Texan tug-of-war

ALAMO RANCH, at the edge of San Antonio’s outer ring road, is hardly a glamorous place. New strip malls stretch along access roads; neon signs advertise a Walmart, a Target and a Men’s Wearhouse. Yet it is here that Richard Cash, a local who runs a party-equipment rental company, is fighting a suburban war. Sitting on the patio of a branch of BJ’s, a chain restaurant and bar, he denounces the city above the hum of traffic. “We moved out here for a reason: we don’t want to be part of San Antonio,” he says. “We don’t want our tax dollars being poured into downtown projects we won’t benefit from.”

Mr Cash is the head of a local committee which is trying to incorporate Alamo Ranch—which sits on San Antonio’s border—as its own city, in an attempt to head off a proposed annexation by the city proper. He has little hope of success. But in his battle, he has plenty of allies, including many state politicians. Increasingly, America’s biggest divide is not so much between red states and blue states but between cities, suburbs and rural areas. Nowhere is this more clear than in Texas.

San Antonio, much like Austin, Houston and Dallas (Texas’s other big cities), is run by Democrats; Julián Castro, Barack Obama’s housing and urban-development secretary, was previously the city’s mayor. The state at large, however, is a Republican stronghold: as well as the bulk of the congressional delegation, the GOP controls both houses of the legislature and the governor’s mansion. Nationally, Republicans control both houses of 30 states, against a figure of just 11 for Democrats. Yet the biggest city in America with a Republican mayor is San Diego in California.

In Texas, where power has long been devolved downwards, and government is generally distrusted, this has created a scramble by state politicians to pull power back upwards again. In the latest session of Texas’s state legislature, which meets for five months every two years in Austin, a series of bills were proposed to rein in cities: limiting annexation rates, capping taxation powers. Most failed, but on May 18th Greg Abbott, the governor, signed a law to prevent cities from banning fracking. That was inspired by the case of Denton, a university town near Dallas where 60% of voters opted in a referendum last November to outlaw the practice within its city limits.

Mr Abbott argues that cities are bringing about a “California-isation” of Texas. In January he accused them of introducing “a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations”, which will undermine the low-tax, low-regulation economic model which draws so many people to Texas in the first place. The problem, he argues, is as bad as federal overreach (that too concerns Mr Abbott: in April he ordered the state to “monitor” military exercises which some conspiracy theorists believe are a federal plot to conquer the south-west).

Yet despite these attempts, the reach of Texan cities is actually widening. According to the Census Bureau, five out of ten of the fastest-growing cities in America are in the Lone Star State. Thanks to an unusually permissive annexation law, in Texas cities can chase the sprawl outwards, incorporating neighbouring land: San Antonio is adding 66 square miles (171 square kilometres) to its existing 465 (see map). Its population could increase by 1m from its current 1.4m by 2040. Some rural and suburban residents who thought they had escaped the city are clawed back into it—and often compelled to pay higher property taxes.

City leaders say this is fair: people who live at the edge of big cities benefit from the urban environment and so they should contribute to it. “It’s annexation that’s made Texas cities healthy and grow relative to north-eastern and Midwestern counterparts,” says Bennett Sandlin, head of the Texas Municipal League, which lobbies for cities. He points to economic failures in places like St Louis and Detroit as evidence for what can happen when a single city government isn’t in control.

But it upsets plenty of Texans such as Mr Cash. “People don’t want to have a city council issue diktats down to them,” says Jess Fields, a researcher at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative-leaning think-tank. He argues that cities are expanding because they need newer, richer taxpayers to cover their overspending and their hefty municipal debts. A law that would have introduced new restrictions on cities’ annexation powers narrowly failed in the state’s Senate.

If Texas genuinely is turning into a new California, Texas’s Republicans have a lot more municipal activism to look forward to. There, Los Angeles recently opted to introduce a citywide minimum wage of $15. San Francisco maintains a citywide rent-control scheme. Though they may be controlled by Democrats, Texas’s cities are by comparison bastions of free-market enterprise. And confrontation does not always work. California’s Republicans spent a lot of energy resisting change—and there are not that many of them left.