Jacksonville
America's largest city by area used a 1968 county merger to recapture fleeing suburban tax revenue—now 875 square miles of military bases, automobile ports, and insurance companies test whether sprawl can convert to urban intensity.
America's largest city by land area—875 square miles after the 1968 consolidation with Duval County—Jacksonville solved its mid-century decline by absorbing everything around it. When white flight, suburbanization, and racial segregation hollowed out the urban core in the 1960s, the city merged with its county government in a single vote that tripled its territory overnight. The strategy worked as a competitive response: consolidated Jacksonville could now capture the tax base that was fleeing to the suburbs, while its peers in the region (Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis) watched revenue evaporate across municipal boundaries.
Geography made the consolidation viable. The St. Johns River—one of the few rivers in the United States that flows north—provides a deep-water port that handles more automobile imports than any other US port. The US Navy maintains three bases in the area, including Naval Station Mayport and Naval Air Station Jacksonville, making the military the city's largest employer. The combination of port, military, and interstate highways (I-95 and I-10 intersect here) creates a logistics ecosystem that attracted CSX Transportation's headquarters, Amazon distribution centers, and a growing financial services sector.
Jacksonville's 868,000 city-proper residents place it among America's fifteen largest cities by population, yet its cultural and economic profile remains overshadowed by Miami, Tampa, and Orlando within Florida. The city functions as a logistics and services node rather than a destination—a role that generates steady employment but limited national visibility. Insurance companies (Florida Blue, Fidelity National Financial) cluster here precisely because the cost structure is lower than South Florida's.
The consolidation model that saved Jacksonville in 1968 now defines its challenge: a vast territory requires proportionally vast infrastructure spending, and the city's low-density sprawl makes public transit economically unviable. Jacksonville is testing whether a city that grew by area can eventually grow by intensity.