A just released book from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, titled Megaregions and America’s Future got me thinking back to all the writing and talking I did through much of my career on the importance of taking a regional approach to major growth issues.  This piece published just before I retired was only the latest in a list of several that I wrote over my time in land use planning (newspaper archives are not what they used to be so I’m having a hard time finding any of them online anymore!).

But getting local officials to recognize and work together on issues that are best approached on a regional basis is, as I’ve learned over my long career, something that is akin to herding cats. It just ain’t easy, and hardly ever works.  It’s great to have books like the one just out on this topic, but a piece by Governing magazine editor Alan Ehrenhalt several years ago titled The Rise of the Megaregion pointed out some of these grim realities:

It seems pretty clear that the idea of megaregions has moved from obscurity back to the center of debate in a strikingly short time. But I think it’s pertinent to ask the same question people asked when Gottmann first came up with it back in 1957: Other than as an intellectual exercise, does it really serve much purpose? … Can we really expect that these jurisdictions will simply skip the step of cooperating with each other and turn to the larger question of sharing power …? That seems extremely unlikely, to say the least.

My experience has shown this to be the case.  Given the demographic characteristic of our state, some of the actions attempted by our state legislature really are more like regional approaches to growth issues (see previous posts on Authorities, like MIDA, Port Authority, Point of the Mountain, and now Utah Lake).  They have, at best, a mixed track record.

One area Ehrenhalt does see hope and actual action on the regional level, however, is in transportation.

In fact, though, there is one area of public policy for which a megaregional approach really does make sense. That one area is transportation. In an era of rapidly rising gas prices and expensive jet fuel, there is going to be a genuine need for inter-city train travel. … When you think of megaregions not as coherent economic juggernauts but less grandly as transportation corridors, the concept finally begins to look plausible. … Touting megaregions as the key to America’s economic future, even if false, may represent a useful step toward establishing transportation policies that our dense concentrations of light bulbs really do need.

In one of those long-ago opinion pieces I wrote, I quoted Alex Marshall, who in his book How Cities Work wrote,

“ If we want to shape a city, we have to shape its transportation system. … If we want a particular type of place, then we have to look at what kind of transportation system produces that kind of place.  If we want to control or shape the type of development in a metropolitan area, we have to grapple with the highways, rails and other systems that move people around within it.”

Indeed in my past writing, I characterized the regional transportation system as the skeleton on which we hang our regional character – will it be sprawl, or urban villages?  And, as noted in that recent piece I wrote, I think our local and state officials have made some real progress in this area.

Now, can we turn that imperative to another regional-level growth issue – housing affordability?