The Plight of the Urban Core

[IrvAdams]

An interesting discussion would be the debate between the dynamic of one large, one-stop-shopping consolidated city/county versus the several-nearby-municipalities-competing model that comprises some SMSAs. As each smaller city fights for population and industry among it's immediate neighbors, is the net effect positive growth for everybody, or does the huge consolidated city model make more sense?

[vicupstate]

^Oh, there's no question they would have done that. It would have been inevitable. Most of the other major cities in Florida (and elsewhere) did that. Tampa, St. Pete, Orlando, Tallahassee, and Fort Lauderdale have all annexed large amounts of suburban/undeveloped land. Miami became semi-consolidated with Dade County and Jax opted for full consolidation with Duval. Here, we would have annexed at least the airport and a lot of the old Southside, perhaps some of the older Westside, and maybe even Arlington.

Several attempts had been made to annex outlying areas in the 15-20 years prior to Consolidation and none were successful. That is one reason Consolidation was pursued.

[IrvAdams]

But didn't each municipality have the right to opt-out of the consolidation like Jacksonville Beach did? Why would they fight annexation before consolidation occurred, and then just accept the consolidation when it happened?

[thelakelander]

I'm not aware of any municipalities outside of the beach communities and Baldwin being in existence when Jax consolidated with the county.  Before that, several municipalities like LaVilla, Fairfield, Murray Hill, South Jacksonville, etc. had already been incrementally annexed into Jax between the 1880s and 1930s.