Across the United States, local governments are facing regional-scale crises with municipal-sized tools. Housing, homelessness, infrastructure, and climate challenges have all outgrown the fiscal and institutional reach of any single city. Federal dollars that once underwrote public works and affordable housing have thinned out, while expectations for local governments have only expanded. The result is a generational shift toward what we call the New Localism: a world in which cities and metropolitan regions must design, finance, and deliver their own solutions.
In our earlier work, Organizing for Impact: Lessons from Atlanta’s Housing Strike Force, we argued that success depends as much on how cities organize as on what they choose to do. Atlanta’s experience showed that systems change requires new institutions (a public asset corporation to build mixed income housing on public land) and new capital (raised via municipal bonds, public asset disposition and the aggregation of private/philanthropic resources). But as the scale of our challenges continues to grow, that same logic must now extend beyond the boundaries of individual cities.
America’s major metropolitan regions—Los Angeles, Atlanta, Denver, the Bay Area, and others—are economic powerhouses. The economic output of each metro rival entire nations. Yet they are less than the sum of their parts — politically fragmented, often governed by dozens of cities and counties, each with its own rules, budgets, and constraints. The next frontier of local innovation lies in closing this gap—building regional governance and finance systems that match the economic power and geographic scale of our metros.
The Untapped Power of Metropolitan Economies
The modern U.S. economy runs on metropolitan engines. The Los Angeles region alone produces nearly $1.3 trillion (2023) in annual output, a figure on par with Switzerland and the Netherlands. The Atlanta region’s GDP, roughly $570 billion (2023), rivals the economies of Norway and Israel. Yet within these massive ecosystems, the core cities operate with budgets that barely register by comparison.
Los Angeles’ city government manages an annual budget of around $13 billion; barely one percent of its metro economy. Atlanta’s general fund budget sits under $1 billion, even as its metro area supports more than six million residents. This mismatch leaves local governments structurally ill-equipped to tackle problems, the causes and consequences of which spill far beyond city limits.
Housing markets are regional; so are labor markets, commutes, and infrastructure systems. But our governance structures, with a few exceptions, remain municipal, bound by city boundaries drawn for nineteenth-century politics rather than twenty-first-century economies. The question confronting metro leaders is simple but profound: how do we build institutions that govern at the scale where our challenges—and our opportunities—actually exist?
A Precedent in Transportation: When Metros Think Like Metros
The way we govern transportation provides inspiration.
In the mid-twentieth century, U.S. metro regions facing mobility crises realized that fragmented local transit systems could never knit together a regional economy. Their solution was to build metropolitan authorities empowered to raise revenue and act collectively.
In Atlanta, the state legislature created the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) in 1965, authorizing counties to opt in by taxing themselves one percent in sales revenue. Counties that voted yes gained both service and representation on MARTA’s governing board—a direct link between local contribution and regional decision-making.
Across the country, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) was authorized by California statute in 1957, with Alameda, Contra Costa, and San Francisco counties approving their own local taxes and bonds to join the system. In Washington, D.C., the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) emerged from a tri-state compact in 1967 that bound the District, Maryland, and Virginia together in a single operating and funding structure.
These experiments worked because they did something revolutionary for their time: they married regional governance to regional finance. Residents and localities bought into a shared future, understanding that participation and payment were two sides of the same coin. The result was infrastructure that linked entire metropolitan areas—physically and economically—in ways no city could have achieved alone.
Governance innovations in the mid twentieth century had a long tail effect. The roles and responsibilities of metropolitan planning organizations, first federally mandated in the 1960s, were expanded by the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991, driven by the brilliant Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A growing number of metropolitan areas (e.g., Denver, Los Angeles) then began to run referenda to raise dedicated resources for transit expansion.
Yet this model never fully translated to other critical sectors. Nowhere is that more evident than in housing. While transit found its metropolitan footing half a century ago, housing policy remains stubbornly localized—managed city by city, parcel by parcel, subsidy by subsidy—even though the housing market itself functions regionally.
Los Angeles: Building a Regional Housing System
That may finally be changing. The Los Angeles area recently embraced a move toward metropolitan governance in housing. With ten million residents spread across eighty-eight cities, Los Angeles County is larger than forty states. Its housing and homelessness crises are similarly outsized. For decades, every jurisdiction wrestled with the problem on its own. Today, those walls are beginning to come down.
Three interlocking institutions now form the backbone of the region’s new housing and homelessness architecture. The first is the Executive Committee for Regional Homeless Alignment (ECRHA), created by Los Angeles County in 2024. For the first time, the County Supervisors, the Mayor of Los Angeles, and suburban city representatives sit at one table to make collective decisions. The symbolism is as important as the substance: a recognition that homelessness and housing affordability are regional systems requiring regional stewardship.
The second is the Leadership Table for Regional Homeless Alignment (Leadership Table), a unique blend of public sector officials, philanthropic partners, developers, and community advocates. In early 2025, this group established a shared “North Star” for the region—a set of measurable goals focused on reducing homelessness, preventing evictions, and expanding affordable housing production. Those targets, adopted by ECRHA and first reported on publicly in October 2025, now provide a single yardstick for tracking progress across agencies and jurisdictions.
