As a point of PB history, there used to be a seperate forum for just QV and one for BV (but not Hawthorne) and then the rest of South Philly including Grad Hospital or whatever we want to call it. It has to do with how active a neighborhood is in posting, not population or geopgraphy. There also used to be a Northern Liberties forum that did not include Fishtown or Kensington. There also did not used to be a North Philly section at all and the West Philly section was only University City and included no other parts of Philadlephia west of the Schuykill.

The reorganization started because as Grad Hospital started to take off with endless threads about people considering moving there, drama on the SOSNA board, what do we call the neighborhood, etc., etc. it became apparent that South to Washington west of Broad deserved its own forum. At the same time, I believe it was actually I who was one of the first proponents amongst the mods of linking all the neighborhoods south of South, north of Washington, east of Broad into a single forum which actually involved merging two distinct forums and adding in Hawthorne which had no presence at all. Basically as neighborhoods see more discussion and more traffic, its the number of posts that guide the layout of the forums.

It does seem that as a general PB trend that gentrification (or whatever you want to call it) drives the need for new forums to handle the quantity posts much faster than "bridging the digital divide" does which has surprised me a little. Discussion here on PB increases much faster when it is about new people moving into an area than it does from oldtimers in an area getting online and finding PB, though there are noticable exceptions. Make of that what you will.

Part of it is that newcomers tend to more anxious not just to discuss real estate, but also to talk about new businesses they bring with them and to start new community groups or to talk about neighborhood activities (neighborhood cleanups, fairs, etc.) online than Philly native residents do. This trend is amplified in areas where the concept of "gentrification" is controversial (again see Grad Hospital or how in terms of number of posts Brewerytown at one point seemed to completely eclipse its more established southern neighbor Fairmount for a while). Again make of that what you will.

Edit: To be clear I used to be a mod but am no longer as I stepped down a few years ago to take some time off from PB. I used to mod Politics but its probably just as well that I no longer do as I've since become more actively involved in a few local campaigns so much so that it might seem a tad lopsided for me to play traffic cop to some people.

__________________
Barack Obama on security, Iraq and Afghanistan. We need a Commander in Chief who knows the differences between Shii'a and Sunni.