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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

You may be tempted to think that at least within a country, the administrative division should follow a homogeneous structure. However, you would be wrong again.

In the US, 48 of its 50 states have counties. Louisiana has parishes, which are essentially counties by another name. Alaska has boroughs which are distinct from counties: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boroughs_and_census_...

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48 of 50 states have a thing called a "county," but they're not all necessarily the same concept. In many states, counties are the division below the state but above cities, and have edge-to-edge coverage (all points in the state are in a county). In some states, however, counties and at least some cities are peer administrative entities (Virginia is an example), so there are some locations that are only in a county but not a city, some locations that are only in a city but not a county, and some locations that are in both.

Thank you.

There are also some city-county consolidated governments:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_city-county

In a similar vein, I used to think that counties contained cities, but then in college I met someone from NYC who correctly pointed out that cities can contain counties.

There's several cities within Harris County (Houston, Texas), and the Houston area -which some people will refer to as "Houston", "Greater Houston", or "the Greater Houston Area", overlaps several counties.

There are also several cities wholly contained within the City of Houston itself. West University and Bellaire come to mind; there's probably more but I can't be bothered.

It's a mess to someone who likes things neat :)

I used to think that most major cities were their own county, because I'm from Philadelphia and it is. This describes some other major cities, too: San Francisco, and to a first approximation Boston.

And in some states cities can cross county lines. (This is different than the NYC case because New York City consists of five entire counties.) List from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._municipalities_in.... Most cities in multiple counties are in two counties, but some are in more.

Some are large cities - from a quick scan through the list these include Atlanta, Columbus, Dallas, Houston, Milwaukee, Oklahoma City. But some are just cities that happened to be founded near a county line and expanded into adjacent counties. Braselton, Georgia has eleven thousand people and it's in four counties.

A few parts of Chicago near O'Hare airport are in DuPage county.

In California a city by law cannot cross a county line.

San Francisco has a unified city/county government. That's why it's the Board of Supervisors. I think Miami/Dade County is similar.

And there are some cities where being in the city means you are in no county. Baltimore is like this (Baltimore, MD is not part of Baltimore County, MD, nor any other county), as is every city in Virginia.

St. Louis, also. It's similar to Baltimore - in both cases there's a city that's part of no county, and a county with the same name.

Furthermore, even when a county is the division below the state but above the city/town, its significance can vary a lot. In some states, county-level government can be relatively important/powerful. But somewhere like Massachusetts, it's significant for some legal things: courts, property transactions, etc. but day to day, counties are pretty much irrelevant.

It does get weird, like you live in Chicago but your government is Cook County.

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