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.
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.
No, historically the US postal service would make anyone who couldn't claim they had the name first change it. I grew up in a small town in rural OH that had to do this in it's history since the name they chose was already in use by another village/town in the state.
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"?
This comes up with school districts too. My home county in rural Ohio had a school district administration that oversaw all the schools in the county but there are two 'exempted' school districts. One is a town that is split between two counties, so the school district would fall in two counties. Hence it is "exempted" from both and the official name is "<TOWN NAME> Exempted Village Schools". The other one if the largest town in the county, which due to it's size voted to exempt itself from the services and administration of the county government, presumably since this single school has as many students as the rest of the county combined.
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.
St. Louis is like this as well.
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.
Look-alike Unicode characters.
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.
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.
Oakwood in Montgomery county is addressed as Dayton on all mail until you get to Kettering which has it's own name for addressing.
A quick search shows that Oakwood in Paulding County has it's own PO and zip code 45873 and Oakwood, Cuyahoga County has 44146.
I suspect that the postal service is much more forgiving on duplicate town names since the advent of zip codes.
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.
There's also the edge case of the (unofficial) 6th borough of NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_borough
ny.ny.us
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82f7BB6zNOcooh, this reminds me of Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses...
https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
Sadly Portland OR eliminated one of my favorites by introducing "South Portland" and eliminating significant leading zeros from address numbers.