Start Date
25-2-2016 12:00 AM
Description
"The highly fragmented nature of the political systems that govern America’s metropolitan areas contributes mightily to all of these problems. The harms of political fragmentation are many and tightly interrelated. The excessive competition triggered by political fragmentation encourages local jurisdictions to pursue socially and economically undesirable policies. Cities steal malls and office parks from each other, fight tax incentive wars for auto malls, and zone out the poor for fiscal advantage in a process rife with haphazard planning and NIMBY biases. This disjointed status quo scatters new jobs like grapeshot at the furthest edge of development and in so doing throws the metropolitan housing market even farther afield into farmland, forest, and sensitive natural places. With jobs scattered like buckshot, transit, a cleaner environment, and basic opportunity for lower income Americans becomes harder, not easier, to accomplish."
Copyright
The authors
Included in
Metropolitan Governance Reform
"The highly fragmented nature of the political systems that govern America’s metropolitan areas contributes mightily to all of these problems. The harms of political fragmentation are many and tightly interrelated. The excessive competition triggered by political fragmentation encourages local jurisdictions to pursue socially and economically undesirable policies. Cities steal malls and office parks from each other, fight tax incentive wars for auto malls, and zone out the poor for fiscal advantage in a process rife with haphazard planning and NIMBY biases. This disjointed status quo scatters new jobs like grapeshot at the furthest edge of development and in so doing throws the metropolitan housing market even farther afield into farmland, forest, and sensitive natural places. With jobs scattered like buckshot, transit, a cleaner environment, and basic opportunity for lower income Americans becomes harder, not easier, to accomplish."