Quote:
Originally Posted by owego
What would your definition of a city be?
I am thinking along the lines of 35,000+ in population.
What are some of your requirements?
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In New York State, cities and towns are all defined legally and are representative of the form of local government found in any particular area. Population is irrelevant in pretty much every regard.
I'll try to paraphrase from the rather lengthy Wikipedia entry that can be found here:
Administrative divisions of New York - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
All of NY's 62 counties are divided into either cities or towns. Cities have the highest level of autonomy out of all other forms of local governments and the most control over how their residents are taxed. Believe it or not, there are only 62 cities in NYS (not one per every county, just a coincidence) and most counties don't contain any cities.
All other places in New York are towns - however most towns are further broken down into villages and hamlets, unlike cities which are only broken down into sometimes vaguely defined neighborhoods which have no legal status. Towns provide varying levels of governmental services to the communities within them. Hamlets are unincorporated sections of towns and have no legal status of their own, aside from having specific boundaries, and as such are completely reliant on the town for all services. Villages typically make use of certain town functions while also establishing things like building codes or even small police forces, the level of power given to villages varies greatly. Five places in NY also have a village/town hybrid form of government which is similar to a "township" in other states.
The vast majority of New York State residents live in Hamlets, which most people refer to as "towns". To complicate things even more, in downstate New York (Westchester, Nassau & Suffolk Counties), nearly all hamlets have Census-Designated Place status, which means they are defined as a "place" by the Census Bureau. This is not the case for most of upstate, where hamlets are more often defined by postal codes or vague boundaries similar to those of city neighborhoods. Also strangely, postal codes rarely if ever line up to exactly what the boundaries of any given city/town/hamlet/village are and some have no corresponding post offices at all....so, for instance, you could live in Plainedge, NY but your mail would show either a Levittown, NY or Bethpage, NY address.
To top it all off, New York City breaks all the rules in that it is a singular city encompassing five separate counties - which are also considered boroughs of the city.
Incredibly confusing minutiae but something I've taken an interest in over the last year or so. There are even smaller layers of government (special districts, community boards, etc.) beyond those listed but I won't even get into them!
As far as population is concerned, cities range from a little over 3,000 residents (Sherrill, NY) to 8,274,527 (NYC). It's a really wacky system.
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NYS Geographic Glossary
