More On Masking Urban Weaknesses

Sometimes you start a research project seeking data that proves a particular point, and find your initial conclusion to be wrong. This is one of those times.

Las Vegas: an example of how growing fast and growing inclusively are distinctly different matters. Source: gettyimages.com

I came into the urbanism sphere during the ‘80s, perhaps the height of metropolitanism in the U.S. Suburbs were ascendant, and cities were becoming increasingly irrelevant, at least from an economic and socio-cultural perspective. However, I was drawn toward regional planning and development. I’d always believed that there was a strong relationship between city and suburbs, and that any suburban success came at the expense of cities. Conversely, I also believed that suburban success would eventually be hampered by a lack of city revitalization. Back in 2018 I wrote about how I thought the efforts of Detroit’s suburbs to “divorce” itself from the core city could come back to haunt them.

I’m really interested in the metro whole, not just city or suburb. I’m keenly interested in how city and suburb interact with each other. But metro areas, particularly their suburban components, can be structured in entirely different ways across the nation. Some suburbs in metro areas are full-fledged, full service, city-sized municipalities of their own; others are barely equivalent to the scale of an urban neighborhood or a suburban subdivision. Ultimately, that impacts how communities deliver services to their residents, how residents view local service provision, and even in how residents view the metro area they live in.

My general view has been that when communities have to compete for viability, rather than livability, their ability to deliver services to residents decreases. Smaller suburbs generally have less tax revenue to provide services, larger suburbs are able to garner more tax revenue to provide services. I saw metropolitan fragmentation as a social phenomenon that hindered economic equity and inclusion. I started a research project to prove my point.

Las Vegas and Cincinnati

I conducted a simple analysis. I decided to compare the municipal fragmentation of two metro areas of nearly similar size: Las Vegas (2020 metro area population – 2.27 million) and Cincinnati (2020 metro area population – 2.25 million). As of 2020, Las Vegas was the 29^th largest metro area in the U.S., and Cincinnati the 30^th largest. Only about 15,000 people separated the two metros (although the faster growth in the Las Vegas Valley puts the difference at about 66,000 as of the Census Bureau’s 2023 estimates). But the metros differ greatly in terms of their governmental composition. Let’s look at the number of municipalities, and the number of people in unincorporated areas living under the jurisdiction of county laws.

Start with Las Vegas. Nevada’s largest metro is unique among large metros in that it is covered with just one county, Clark County. The county is the 11^th most populous county in the nation, and covers more than 8,000 square miles – an area larger in size than the state of New Jersey. There are just five incorporated municipalities in Clark County – Boulder City, Henderson, Las Vegas, Mesquite and North Las Vegas – and they hold about 55 percent of the county’s population. The other 45 percent of Clark County’s population lives in unincorporated areas, with services provided directly by the county itself.

Actually, much of what visitors consider to be Las Vegas – The Strip and adjacent areas – is one of the large-yet-still unincorporated places under Clark County jurisdiction. Seven of the unincorporated areas are “Census-designated places” that are significant enough in size and development to be treated like their own incorporated community. They are: Enterprise (221,000 people); Paradise (191,000); Spring Valley (216,000); Summerlin South (31,000); Sunrise Manor (206,000); Whitney (49,000); and Winchester (36,000). The southern boundary of the actual city of Las Vegas at The Strip is Sahara Avenue, where the Stratosphere Tower, STRAT Hotel, and Circus Circus Casino are located. If you’re famililar with Las Vegas and you said, “that’s the far northern end of The Strip just outside of Downtown Las Vegas,” you’d be right. South of Sahara Avenue, The Strip is located exclusively in the unincorporated communities of either Enterprise or Paradise, NV. The unincorporated Spring Valley area begins just one mile west of The Strip.

Take these places along with several other small, disparate unincorporated areas in Clark County, and the county is the major power player for what we consider Las Vegas, setting laws and policies, and delivering services to one million of the county’s 2.27 million people.

Tally up the local governments on a per capita basis, and things look something like this:

So there is one county that serves more than a million residents living in unincorporated areas, and five municipalities that serve 1.26 million.

Then there’s Cincinnati. Or, for the purposes of this exercise, the seven counties at the heart of the Cincinnati region that equal the population of Nevada’s Clark County. Hamilton County, Ohio, the home of Cincinnati, is the region’s largest county with 830,000 people. Three additional counties in Ohio (Warren, Butler and Clermont) add another 840,000 people, while three Kentucky counties south of the Ohio River (Boone, Kenton and Campbell) hold another 400,000 people. These seven counties held 2.07 million of the metro area’s 2.25 million residents in 2020, or 92 percent of the region’s population.

