Brookings’ Bruce Katz, Mark Muro, and Jennifer Bradley have a piece in the latest issue of Democracy (which can also be read here) on the need to orient policy around metropolitan areas. They write:

California, it is often noted, accounts for more than a tenth of the national economy. That’s true—but somewhat misleading. The “California economy” is not evenly spread across the state, but rather it is driven by a few metropolitan areas. The Los Angeles and San Francisco metropolitan areas are responsible for more than half the state’s economic clout. Along with San Diego and San Jose, they together contribute 72 percent of the state’s GDP. True, if California were its own country it would have the eighth largest GDP in the world, but if these four metros alone were a separate nation, they would outpace India, Mexico, South Korea, and Australia.

Two other economically powerful states, Illinois and New York, are even more dependent on their metro powerhouses, with Chicago and New York each constituting more than three-quarters of their state’s GDP. (The New York metro actually powers two states: the portions of the metropolitan area in New York account for 75.7 percent of that state’s GDP, and the chunk of the metropolitan area across the river in New Jersey accounts for 77 percent of Jersey’s GDP). Texas and Florida likewise each get 80 percent of their economic heft from the handful of major metros within their borders.

Other states may be less dependent on their metros, but not, for the most part, by much. Consider, for instance, the southeast, where states like Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia have struggling hinterlands consisting of poor rural and industrial communities propped up by tax revenues from metropolitan juggernauts.

The authors go on to argue for a focus on policies that serve the metropolitan economies that are the basic units of the national economy. The challenge, of course, is how to empower these units. Metropolitan areas are generally made of up multiple local municipalities, which also happen to be part of one or more states, the boundaries of which are basically never concurrent with urban areas. There isn’t a good institutional structure in place to direct federal money toward productive metro areas.

There are a couple of ways the federal government could work toward addressing this situation. One option would be to directly encourage the creation of metropolitan level institutions, that could then receive and allocate federal money, or at least work to help direct spending at the state level toward projects with a metropolitan emphasis. Easier and more politically palatable would be to attach strings to federal disbursements to states that encourage those states to target spending at priorities generally associated with metropolitan investment. Transportation funding or housing funding, for instance, could be made dependent upon density or land-use goals that would limit the extent to which states could shaft their big cities.

This raises an interesting point, though — if rich metropolitan areas are generally a source of revenue used to support spending in less productive regions of a state, as is the case in Virginia, one would think that out of rational self-interest, the hinterlands would want to see the metropolitan areas succeed and would support adequate investment in infrastructure there. In North Carolina, for instance, growth in Raleigh and Charlotte has generated a great deal of wealth at the state level, much of which has redounded to the benefit of rural areas (over and above the extent to which those areas benefit directly from the economic energy of those places). And yet, when it comes time to allocate funds for infrastructure improvements, there is a significant tension between the hinterlands and the metropolitan areas. Enough, it’s said, has already gone toward Raleigh and Charlotte.

It’s just interesting to me that the metropolitan areas aren’t seen as a resource for the state as a whole, which should be nurtured. Having been born and raised in a metropolitan center, but with families from the rural hinterlands, I understand the attitude. The cities are seen as alien from the state (the more so, since they attract large numbers of migrants from elsewhere in the country). Their help isn’t needed, it’s felt, or wanted. And yet, investment from the state is wanted and needed. The state government acts as a buffer between the productive and the less productive, masking the actual flow of resources. In that sense, a new focus on metropolitan areas as independent entities might help affirm their value in the public mind.

But it’s always going to be a challenge to redistribute money and power. A metropolitan president and a Democratic Congress — which is now, more than ever before, an explicitly metropolitan party — will help, but the Senate is the bottleneck. The more that can be done on this count through the executive, the better.