It's both. City planners are constrained to their own jurisdiction, so they're trying to come out ahead by ensuring that the next wave of growth doesn't leave t

It's both. City planners are constrained to their own jurisdiction, so they're trying to come out ahead by ensuring that the next wave of growth doesn't leave them behind. They're trying to solve a local optimization problem, where their competition is often the neighboring localities with whom they will share the wider trend of whatever the future may bring, but the resulting wealth will be allocated depending on exact settlement and zoning patterns. It's a prisoner's dilemma. Meanwhile, developers -- as a loose cohort -- are absolutely the executors for the nationwide phenomenon. Their loyalty is to not to the land or their products, but to the cycle of plan, build, and profit. Wherever they are, they're deeply entangled in local politics, and lobby the local officials to let them build homes on farmland to be upzoned. They leave behind subdivisions that don't actually generate enough revenue to the town to make up for their hookups to utilities and services, but the population growth looks good for the town in reports that businesses look at to expand or relocate. Just like a B-roll of the cities now scrambling to attract Amazon, these suburbs are hoping they'd be picked instead of the town one over when some company with national pockets wants to build a 200-job call center, data center, or distribution warehouse. In mainstream America, these tiny battles between neighboring towns are fought and lost thirty, fifty jobs at a time.