The Cincinnati metro’s seven core counties are much smaller in size than Clark County. Together they total about 2,300 square miles in land area, averaging 326 square miles each (the Ohio counties average 432 square miles, while the Kentucky counties average 186 square miles). Yet the seven counties are home to 108 individual municipalities, with jurisdiction over nearly 1.2 million residents.

Oddly, the municipality/unincorporated composition of Clark County, NV and the seven core counties of metro Cincinnati aren’t that different. I noted earlier that Clark County’s split is 55/45; in metro Cincy it’s 57/43. I’ll apply the same table to Hamilton County that I did for Clark County:

There are stark contrasts in the municipal composition of similarly sized metro areas. The Las Vegas metro area is located in one super-sized county, while Cincinnati’s core has seven counties that together equal Clark County’s population. Clark County has just five municipalities, with an average of more than 250,000 people residing in them. Metro Cincy’s seven counties have 108 municipalities, with slightly less than 11,000 residents on average.

If you think a population of less than 11,000 resident per municipality is small, think again. That total includes the largest city in the region, Cincinnati, which in 2020 had 309,000 people. Take Cincinnati out of the equation, and the 107 suburban municipalities of the metro area average just 8,106 residents per jurisdiction.

Efficiency and Equitability

It’s worth taking another look at the tables above, but close up:

There are two main arguments that usually support local government consolidation to deal with fragmentation. The first is efficiency – consolidation eliminates the duplication of local government services to provide. Each municipality requires some kind of organizational framework to deliver local services – public works employees to maintain streets and water and sewer lines, local police and fire, for example. Truth be told, Ohio’s counties have a township structure as well, and some of these responsibilities might lie at that level of government. If that’s true, it may simply be another tier of local government, and not exactly a reduced burden to taxpayers.

That creates a dilemma: should each municipality be responsible for its own police and fire services, or water and sewer line extensions? If so, that thrusts municipalities into competition with each other to generate the revenue needed, coming via property and/or sales taxes, to offer services. In that respect, with fewer local taxing jurisdictions, metro Las Vegas has metro Cincinnati beat.

The second argument in support of metro consolidation is equitability. Larger counties and cities have larger tax bases, but can distribute its larger base among a larger constituency, thereby improving equitable distribution of resources and services. With a larger tax base, the argument goes, local governments can expand the range of services and programs to address particular needs for its residents. If true, then Las Vegas should be winning out over Cincinnati in equitability terms as well.

This is where the pivot happens. In at least one analysis, Las Vegas fares worse in equitable outcomes than Cincinnati.

 You may have seen my recent piece a couple of weeks ago about the Brookings Institution’s 2024 Metro Monitor report. Since 2015, Brookings has produced annual reports that allow for comparisons of economic performance between metro areas. I’ll grab a quote from my recent piece to quickly describe:

“Each year the report evaluates five factors of metro success. The first is growth, or measuring the change in size of the metro economy and its entrepreneurial activity. Second is prosperity, or monitoring changes in average wealth and income. The last three are all measures of inclusion. The general inclusion factor evaluates changes in employment and income are distributed among individuals, racial inclusion analyzes gaps in economic indicators among white non-Hispanic persons and people of color, and geographic inclusion, which explores gaps in economic indicators between the top 20% and bottom 20% of census tracts in a given metro area.”

My recent piece concluded with saying that high-growth metros didn’t necessarily deliver more prosperity to its residents, and, interestingly, some low-growth metros were better are providing prosperity outcomes than even high-growth metros. After completing the first phase of the Las Vegas/Cincinnati analysis, I went back to the Metro Monitor data to see if Las Vegas’ more efficient government structure might provide more equitable or inclusive outcomes than Cincinnati.

What I found was surprising. Cincinnati ranked about where I thought it might in inclusion stats for the 54 metro areas with more than one million people in 2020 – 43^rd in overall inclusion, 46^th in racial inclusion, and 38^th in geographic inclusion. Put another way, Cincinnati was in the lowest quartile of metro areas in inclusion ranks. Las Vegas, however, was arguably worse. Las Vegas ranked 52^nd out of 54 metros for overall inclusion, 50^th for racial inclusion, and 20^th for geographic inclusion.

My conclusions so far? More consolidated metros may lead to more geographic inclusion, in the sense that more parts of a metro area might look alike than look different from each other. But being more consolidated doesn’t do anything for racial inclusion. Also, metro fragmentation might be a huge inhibitor to metro growth.

I’ll explore this more in a future post.