2 children found living in abandoned bus in Texas

[Xithras]

68. Not just Texas. That's the case in most of the west.

You actually have it a bit backward when you assume that the Northeast does it "normally", and the south does it "strangely". The New England states borrowed those concepts from old England, and they spread to some of the midwest, but the concepts of "townships" and "boroughs" are uncommon in the rest of the country.

I grew up in California and was a teenager before I ever heard the term "township". Out here, you have city governments with defined urban boundaries, and county governments which can cover thousands of square miles. There's generally nothing in between. Small unincorporated communities do exist, but they answer directly to the counties and rarely (if ever) have any kind of formal government. Some of these can be quite large. I lived just outside of Salida California for years, which has existed since the 1870's and has a population of over 13,000 people. In spite of its age and size, it has no government of its own, no police force, and is entirely dependent on the county government for its services. It's residents have voted to form independent sanitary districts to handle sewer and garbage, and a local elementary school district, but it completely lacks any sort of mayor, council, or local government. There are no zoning laws, no local ordinances, and new regulations impacting the community are passed using direct democracy. When the county decided to stop paying the electric bill for the street lights in Salida a number of years ago, the residents had to vote on whether or not to form another utility district to collect special taxes to run them. The residents voted against it, and the cities streets went dark for months (rising crime rates eventually forced the residents to reconsider, and they formed the district in a later election). It's not an anachronism either...the majority of the houses in Salida are less than 20 years old. In fact, a brand new "town" called Mountain House was established north of us only about 10 years ago. An entirely new town without any sort of government (most of it's "laws" come from HOA rules in the various neighborhoods that have been built). In the western U.S., this is considered a fairly normal thing. I don't know if the legal mechanisms even exist in California to create a "township" in the Eastern sense.