The third pillar is the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency (LACAHSA). Established by state legislation, LACAHSA serves as the region’s operating engine. It can receive funds directly, issue bonds, and channel technical assistance to cities that lack staff or expertise to develop housing projects on their own.
What makes this governance framework truly powerful, however, is the funding mechanism that sustains it. In 2024, Los Angeles County voters approved Measure A, a permanent half-cent sales tax expected to generate more than $1 billion per year. Unlike prior measures, Measure A dedicates a portion of its revenue—called the Local Solutions Fund—directly to every participating jurisdiction. Each locality receives flexible dollars to implement its piece of the regional plan, ensuring that all 88 cities have both a role and a stake in the system’s success.
The result is a new kind of metropolitan contract: shared goals, shared institutions, and shared money. It is already paying dividends. For the first time in more than 15 years, the City of Los Angeles recorded a two-year decline (2023-2024) in homelessness—a fragile but significant signal that coordinated regional action can reverse seemingly intractable trends.
Other Metros on the Move
Los Angeles is not alone in seeking metropolitan scale. Across the country, other regions are experimenting with similar forms of collaborative governance, each illuminating a different stage of evolution.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Bay Area Housing Finance Authority (BAHFA) represents one of the most ambitious regional housing structures in the nation. Created in 2019 as a joint-powers agency spanning nine counties, BAHFA was designed to pool resources, coordinate investments, and issue bonds for affordable housing. Yet without a dedicated regional revenue stream, its promise remains largely unrealized. A prospective ballot measure to fund a $20 billion regional bond was withdrawn from the November 2024 ballot. As of late 2025, BAHFA demonstrates the structure of regionalism without the necessary financial backing—the architecture is there, but the engine lacks fuel.
The Denver metropolitan area offers another instructive case. The Metro Mayors Caucus and the Denver Regional Council of Governments have built a robust culture of cooperation, aligning city and suburban leaders on issues from transportation to housing. In 2004, voters approved FasTracks, an ambitious light rail system that has simultaneously spurred urban redevelopment and metropolitan connectivity. But when voters considered Ballot Issue 2R in 2024—a 0.5% city sales tax projected to raise about $100 million annually for housing—it narrowly failed at the polls. Denver has governance capacity and political will, but not yet the dedicated funding necessary to convert coordination into scaled delivery.
And then there is Atlanta, which, through its Housing Strike Force, has become a national model for intra-city coordination. In his first term, Mayor Andre Dickens has unified agencies, accelerated housing production, and created new tools for financing and public land reuse. Yet Atlanta’s city boundaries contain only eight percent of its metropolitan population. Without a regional structure or tax base, the city’s success, though remarkable, remains bounded by geography.
Together, these three metros trace the evolution of a new American pattern. Regional collaboration is emerging everywhere, but full success requires two ingredients: regional governance and regional revenue. One without the other is not enough.
Lessons for Metros Nationwide
From these cases, a coherent playbook is beginning to take shape. The first lesson is to set a clear regional North Star. Ambiguity is the enemy of coordination. Just as Atlanta’s Strike Force organized around a single affordable-housing goal, Los Angeles has united its region behind measurable targets on homelessness, eviction prevention, and housing supply.
Second, govern together. Ad-hoc partnerships can start the work, but durable change requires formal institutions—joint-powers authorities, regional boards, and shared leadership tables that distribute authority and accountability across governments and sectors.
Third, finance together. Sustainable regional action depends on sustainable regional funding. Los Angeles’s Measure A design demonstrates how inclusive fiscal mechanisms—allocating resources directly to every participating city—can foster trust and buy-in across a complex region.
Fourth, leverage scale. By bonding collectively, standardizing underwriting, or pooling technical assistance and procurement of modular housing, regions can reduce costs, accelerate timelines, and extend capacity to smaller municipalities that would otherwise be left behind.
Finally, once these systems exist, expand beyond housing. The same governance logic applies to climate resilience and workforce development. Housing can serve as the proving ground for a new era of metropolitan problem-solving.
Building the Shipyard, Not the Battleship
What Los Angeles is constructing is more than a housing initiative. It is a prototype for how U.S. metro areas can govern themselves in a post-federal age—combining the legitimacy of shared institutions with the power of shared finance.
Half a century ago, the creation of BART, MARTA, and WMATA proved that metros could build common transit systems when they aligned authority, money, and purpose. Today, housing demands a similar leap. The stakes are higher, but so is our collective capacity.
If Atlanta’s Strike Force showed us how to organize for the how within a single city, Los Angeles is showing us how to organize for the how across an entire region. American metros already possess the economic power of nations. The challenge now is to act like it—to marshal that power through institutions built for scale, inclusion, and durability.
We may not yet know every design detail, but we know the task ahead. We must build the shipyard, not just the battleship: the flexible regional infrastructure that will allow American metros to leverage their economic might to confront not just today’s housing crisis, but the many storms still to come
Bruce Katz is Founding Director of the Nowak Metro Finance Lab at Drexel University. Josh Humphries is Senior Advisor at the California Community Foundation and Partner at Propvizer, a public land development firm.