The San Francisco Bay Area is composed of nine counties and 101 individual municipalities with populations ranging from 1,792 in Colma to over 1 million in San Jose (2010 census). The smallest city by land area is Belvedere in Marin County, at 0.52 square miles, and the largest is San Jose, at 176 square miles.
The Bay Area has at least 50 police departments, 161 school districts (or more, depending on what you count), and 27 public transit systems. The balkanized nature of our region leads to dramatic income and education inequality, dysfunctional transit systems that don't interoperate (though there's movement on this front via Seamless Bay Area), and segregated housing markets controlled by governments that think only their neighbors should build housing instead of themselves.
In total, some 7.5 million people are spread throughout a region with the highest income inequality in the nation (and a higher GINI coefficient than most OECD countries), the 7th-worst automobile traffic, and the nation's most acute housing shortage -- at least 700,000 homes.
These problems are solvable, but they require abandoning "local control" and uniting into a regional government.
Bay City
The two biggest benefits of Bay City will be around housing and transportation.
In his 2020 paper, "Warding Off Development: Local Control, Housing Supply, and NIMBYs", Evan Mast investigated the effect of cities changing from citywide elections to district-based elections. He found that moving to district elections "decreases housing units permitted by 24%, with 47% and 12% effects on multi- and single-family units."
To reiterate: production of multifamily buildings plummeted by nearly half just because the city moved to district elections.
Notably, San Francisco uses district elections.
But it's not just district elections that have caused our housing shortage, it's also the desire of local governments to only build commercial space so they gain tax revenue without having to pay for constituent services.
“We’ll provide the commercial, San Francisco will provide the housing.”
- Clifford Lentz, Mayor of Brisbane via SF Chronicle
The smaller the voting population, the more anti-growth policies we get. Moving from district-based elections to citywide elections will make representatives less beholden to neighborhood-level interest groups and more concerned with the health of the city at large. The same ought to hold true if we move from 101 individual cities to one large city: our leaders will care about the health, affordability, and growth of the region, rather than just their small fiefdom. A regional Bay City would mean people couldn't get elected on the promise of pushing development into neighboring towns.
Bay City could deliver the promise of Seamless Bay Area: a unified transit system that could move you from San Jose to Napa.
While Seamless Bay Area must struggle against intransigent local governments uninterested in solving regional transportation problems, a singular regional government would account for the interests of all 7.5 million people that commute around the Bay Area daily. We could finally extend BART to Marin and through San Mateo county, bypassing the local-control NIMBYism that killed those routes in the 1960s. Imagine what would be possible if commuters from Richmond could vote on infrastructure in Santa Clara!
Getting there
The whole problem is of utmost importance to the future of American cities. Aside from the obvious economies of a single local government, as opposed to two or more, it seems essential that the future development of large centers of population should not be hampered by conflicting policies of a double or multiple system of local governments. It is obvious, moreover, that perils which continually threaten the population of urban communities, such as fire, crime, and contagious diseases, constitute unified problems which are co-extensive with congested areas. It would seem essential that the control of these perils should be a unified one, and that too much reliance should not be placed upon a spirit of coöperation between different units.
The County by Henry Stimson Gilbertson, via @Rasheed_Shabazz
My long-term political goals include merging the entire Bay Area into a single Bay City, with each of the nine counties transformed into boroughs, much like New York City. This is no small feat.
Standing in the way of achieving Bay City include section 56741 of Title 5 of California's government code, the "home rule," and the fact that San Francisco is a Charter City... to say nothing of the incredible resources required to run a campaign to actually vote on it. Check out this handy 2012 report from the California Governor's Office of Planning and Research to learn more about the steps involved in annexing.
But all laws can be changed given sufficient pressure, and California's impending pension crisis may force the state or its municipalities into bankruptcy and receivership over the next several decades (which will either force or incentivize rule changes), so it's worth exploring the benefits of uniting into a regional government.
The City and County of Alameda
At the turn of the 19th century, there actually was a movement to consolidate the Bay Area governments. Henry Stimson Gilbertson outlines the proposed City and County of Alameda in his book, The County. The plan would have followed the New York City model, where the various cities of Alameda County would be transformed into boroughs of the new City and County. Legislative responsibilities would be shifted to the new regional government, while responsibilities of local concern, like public works, would be left in the hands of the boroughs.
Each borough would have its own Borough Board, with members directly elected by their citizens, whose responsibilities would be constrained to purely local matters. All citizens in the new City and County of Alameda would directly elect the Mayor and the City Council in at-large (aka citywide) elections.
Greater San Francisco
After the 1906 earthquake and fire, the Greater San Francisco Association put a plan into motion to annex "Colma, South San Francisco, Sausalito, Mill Valley, San Rafael, and East Bay cities spanning from Richmond to San Leandro." This effort was largely spurred by the desire to coordinate transportation projects and infrastructure, as well as help pay the cost of the Hetch Hetchy pipeline.
Unfortunately for us, the vote failed in November 1912 due to strong resistance to annexation by San Francisco's neighbors.
MTC-ABAG
Despite the failures of these historical movements, the San Francisco Bay Area does have a regional proto-government in the Metropolitan Transportation Commission & the Association of Bay Area Governments (MTC-ABAG). Southern California has something similar in the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG).
MTC-ABAG is a voluntary-membership organization that represents all nine counties and 101 municipalities of the Bay Area. MTC plans regional transportation and ABAG is involved in planning housing growth, land use, and environmental quality. The members of each organization are appointed by the elected leaders of the cities and counties in its member governments.
In my opinion, MTC-ABAG is not a huge success story. Our transportation system is still fragmented and under-funded and ABAG consistently underestimates how much housing growth is necessary. Though it has no executive power, its plans carry weight by directing where and how money is spent, and in fulfilling obligations for obtaining grants from the federal government.
Since MTC-ABAG lacks electoral accountability, there are no penalties for failure. In order to have effective regional planning, we need a regional government that's directly elected rather than composed of political appointees that aren't held accountable for their failures. We need a regional government with real executive power, not just pulling on purse strings. We need a regional government that is responsive to the needs of the region as a whole… one that says growth is good, and that Bay City can be affordable, dynamic, and accessible.
We can build Bay City, but it will take time and effort.
I couldn't agree more! I'm 100% on board with helping SF move away from district elections and instead adopting proportional approval voting. Districts have got to go.
I agree with your goals, but see a couple of reasons to be skeptical that city consolidation will actually advance them.
1. It's not obvious that NYC is better governed than the Bay Area overall, or that in the areas where it is better, this is due to having a consolidated city government. There is definitely better transit integration, but if anything that seems more the work of statewide and multistate authorities. You might look, for instance, at how the NY/NJ Port Authority manages to be effective and see if MTC-ABAG could be made more like it. And as far as I can tell, the housing supply that keeps NYC less unaffordable than SF is mostly in suburbs-- suburbs which are better commute options than similarly far-out ones in the Bay due to better transit, but which are not under NYC municipal jurisdiction.
2. I don't think it is reliably true that directly elected officials do better than political appointees or that citywide elections give you better officials than per-district ones. The ridiculous SF Board of Education is a recent counterexample. The question is whether the elections will actually attract broad enough turnout and interest that they don't just get captured by a few insiders who everyone else is too uninformed to oppose. Large urban school districts are in general an example of a service where more local control and smaller units of governance are probably better, since they have much less of a spillover effect than transit or housing.