identical or similar to those of incorporated places). Others have governments performing few if any functions, or no governments whatsoever, as is the case with unorganized territories, the election districts of Maryland, the magisterial districts of Virginia, and similar units. All incorporated places within a State may be independent of any MCD (as in Wisconsin), dependent within an MCD (as in Mississippi), or there may be a mixture of independent and dependent incorporated places (for example, in Vermont, villages are dependent within MCDs, while cities are independent of any MCD). Dependent places frequently are located in more than one MCD.
The places that are independent of any county subdivision stand alone in the Census Bureau’s statistical presentations; that is, they appear in the same alphabetical format within counties as the MCDs, and their statistical information is not included in that of another entity except the county. Although they are not shown as part of any MCD, the Census Bureau assigns these places MCD geographic identification codes so that there is complete county subdivision coverage for the entire United States. (For details, see the “Place Codes” section at the end of this chapter.)
There are complex place/MCD relationships in several States. For example, in Ohio, places that are in more than one county may be independent of any MCD in one county, yet be dependent within an MCD in another county. In some States, there are some places that are coextensive with one or more MCDs. When these places annex or detach territory, the MCD boundary automatically changes with the place boundary, adding area from or losing area to, surrounding MCDs. (For further information on the geographic relationships between places, MCDs, and CCDs, refer to Chapter 8, “County Subdivisions,” specifically Table 8-4, which describes the relationship of places to county subdivisions in each State.)
Census Bureau criteria that establish the relationships of incorporated places to the statistical entities generally do not vary among the States. For the 1990 census, places consisted of whole census blocks. When a place boundary split a previously existing census block, the split block number was assigned suffixes, with each
