Welcome to Super City, USA | A long-forgotten idea to connect California’s cities and towns could lower home prices

emphases mine:

> 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.

They go on to talk about regional housing authorities. It’s very interesting and worth a read imo. I’m a huge fan of [metro areas being self-governing (ideally as states)](https://archive.is/01rJV) so it’s cool to see more people discussing reasons why that’s important and ways we could move toward that.

!ping YIMBY