Reliable method to get relations / boundaries for a US city/town/village from Overpass API

Question

I'm trying to get the boundaries from Overpass API for all counties, cities, towns, villages or hamlets for specific US states. The problem I'm having is that I sometimes get "nodes" instead of "relations" and I haven't found any truly reliable way to find the "relation". I'm quite sure one exists because OpenStreetMap seems to always be capable of showing me the relation/boundaries for some of these same places I'm trying to get.

This is pretty good but still returns a lot of nodes:

[out:json];
area["ISO3166-2"="US-NJ"]->.state;
(
    nwr(area.state)["type"="boundary"]["admin_level"="8"];
);
out geom qt;

This is also pretty good but also tends to return a lot of nodes:

[out:json];
area["ISO3166-2"="US-NJ"]->.state;
(
  nwr(area.state)["place"="city"];
);
out geom qt;

I've been using this to find relations from a node id but I've found a few cases where it doesn't return any relation even when I'm sure one exists:

[out:json];
(node(27023173);
<;
);
out geom;

Answer 1

I do thing your queries are pretty good. Let's look on the first one:

[out:json];
area["ISO3166-2"="US-NJ"]->.state;
(
    nwr(area.state)["type"="boundary"]["admin_level"="8"];
);
out geom qt;

returns mainly relations (boundaries) like:

{
  "version": 0.6,
  "generator": "Overpass API 0.7.61.5 4133829e",
  "osm3s": {
    "timestamp_osm_base": "2024-01-07T11:09:45Z",
    "timestamp_areas_base": "2024-01-07T07:01:30Z",
    "copyright": "The data included in this document is from www.openstreetmap.org. The data is made available under ODbL."
  },
  "elements": [

{
  "type": "relation",
  "id": 11998841,
  "bounds": {
    "minlat": 39.3806414,
    "minlon": -75.5442101,
    "maxlat": 39.5557416,
    "maxlon": -75.3514966
  },
  "members": [
    {
      "type": "way",
      "ref": 883001478,
      "role": "outer",
      "geometry": [
         { "lat": 39.4613019, "lon": -75.4027965 },
         { "lat": 39.4621142, "lon": -75.4008609 },
         { "lat": 39.4622233, "lon": -75.3994642 },
[...]

If you are referring to lot of nodes as those like on the image below (Cherry Chill),

that's because this node is part of boundary relation marked as admin_centre (see: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/962882). I'm not sure if you can filter it out directly in Overpass.