Dallas' increasing economic isolation, for example, results primarily from trends beyond its boundaries just as downtown Dallas traffic jams are mostly the product of regional sprawl. This is not easy. In these cases, governments collaborated because they were ordered to work together by their state government or by a state-empowered county government. The Texas Legislature must change the rules of the game for how local governments shape their regions' growth. But that is not how we do things in Texas.
Texas legislators believe in local home rule.
The Texas Legislature, for example, set aside the nearly sacred autonomy of local school boards when it mandated a wide-ranging, statewide package of school reforms. But that would be interfering with the free market. It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more shaped by public policy and more dependent on public subsidies than the land development and housing industry. Listen to the National Association of Homebuilders. The challenge is to replace one set of rules of the game with another set that will produce more socially equitable and more environmentally sustainable regional growth.