When I moved to the Bay area from France, I was very surprised by the complete lack of organized government at the regional level. Decisions, planning an budget

When I moved to the Bay area from France, I was very surprised by the complete lack of organized government at the regional level. Decisions, planning an budgeting seem to happen either at the San Francisco level, or at the California level. That is a huge gap! The result is that nothing ever seems to get done at the scale of the bay, and SF is left to deal with a problem bigger than one city. The fact that SF seems to get blamed for everything, without any visible cooperation with Palo Alto, Mountain View or Cupertino, is absurd. Contrast this with France which, for all its flaws, has an intermediate level of government called "region" with actual decision-making power and budgets. The result is an exceptionally good transportation infrastructure and overall decent housing situation in the "greater Paris" region, which has 3x the population density of SF and a much larger population than the bay overall. If the city of Paris alone were left to deal with the challenges of a fast-growing population hub, then there would be no counter-balance to the natural inter-city politics and they too would have a non-existent transportation network and an embarrassing lack of adequate housing.