Talk:Unincorporated area

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Article (Unincorporated community (New Jersey)) merged: See old talk-page here —Preceding unsigned comment added by Formerly the IP-Address 24.22.227.53 (talk • contribs) 12:13, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

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[edit] "insular area" vs. "territory"

The reason I removed the word "territory" is that the term is ambigious. A uppercase "T" territory is one that has been Incorporated (e.g. Palmyra Atoll). A lowercase "t" territory is one that is unincorporated. (e.g. everything else). I hope this helps. - Hoshie 07:41, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] merging articles

Doctor Whom added the template on unincorporated community to merge with this article. Actually, I think the merge should actually go the other way. Without modification, the term "unincorporated" can refer to things other than land, territory, or communities. older≠wiser 19:29, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

I agree and have tagged the articles acordingly. However, no discussion has been forthcoming yet and hence after waiting for a week for comments, I'd merge the articles as per the tag on them. --Gurubrahma 12:57, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

I've suggested merging this article with census-designated place--both articles cover the same territory with the one caveat that CDP talks about a census bureau designation. That could be easily covered in this article.--Velvet elvis81 18:18, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Well, no, not at all the same. A CDP has a very specific, albeit somewhat confusing, meaning. Not all CDPs are unincorporated. older ≠ wiser 01:06, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
Strong agree with Bkonrad, a CDP is distinctly different from an unincorporated area. --MMX 09:04, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
I concur. What older ≠ wiser is referring to is the six New England states that use incorporated townships and have allowed the county governments to wither away to vestiges, unlike most other states which divide local administrative power between cities and counties. Some New England townships are so large as to have several geographically distinct communities within them, which all require their own CDPs. --Coolcaesar 22:58, 6 January 2007 (UTC)
I would not want to see a merging of these articles. Some CDPs can be a subset of unincorporated areas, but not all of them are. While CDPs should be mentioned in the Unincorporated area article, there is sufficient difference between the two that Census-designated place should continue to have its own article as well. Whyaduck 11:46, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
I second those that say these should not be merged. Census-designated places are statistical divisons used by the census. Unincorporated communities can be any loose grouping of areas by one person or a community. They are statistical divisions. These are not one and the same. --Criticalthinker 04:24, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose. Please do not merge in either direction. First, there's the New England situation, where many towns that are fully-functioning municipalities and have clearly defined boundaries are not "incorporated" according to state law and therefore are treated by the Census as CDPs. In contrast, in other parts of the country there are many unincorporated communities that are recognized by the post office, appear on standard maps, and are identifiable on the ground, but that the Census Bureau chooses not to recognize as CDPs. Combining the two would be like combining "apples and oranges." --orlady 16:41, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Very Strongly disagree!!! CDPs are constructs of the USA National Government Census Bureau just as the Post Office ZIP code service area are created by the US Postal Service (USPS). While the USPS asks for a city in address your mail that may not be the municipality that the addressee lives in. The USA has a federal system of government so ZIP Code areas and CDPs are not exactly municipalities or recognized place names. No one is suggesting to merge ZIP Codes with Unincorporated Areas. While the state government does recognized some place names that Unincorporated Areas are as some may be recognized through platting (survey) records. The Village of Swartz Creek (now city; village was a size tag for incorporated mini.{ie. cities} in MI) was platted as the Village of Swartz Creek in 1877 but was not incorporated until 1959 (with two other place names {Crapo Farms & Otterburn} and other Platted subdivisions. In fact, Swartz Creek was formerly know as Miller Settlement by the residents, Swartz Creek was the Post Office name and Hamiltion as the train station name for one year! Spshu 22:28, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Very Strongly disagree I can not be more against merging the two articles. I don't believe that there is any useful purpose in doing so. Furthermore there are at least two reasons why it should not be done. 1) This is tantamount to bureaucracy, unnecessary and unwarranted. 2) Merely linking CDP and Unincorporated Area is not at all helpful. The terms are not synonymous with one another. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 206.174.79.202 (talk) 13:03, 30 January 2007 (UTC).
  • Strongly oppose merge in any direction Irrespective of all of the other points that others have made, CDP is an American topic, whereas unincorporated area is not! Also, please take a look at unincorporated to see that unincorporated has different meanings in different contexts. John Vandenberg 23:50, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] In law ?

