Imagine, if you will, that you share a group house with five other people. One day, the house decides to throw a party, at which you'll happily provide your guests with food and beverages. Rather than plan the party together, however, you just decide that each housemember can handle a portion of the preparation by him or herself.

The day of the party comes, and everything is a mess. Some housemembers brought what they thought was a fair share of the supplies, some brought just enough for themselves, and some brought nothing, thinking they weren't about to shell out their hard earned cash without knowing whether everyone else was going to as well. Nobody went out and bought everything that was needed. Now all your friends are sitting around hungry and sober; nice work, group house.

That's a coordination problem, and a similar one is looming large in discussions of planning for growth in the Washington area. Some observers, myself included, feel that it's important for leaders here to address growth issues from a regional standpoint, but others don't always understand why a regional perspective might be preferable to uncoordinated local government action. As fortune would have it, however, a convenient coincidence of recent stories makes the advantage of a regional approach crystal clear. It seems we're looking at a future that's a party with no drinks, and nobody likes a party with no drinks.

Consider this: the Washington metropolitan area, currently home to nearly 5 million people, is expected to add (PDF) another 1.5 to 2 million people over the next 25 years, according to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. While job creation and population growth are expected to increase substantially throughout the area, the largest percentage gains are predicted for the area's outer suburbs, including a number of counties where population and employment are expected to double over that time period. How should local leadership react?

Picture taken by Jon-Miles.

If leaders have a regional focus, then the only way to deal with expected growth is to prepare for it, by adjusting housing and zoning policies to accomodate more people at greater density, and by building the infrastructure, including transportation systems, to make it all work. If leaders are focused on just one part of the region, however, then the easiest solution is to try to control growth and its accompanying expenses in that small area and let other places deal with the cost of accomodating new jobs and people.

Absent coordination, there's no reason that one particular county ought to feel obliged to accomodate many more people at a great expense. For an individual county to do so would mean placing the full burden of the taxation necessary to fund the infrastructure improvements on that county's residents, but the benefits of reduced congestion would accrue to people across the metropolitan area. It therefore makes perfect sense for places making policy in isolation to simply refuse to accept anymore people. Of course, if every local jurisdiction pursues that policy, then the region as a whole finds itself woefully unprepared to deal with a couple million new residents.

And in fact, that's just what we're observing in the Washington area. By all accounts, Washington is ready to boom over the next two decades, and yet county after county is responding by constraining their ability to handle more people. It's rational, but it means that we can expect housing costs and congestion to spiral out of control if a broader perspective isn't adopted. Someone, in other words, has to focus leadership on the big picture. Someone has to make it clear what the region is going to need to deal with this growth, what those needs are going to cost, and how those costs are going to be divided up. And someone had better get started.