Neighborhoods and Neighborhood Associations (NAs) have existed as long as urban spaces either as a voluntary community of close-knit social interactions or as the desire of a greater spatial entity to organize and administer the larger urban space by breaking it into more manageable subunits. Modern Neighborhood Associations are the formalization of these relationships either voluntarily bottom-up around a particular interest or top-down by design as part of an over-arching desire to plan and administer. Borrowing from Borderlands theory two terms succinctly define this difference: adhocratic and topocratic regions. Most studies of NA’s have focused on those with an adhocratic nature, less so on topocratic ones like those that have emerged in Washington State especially as the Growth Management Act required more neighborhood level planning. This study addresses this lacuna by studying four topocratically created NA’s in a mid-sized city, Bellingham, WA, through interviews of board members and a review of current and past activities as documented by each NA. This paper reports on the results finding that for the four NAs, which represent the chronological expansion of the city from the late 19th to the early 21st century, the spatial chronology has resulted in unique problems for each NA. Hence the topocratic NAs are also adhocratic ones. To further confirm this conclusion and speculate on the future, we are in the process of administering a Delphi study to each NA board and a follow-up Likert based questionnaire generated from the Delphi to the neighborhood general membership.