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thrill 4 hours ago

Aren’t there several states that have the same city name repeated within the state? I think there’d need to be a county delineator here too.

TallGuyShort 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That gets extremely complicated. My town straddles the border between 2 counties. And you can't trivially have subdomains for counties and cities at the same level, because Wyoming has a Laramie city but it's in Albany County, not the neighboring Laramie County.

Did this just inspire the next "Falsehoods programmers believe about... Federalism"?

wat10000 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Virginia cities are independent, not within counties. And there's both a Fairfax City and Fairfax County. Making things even more confusing, the county seat is Fairfax City despite the city not being part of the county. The county has fairfaxcounty.gov while the city has fairfaxva.gov.

There are a handful of other independent cities in the US, but the vast majority are in Virginia.

georgel 4 hours ago | parent [-]

St. Louis is like this as well.

tialaramex 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you have hierarchical naming, which DNS does, then the problem of name clashes is always a problem for whoever sits above those names and they can resolve it however they like.

If your state thought it was a good idea to have two cities named "Star City" that's on them to resolve however they like. Trial by endurance for the city mayor? Draw lots? Everybody in the state votes? Not my monkeys, not my circus.

DrewADesign 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The edge cases always make things so difficult:

Manhattan: New York County

Brooklyn: Kings County

The Bronx: Bronx County

Queens: Queens County

Staten Island: Richmond County

All New York City. Same municipality, 5 counties.

kmoser 4 hours ago | parent [-]

There's also the edge case of the (unofficial) 6th borough of NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_borough

runjake 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're right, but typically, when two towns in a state share a name, only one is an incorporated city at most. The other, or both, are usually unincorporated communities. Normally, unincorporated communities do not receive a city.state.us locality domain.

toast0 3 hours ago | parent [-]

For city.state.us, I'm pretty sure first to file (while filing was available) wins...

Ohio doesn't (or at least historically didn't) have a highlander restriction for incorporated cities.

Oakwood, Cuyahoga County was incorporated in 1951 although Oakwood, Montgomery County was incorporated in 1908. There's also an Oakwood in Paulding County, but its wikipedia page doesn't have an incorporation date or explicitly declare it incorporated or not. I thought there was a famous Ohio city with a same named city elsewhere, but I must have been thinking of somewhere else. I will note that Pennsylvania has an awful lot of same named Townships.

City name in the US ends up being a pretty wild concept when you dig into the details. Often what people are using as a 'city name' is really the name of their post office which statistically has a high correlation with the city they live in. But of course, lots of people live outside incorporated cities, and postal boundaries are independent of political boundaries.

youvebeenbad 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

ooh, this reminds me of Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses...

https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...