I agree with your idea that, in an ideal world, we should promote more land use and transit decision making to metro level governments. The problem is that poli

I agree with your idea that, in an ideal world, we should promote more land use and transit decision making to metro level governments. The problem is that politics is the art of the possible, and this is the set of stakeholders we can currently wrangle to push forth a pro-housing agenda. > if you want State government overriding local government rights, you have to be prepared for the day when the State legislature is doing something you don't like, and the local government is doing something you do. Right? I do some volunteering/organizing in local politics, and there are a few "problem domains" within local government. Pretty much everything in local government boils down to "land use", "police" and "education". Additionally, smaller governments are _always_ more beholden to parochial interests than state governments are. Its kind of a "sample size" issue with local governments. As an example, lets say that 1 in 1000 people cares a lot about 1 specific issue and get involved, and that there is a universe of 10 issues in which government is looking to work on. In a city of 20k people, you would expect that each of these 10 issues would have thought leadership promulgated by only 2 people, thus the debates, policy crafting etc will be highly impacted by these 2 peoples narrow views. in a state government of 2m people, there will be more like 200 people interested in thought leadership and policy crafting on a single issue, thus the ultimate policies crafted will be less beholden to the specific biases of individuals.