Connecting Cities, Towns Could Lead to More, Cheaper Homes within the US | Invesloan.com

Depending on who you ask, suburban living is either the stuff of the American dream, a desolate, alienating existence, or something in between. But there is no doubt of the grip that the white picket fences and green lawns have on the American imagination. In his 1985 book Crabgrass Frontier, the historian Kenneth T. Jackson — perhaps the dean of American suburban studies — wrote that “suburbia has become the quintessential physical achievement of the United States; it is perhaps more representative of its culture than big cars, tall buildings, or professional football.” To many urbanists, the suburbs also represent something a little more prosaic, though no less important: a major governance problem.

In particular, the suburbs pose a problem called municipal fragmentation. Most of the little bedroom communities surrounding a major city have their own governments, their own electorate, and their own set of policy priorities. The central problems of urban governance — how to run a safe and efficient transportation network, where to put housing, how to cultivate a strong job market — are essentially regional, but the mosaics of incorporated towns and unincorporated county lands that surround major American cities struggle to properly coordinate to address these issues. Each little fiefdom is largely free to pursue its own goals, even if those goals conflict with the interests of the larger metropolitan region, and there are few regional bodies in the United States that have the muscle to overcome this parochialism.

But overcoming local parochialism is the key to creating vibrant, growing cities across the nation. If we’re going to solve the housing crisis, build a transportation network that works for all people, and provide economic opportunity to all of the more than 80% of Americans who live in urban areas, then we need institutions that can tie together the towns, hamlets, and satellite cities of our major metropolitan regions, so that they all start moving in the same direction.

To understand the problem of municipal fragmentation, consider New York City’s housing shortage. (By one estimate, the New York metropolitan area would need to build more than half a million homes in order to close the housing gap.) The city can and should stimulate a lot more housing production within its borders (and is attempting to do so), but even if the city council abolished all zoning laws tomorrow and allowed massive amounts of new construction, New York would probably still be digging out of a housing shortage in a decade, albeit a less severe one.

That’s in part because New York City comprises less than 10% of the entire New York City metropolitan area in terms of surface area. The region as a whole includes more than 900 other municipalities, from New Haven, Connecticut, in the north to the seaside towns of southern New Jersey. Quite a few of those localities are affluent bedroom communities that have grown prosperous off their proximity to New York while providing the city with very little in return.

For example, many residents of Greenwich, Connecticut (average household income: $272,636) have lucrative jobs in Manhattan. They benefit from the city’s booming economy, as well as its high concentration of skilled workers and major employers in high-wage industries like finance, but their property taxes don’t go to New York. Instead of seeing itself as part of the broader NYC area and welcoming people who are looking to secure their economic future there, Greenwich has instituted a draconian zoning code that keeps people out and contributes to the region’s housing supply crunch. (It doesn’t help that the governor of Connecticut recently vetoed a bill intended to mitigate the state’s housing shortage.)

If Greenwich and every other exclusionary suburb in the New York metro area loosened up their zoning, it would go a long way toward easing the central city’s affordability crisis. There’s plenty of room there; even increasing Greenwich’s population density to make it on par with a denser midsize city like New Haven would mean growing its population by fivefold, adding more than 250,000 residents. More homebuilding in the suburbs would not only make the region as a whole more affordable, but it would also give more enterprising people a chance to move to the area, work, build businesses, and contribute to the shared prosperity of the region. But officials in New York City have no jurisdictional authority to push other towns to greenlight more housing. And since the potential benefits are so diffuse, Greenwich residents who oppose more development (aka NIMBYs) have little clear incentive to be part of a region-wide solution.

Some metropolitan areas have solved this collective action problem through municipal consolidation: New York City’s borders stopped at the edge of the Island of Manhattan until it absorbed the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island between 1873 and 1879. More recently, Louisville, Kentucky, merged with surrounding Jefferson County in 2003. But in general, consolidation is a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Fragmentation is the norm in the United States.

While it’s unlikely that big cities will be able to annex surrounding counties en masse anytime soon, there is another way to fight municipal fragmentation and to alleviate the housing crunch on a wider scale: through regional super-governments that conduct planning and exercise some land use authority over entire metropolitan areas. The United States is already dotted with regional government authorities — in particular, the metropolitan planning organizations that help distribute federal transportation funding, like the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, the San Francisco Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. But regional bodies often have little power compared to cities, making the battle for change an uphill fight.

