What are some factors that can possibly cause an American town to be officially downgraded to a village? Are there any examples of this?

26 comments

1. There is no official definition of either, so your concept is not possible.

2. I’m not aware of any. I’ve been in many places that have sub fifty residents total and it is still a town. The designation of “village” is just not very common in the United States, though it is used in some places.

3. There aren’t uniform standards.

4. There’s no official designations for towns/villages/cities/whatever. Jacksonville Florida for example is one of the largest cities in the continental US, but that’s only because the county decided to declare the entirety of Duval County to be within city limits. Even though most of it is definitely *not* a city, and it’s full of what would be considered towns anywhere else. So what things get called is entirely arbitrary.

   Some states may have their own way of categorizing communities, but there’s no hard or fast rule. The term “village” is, to my knowledge at least, only used in a few places in the North East.

5. There’s no legal basis for the term “village”. The closest thing is the phenomenon of ghost towns, where everyone moves away, buildings are abandoned, and local industry collapses.

6. We don’t really categorize cities/town/etc. like that.

7. In Connecticut we have cities (they elect a mayor) or towns (they elect a town council). That’s it, end of list.

8. These designations are made by states, not at the federal level. Some states have official designations, others do not. Each state has different laws for incorporation.

   Population loss could lead to a change in terminology, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything more significant than the City of Springfield is now the Town of Springfield. It doesn’t always present a “downgrade” in any meaningful way other than a way to distinguish that the incorporated area has a certain population.

   Perhaps a town/village/city has lost population or has financial problems and determines that having a council is no longer productive or a police department is too expensive to maintain, in that case those services would fall to the county level.

   There’s no single answer for any of this. It’s complicated and depends on state laws, how areas are incorporated, etc.

9. I think that the smallest an incorporated town can be is 1000 in Virginia. Smaller communities are officially listed as unincorporated areas, and most of us just refer to them as small towns or residential areas.

10. We don’t really use the word village that much. I think Alaskans do but I’m not certain about officially. Pelican Alaska is a fishing village but they have a city government.

    A town/city is incorporated = votes for their local government.

    There’s plenty of people living and working in unincorporated areas with no city level government.

11. Yeah, there’s historically not a legal standard the way there is in Britain. It’s just not a meaningful distinction except in popular usage.

12. Desisgnations for settled places are based on *state* law. The only state I’ve lived that had villages was New York. There, towns were spreads of territory like counties but smaller, while villages were settled clumps that weren’t big enough to be cities.

    I lived in California now, where we have cities (incorporated municipalities) and that’s all — if you’re not a city, you’re served by the county. A city can choose to disincorporate (thus no longer paying to support its own services), and there have been cities disincorporated due to population dropping extremely low (but it’s rare, and it’s only possible because our “city” can be quite small in the first place).

13. I’m not aware that there is anything “official” about it. I think it’s more of a marketing thing. “Village” sort of implies a kind of quaintness or historical charm. You can call your community anything you want.

14. I’ve never lived anywhere that had “village” as an official designation.

15. In MA, there is no legal concept of a village. There are minimum population requirements for a town to change to a city, but afaik, there’s no requirement that a city whose population falls below that requirement to revert to a town.

    New York State is the only state I know that has a formal legal concept for villages. NYS villages are contained within a town or towns. I don’t think there’s any process for a town to be changed to a village, but there is a process to dissolve a village, transferring services to the town or towns containing it. That requires a vote of the village voters.

16. Newton, Massachusetts is a city (has a mayor) and is split up into different “villages”.

    Fun Fact: The village of Nonantum has its own language called Lake Talk. Matt LeBlanc talked about it on Conan.

17. I suppose if the town council are pretentious enough they could officially reincorporate as a village, since the words town, village, and city don’t actually mean anything different (at least by my state laws).

18. Local governments are “creatures of the state”. That means that each state sets the boundaries and rules for local government. If my state tomorrow wanted to abolish the City of Indianapolis and make it directly controlled by the State Government, they could. It would take a lot of law changing since there’s extensive code references to Indianapolis,but there’s nothing preventing them from doing so.

    In Indiana, we only have towns and cities for incorporated municipal governments. And there’s a few different classes of each, usually based both on population and then what kind of government. In general towns do not have mayors (with two exceptions) whereas cities have an elected mayor who handles day-to-day governance. I’ve never heard of a city downgrading themselves to a village, or a class two city downgrading themselves to a class three city.

    ​

    At some point we did have villages. And informally many areas of Indiana may still refer to themselves as such. Broad Ripple Village has been incorporated into the City Of Indianapolis since before I was born, and hasn’t had its own government for eons, but its still called that because it was initially founded as a suburb just outside of Indianapolis city limits. Like many streetcar suburbs of the time, it has its own main street and other business corridors. And the City of Indianapolis continues to foster that sense of community within Broad Ripple even though it, legally, is just Indianapolis at this point.

19. Each state manage municipalities differently, so there is no set rules.

    * In South Carolina, *village* does not exist; it is either a *town* or *city* by population.
    * In North Carolina, the municipality can decide what to identify as, so it can be a *village*, *town*, or *city*; there is no set criteria.

20. A town and a village is the same thing. There’s no meaningful distinction, outside of how individual states or countries define them.

21. There is no federal laws as such. In New Jersey there is no such formal designations either.

    So, nothing.

22. I don’t think we really have villages here even the smallest even the smallest settlements are called towns.

23. If they lose the pie eating contest at the county fair three years in a row then there is an additional competition between them and the champions but since this is so lopsided it is strictly for appearances.

24. Most states don’t have villages as an official type of municipality, so it’s not possible.

    In my state, most places are a borough, township, or city. There is one town, Bloomsburg, but it is effectively governed the same as a borough. Notably, there is no unincorporated area in Pennsylvania (places where the most local form of government is the county).

    Boroughs are what most states would call towns, while townships are generally larger and less dense. The only difference between a borough and a city is the form of government, there is no minimum size to be a city; the smallest city in Pennsylvania has a population of 800.

25. I live in a city of about 40k people and the next town over is a village of about 14k. The only actual difference is in the incorporation papers and the word that’s used. Towns can call themselves what they want here.

26. The legal definitions of those designations, if any, depend on the laws of the state in question. In much of the United States, any incorporated municipality is legally a “city” regardless of size.

    In Michigan, for instance, the only difference between a “city” and a “village” is that a village is not administratively autonomous from their surrounding township. To my knowledge there’s no way for a city to be “downgraded” to a village unless their charter is amended.