ABSTRACT
Governmental fragmentation is the essence of American suburbia. Suburban government appeared to rest on a foundation of shortsighted parochialism and greed, a fact that critics deplored in articles, books, and policy reports. Products of permissive incorporation laws and a desire for local self-rule, municipalities proliferated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially along the metropolitan fringe. In addition, in 2002 there were 13,506 independent school districts in the United States, separate units of government charged with the oversight of public education. Some county governments were attempting to withdraw from the costly business of providing municipal services in a more orderly fashion, and were actually promoting total coverage of the county by municipalities. Metropolitanwide government promised to dilute the hardwon power of central-city blacks and threatened to return them to the status of an ignored minority. City-county consolidation seems destined to proceed at a limited pace in the future as the barriers to reform preclude rapid change.
