a time when the dynamics of this and maintenance have become central issues in community research, thus they address the following questions: Is there something unique about the Mexicano community in the United States that promotes social cohesion and that can therefore account for the unexpected population health status of the Paradox? Is there something about the formation of social capital in the Mexicano community that can be understood by taking a barriological approach to the study of that community?