This discussion, although amazingly lengthy is seeming useful. Someone already explained that much of New England is different from most of the United States in terms of not having unicorporated areas, and it might help to explain details.
In Massachusetts, we have counties. Counties don't do that much in terms of government, but have things like the District Attorney and Sherriff. I think that each cities/town or at least the vast majority are in a single county. Every bit of land in the state is in some city or town. Cities and towns are basically the same thing except that cities (to first order) have a city council and a mayor, and towns have a board of selectmen and a town meeting (direct or representative). There are some towns that are bigger than some cities - the issue is form of government, not size - although mostly the big places are cities and smaller are towns. Within some cities there are neighborhood-type divisions that have significant cultural standing, and I'm unclear on whether any of them have legal standing. Newton is an example where the 'villages' are said by wikipedia not to have legal standing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton,_Massachusetts So using one admin_level for county and another for city/town seems fine, and then if a city/town really has a legal notion of neighborhood admin_level=9 will be fine. Also in Massachusetts there are place names for areas of towns. Generally these refer to what was once a cluster of houses in colonial or mid-19th-century times. But these aren't appropriate for admin_level because a) they have no legal standing and b) they don't have crisp boundaries. To me this clearly points out the difference between names for governmental areas and place names that would exist without government.
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