Our tradition of strong hyperlocal rule and weak regional government is fairly unusual across the globe. The regional governments of Barcelona and Helsinki’s urban areas, for example, do genuine regional planning. And in stark contrast to the United States, Japan is subdivided into prefectures, which are supercharged regional governments that have broad control over planning and land use. That may help to explain why housing costs in big Japanese cities like Tokyo have largely remained stable even as the country’s rural population has shrunk and its urban population has grown.

Three decades ago, California very nearly became the first US state to inch in Japan’s direction. In some ways, the state is an ideal testing ground for super-regionalism, thanks to the extreme fragmentation of its largest metropolitan areas (Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area), its history of progressive experimentation, and its yawning housing shortage. Policymakers in the state spent a lot of time in the late 1980s and early 1990s thinking about solutions to municipal fragmentation. Some of what they came up with was genuinely radical.

For example, the Los Angeles 2000 Committee, which then-Mayor Tom Bradley assembled to consider the city’s future planning needs, issued a report in 1988 that proposed a regional Growth Management Agency for greater Los Angeles. The goal of this agency would be to produce plans that would help the Los Angeles metro area, which sprawls over 4,850 square miles and more than 100 municipalities, “achieve a favorable balance between jobs and housing.” The agency would have been empowered to, for example, stimulate job growth in eastern Los Angeles and encourage greater housing production in prosperous Orange County.

Inspired in part by the work of the Los Angeles 2000 Committee, in 1989 some influential Northern California residents secured both public and private funding to create the Bay Area 2020 Commission. This commission’s work was much more explicitly regionalist, and so its core recommendation was for a significantly more muscular regional planning mechanism than even the Los Angeles committee had devised. The Bay Area’s commission proposed merging the area’s three major regional bodies (the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District) into a single commission.

This Regional Commission would have had extensive powers, including the ability to levy fines on local governments that didn’t comply with regional plans, and to issue permits for a proposed development anywhere in the Bay Area’s nine counties. A bill was introduced in the state senate to implement Bay Vision 2020, but, needless to say, it didn’t pass. Many local governments, and two of the three regional bodies that were supposed to merge, were not pleased with the prospect of ceding their autonomy.

But that wasn’t even the spiciest proposal from the era. That honor belongs to an idea cooked up by then-Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. Brown was one of the central figures of late 20th-century California politics: the first Black speaker of the Assembly, the first Black mayor of San Francisco, and the kingmaker who helped launch the political careers of both Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom. He actually floated two separate proposals for overhauling regional government across the state. The first one was about as audacious as it gets: In 1987, Brown casually suggested completely abolishing city and county government in the state of California and replacing it with a series of regional governments. In essence, he was proposing that California adopt the Japanese prefectural system. Though his idea never made it into legislative language, a couple of years later, he proposed something a little less radical. As Bill Fulton, the dean of California urban planners, wrote of Brown’s proposal in his book about Los Angeles, The Reluctant Metropolis, Brown’s proposed “Regional Development and Infrastructure Agencies” would have been directly-elected boards that could pass “judgment on large development projects that were previously the province of local cities and counties.”

By making the boards directly elected, these “regional legislatures” would have seriously diluted the power of the NIMBY bedroom communities and drawn in ambitious politicians seeking to enact major projects on a region-wide scale. Once again, this proposal died on the vine: Brown didn’t push it particularly hard, the governor wasn’t interested, and a looming recession bumped regionalism off the legislative agenda. But maybe it’s time to take another look at some of these ideas.

If states like California did beef up their regional governments, it could go a long way toward solving the housing crisis. A 2023 report from California YIMBY (my former employer, full disclosure) found indications that the biggest potential housing gains from zoning and land use reforms can be found in suburbs, not the high-cost cities they surround. Eliminating zoning in San Francisco could yield a lot more units, but doing the same in Marin County would lead to much bigger results.

Granted, implementing something like Brown’s proposal for regional super-governments would likely infuriate a lot of people in both San Francisco and Marin. Opponents would no doubt describe regionalism as an unconscionable usurpation of local democracy. In return, I would argue that region-wide planning is more democratic than giving exclusive enclaves like Sausalito free rein to write their own rules and lock out lower-income residents from the rest of the region. If hyper-local control is what got us the Bay Area’s current housing and homelessness crisis, what is it really worth?

We may never get the Bay Area mega-city that Willie Brown seems to have envisioned. But at a time when many Americans are concerned about housing costs and commute times, even some halfway measures toward tighter integration across metropolitan benefits would yield enormous benefits.

Ned Resnikoff is an urban policy consultant and writer. He is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and is currently working on a book about cities with an expected publication date of Fall 2026.