By Myron Orfield and Baris Gumus-Dawes
Reforming and strengthening metropolitan governance are critical to attaining a growing, fair, and sustainable national economy. In today’s global economy, metropolitan areas are the relevant competitive unit. Firms make location decisions based on evaluations of entire metropolitan labor and housing markets and transportation systems, and not simply
on evaluations of local areas. In addition, the scope of many important public policy
concerns, such as congestion, pollution, and environmental issues, exceeds local
boundaries to cover entire regions.
Despite the growing relevance of metropolitan regions in the national and global
economies, policy decisions are rarely made at the appropriate regional scale. In fact,
most metropolitan areas in the United States are governed by highly fragmented systems
that are dominated by local governments. High levels of political fragmentation produce
inefficiency and inequality in metropolitan areas, undermining the possibility of fair and
sustainable growth. Metropolitan areas could be reinvigorated by establishing regional
institutions to coordinate decisions across policy areas in ways that promote efficiency
and expand opportunity for all residents.
The harms of regional political fragmentation are many and tightly interrelated. Political
fragmentation provides incentives for inefficient land use practices and leads to sprawling
residential development that consumes valuable natural resources in an unsustainable
fashion. It stunts regional job growth by fostering zero-sum competition among local
jurisdictions, providing minimal net developmental gains for the region as a whole. By
boosting job sprawl and contributing to unclustered job growth, political fragmentation
creates an unsustainable growth pattern that undermines the development of transit
options. This contributes to ever-expanding congestion, accelerates the growth of
regional vehicle miles traveled, and torpedoes the national efforts to curb greenhouse
emissions. It encourages exclusionary zoning practices that geographically concentrate
most of the region’s affordable housing stock in urban and inner suburban areas, which
already struggle with high concentrations of poverty. By encouraging such harmful land
use practices, fragmentation intensifies racial and economic segregation in metropolitan
areas, undermining social and economic opportunities for low-income residents and
residents of color who disproportionately live in the region’s opportunity-deprived,
segregated neighborhoods. Finally, fragmentation deepens regional inequalities among
local jurisdictions by intensifying their shortsighted and harmful competition for
additional tax base.