I believe the article means in USA law, not "in law" in general. However, not being a Columbian, I can't amend the article as I don't know whether to put US law, or whether this is something federal or state or whatever....someone Stateside please help.

I'm not sure if it is a U.S. specific term. I think it depends on whether the other common law jurisdictions have it as well. If they don't have the word, then maybe we should qualify the definition by saying in American law. Does anyone from the British Commonwealth know anything about whether they have unincorporated areas there?
(A British reader responds: There's no such thing as an "unincorporated area" in the UK. I've never heard the term used outside the US.)
A Google search turned up plenty of uses in Canada and Australia. I haven't tried it with other countries. Would someone familiar with the organization of local government in Canada or Australia care to enlighten us? Thanks. Doctor Whom 20:48, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
The term is most definitely used in Canada, and some very large communities have chosen to remain unincorporated for tax saving purposes. Other have chosen to lose their incorporated status and merge with surrounding rural communities. Since the provinces have constitutional jurisdiction over municipalities, the rules regarding them are different for each province. I know in my own province, Alberta, some of the largest communities are unincorporated. See Sherwood Park, Alberta and Fort McMurray, Alberta, and see the good information in Hamlet (place). Kevlar67 12:05, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
From reading the interwikied article in German, de:Gemeindefreies Gebiet (roughly municipality-free area), it is clear that such areas exist in some German states as well, and to some extent in Switzerland also. And those countries are not common law ones, are they? This article clearly needs to be more international in scope. 217.208.26.177 22:18, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
Ironically enough, the apparent intent of the anon editor who raised the issue was to remove US-centric bias, not to add it. I've had to revert edits in other articles that have backfired in the same way. Doctor Whom 01:10, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
Also, I should point out that using Columbian for American is very archaic and would not be understood by most people. I know what you're saying because I have a bachelor's degree in history, but most people don't know much about history! --Coolcaesar 15:35, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Stub?

I dont really belive this article is still a stub, it seems pretty informative, maybe some legal info is needed?

[edit] Strange edits by Freekie in July

I just caught on to this. Where are unincorporated communities signed with the term "unincorporated"? In California and Virginia, unincorporated communities, if they are signed at all, are usually signed in the name of the county. For example, Alta Arden is signed as "Alta Arden, a Sacramento County neighborhood," and in the D.C. area, Rosslyn is signed as "Rosslyn, a neighborhood of Arlington County." If Freekie doesn't give a concrete example soon, I'm deleting his/her edit.--Coolcaesar 09:49, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree. This edit is rather too vague to remain as is. I don't doubt that there may be cases like this, but at the very least there needs to be at least one specific example. older ≠ wiser 12:33, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
Wisconsin. They used to be settlements (for lack of a better term) with names, which got swallowed up by townships (six-mile-square). There are signs showing where the old towns were, listing them as "unincorporated." But what I'm talking about fits under the definition of the first bullet point (a neighborhood that is within a town), so it's no big deal - I just gave a more specific description. I'll see if I can get a picture for you, but either way, feel free to edit the article in any way you see fit. -Freekee 03:00, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
Well, see, it's kind of confusing, since towns in Wisconsin, are like civil townships in Minnesota and Michigan and are not themselves "incorporated" municipalities. These towns and townships are county subdivisions established under provisions of general law. Their powers are limited by the provisions of the statutes. On the other hand, with incorporated municipalities, like cities or villages, the people in an area incorporate as a municipal corporation. Such municipal corporations have considerably more powers than general law entities. The confusion arises because in other states, towns are just another type of municipality. And even in MI, MN and WI, some townships have powers which approach that of a municipality, so it can be difficult to make meaningful distinctions. BTW, it's not quite accurate to say the settlements got swallowed up by townships -- townships in these states were generally the first form of organized local government in many of these areas. It'd be probably more accurate to say in most such cases that the communities were never incorporated. In the case of a place within a Wisconsin town, I think this would more closely fall under the second bullet point. older ≠ wiser 12:40, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
I concur. My understanding of townships is that they were surveyed first and then the settlements within them came later. --Coolcaesar 17:59, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
So what you are saying is that in Wisconsin (and some other states), towns are technically unincorporated. Even though they have governing bodies. I don't think the article and/or bullet points explain this. Sounds like you should do a rewrite. :-) As far as my edit, I don't think either bullet point quite explains what "unincorporated" means in this context. Perhaps something like a neighborhood or other community existing outside of an incorporated municipal government, within a larger unincorported area, or away from a larger urbanized area. My point is that these unincorporated "towns" are really just neighborhoods, but they have official signs, so someone is going to come here to see what that may mean. -Freekee 16:11, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
Unincorporated Kansas towns often have a green city limit sign stating the town name and "Unincorporated" underneath, where incorporated Kansas towns list "Population: X,XXX" underneath the city name.

[edit] Challenging Gurubrahma's edit as not quite right

On 9 November 2005, User:Gurubrahma inserted this edit [1] which doesn't sound quite right. In California, we have many unincorporated settlements away from cities (the second part of the second category) and many unincorporated neighborhoods surrounded by incorporated cities (the first part of the first category). The first is exemplified by Glen Ellen, California and the second is exemplified by East Los Angeles, California.

But we don't have neighborhoods that are shared across city borders---in fact, I can't think of any (and I've visited over the years nearly every important city in the state).

Actually, as far as I know, the first category doesn't really exist; it seems to describe a situation where a neighborhood within one incorporated city merely shares the same name as an adjacent neighborhood within an adjacent incorporated city. This is kind of analogous to how the names Kansas City and Texarkana are shared by a pair of twin cities on a state border. Thus, such a neighborhood really isn't unincorporated in the sense that it lacks a city government. My understanding is that unincorporated means that one doesn't have a municipal government at all, which means one doesn't have a city hall, so one has to go to the county government to lobby for changes to local services. In the case of physically gigantic counties like San Bernardino, this is the difference between driving 1 mile (if one is driving to San Bernardino City Hall from a San Bernardino residence) versus 100 miles (if one is driving to the county seat from the unincorporated hamlet of Trona).

If Gurubrahma doesn't defend his/her position soon, I'm going to get rid of this original research.--Coolcaesar 03:13, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm not certain precisely which statements you're objecting to. Based on your description, I'm assuming that it is this bullet point:
  • a neighborhood or other community existing within one or across multiple existing incorporated areas (i.e. cities or towns). One example is Clifton, Massachusetts.
But, are you objecting to the statement in its entirety, or only the bit about spanning multiple existing incorporated areas? I don't think it is that unusual to refer to unincorporated communities within a larger municipal entity. While the example given, Clifton, Massachusetts, seems to fit the bill for spanning municipal boundaries, I don't know anything about the details and I'd probably describe that as a neighborhood rather than a UC. But I think the idea behind describing it as a UC is that "Clifton" is not an incorporated entity -- the locale by that name is a part of one or more municipalities, but is not itself an incorporated municipality. There are quite a lot of such entities (depending on how you define incorporated municipality). In the midwest, there are multitudes of small communities that are within a civil township, which provides a level of municipal services and local government. But the communities often have a distinct identity apart from the surrounding township and are not incorporated. older ≠ wiser 14:18, 6 May 2007 (UTC)
Well, what I'm objecting to is this concept of applying unincorporated to neighborhoods that are clearly governed by a city government, when the very definition of unincorporated is land that doesn't have a city government. For example, Nike's headquarters sits in unincorporated Washington County but is surrounded by Beaverton, Oregon. I have never seen a legal professional using the term "unincorporated" for a neighborhood within a larger city regardless of whether that neighborhood spans other cities or not.
I'm well aware of the situation you describe for townships. But that's not the situation described by the phrase "a neighborhood or other community existing within one or across multiple existing incorporated areas (i.e. cities or towns)." The phrase is describing a situation where a named community lies "across" or spans multiple corporate entities (analogous to the situation where the Kansas City metropolitan area spans two separate municipal corporations named "Kansas City,") as opposed to the unincorporated towns which are fully encompassed by civil townships.
My suspicion is that Gurubrahma isn't law-trained and is inadvertently promoting a neologism or original research on Wikipedia, which violates the No original research policy. --Coolcaesar 06:37, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
I think that what the confusing passage is trying to get at is that unincorporated can refer to both senses -- you seem convinced that it only refers to the complete absence of local municipal government, while the implication is that the named entity as such is not incorporated.
Re, townships, I don't see the distinction you are making -- there are countless little hamlets that are situated precisely on the boundary between townships or in some cases at the corners and overlap into four townships. I don't see how the phrasing implies the situation you describe with Kansas City, which is really two separate incorporated entities that happen to share the same name. older ≠ wiser 10:48, 7 May 2007 (UTC)