Washington is an unending source of tumult these days, and it includes a certain animosity toward the Bay Area. Folks are treating it like a major setback for our region.
But what if it represents a fresh set of opportunities? A chance to go it on our own and invent the future we want for ourselves?
There’s nothing stopping us.
There may have been a time when we relied on Washington to set direction, to provide assistance for local programs, and to come through with major infusions of money. Those days are over.
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There was even once a time when we looked to the Capitol for thought leadership on the problems facing major metropolitan regions. That’s not happening either.
Here’s what is happening: we have a federal government swallowed up in ideology and partisan rancor, and hampered by massive deficits. The policy scene is a graveyard of stalled agendas and congressional stalemate.
In such a setting, our local issues — affordable housing, mounting homelessness, creaking infrastructure, metastasizing inequality and sustainability challenges, among others — will get scant attention. If they do, the Bay Area will be treated like a whipping boy, then left to duke it out with other metros competing for the crumbs. Our current federal actors only reward those who drink the Kool-Aid or engage in their grossly partisan tactics.
It’s off-putting and morally bankrupt.
But there’s actually good news in all of this! Washington’s deadlock has created a tectonic shift transferring power — and the locus for activity — back to the regions. Now we can put ourselves back in charge, remove all the ideology, start thinking big again, and apply the pragmatic and innovative approaches that have made the Bay Area famous.
We’re naturally suited to this. The Bay’s issues aren’t ideological and most of us aren’t wired as ideologues anyway. There’s nothing particularly partisan about building out our transportation system, addressing our housing woes, reducing the risk of disasters, or achieving our sustainability goals.
Working at the regional level also has profound advantages over the federal system: our involvement can be immediate, active, continuous, and highly participatory; we can leverage our existing networks; we can use the collaboration and teamwork that comes so naturally here.
Think big, together
Where should we start? What are the region’s most pressing challenges?
Here is a starting list of things that are within our grasp, would find support in Sacramento, and don’t require direct federal involvement:
We can consolidate the Bay Area’s fragmented transit system and give it a single lead authority with a mandate (and sufficient resources) for integration and expansion.
That lead authority can look far into the future to anticipate coming revolutions in transportation technology, and plan for them.
We can harness the promise of the Bay itself, to be a corridor for high-speed water transport, using environmentally sensitive jet foils and hovercraft.
We can enact permanent, user-based funding mechanisms for infrastructure in the same way that we have enacted ongoing funding for schools, instead of the hodge-podge of sales taxes and one-off measures we use right now.
We can take coordinated regional approaches to assist our unhoused population, replacing the city-by-city approach we’re using now (which inevitably bumps encampments from one locality to the next).
We can supercharge the Bay Area’s fledgling housing authority: give it the tools to finally integrate housing, land-use and transportation planning, and bring game-changing solutions to our housing crisis.
We can fast-track things like solar panels or communications infrastructure by adopting uniform ordinances across all 101 Bay Area cities.
We can incentivize the coming revolutions in agriculture that apply hydroponics, banks of LED lights, vertical planting, and AI watering algorithms to increase yields and lower prices. We can improve the local delivery systems.
We can build out our electrical infrastructure for cars, e-bikes and city-run on-demand scooters.
We can enact private-public partnerships to provide innovative, market-based financing for major projects beyond the reach of our public institutions.
We can create opportunity and address our income gaps by building workforce training institutions at a regional scale, ones that are fully in sync with the needs of our cutting-edge companies.
Perhaps most importantly, we can ensure we’re providing the kind of policy and business climate required for our innovation ecosystem to thrive.
We’re really good at this here! Our innovation is unsurpassed! We know how to experiment, make hard choices, and take acceptable risks.
Wouldn’t it be great — wouldn’t it feel so empowering — if we applied all of that creative energy with a laser focus onto the civic arena?
Taking the first step
In the early 1990s far-seeing leaders set up the Bay Vision 2020 task force to imagine a better future for our region. Some of their objectives were never realized, but the effort established a worthy precedent we can use today.
The task force should be led by the public sector, with the big-city mayors out in front. But they must be joined by heads of companies, the major universities, the large medical campuses, labor unions, business organizations, environmental groups, and the leading foundations. The effort should be resourced appropriately.
We should expect this body to look 50 years into the future and do an expansive, unbound visioning exercise. What kind of region do we want to be? What are the world regions we admire, and what are the best practices we should emulate? What institutional frameworks and governance structures should we create? Knowing we can’t achieve anything without investing, what financial mechanisms should we use?
What’s perfectly clear is that we have an opportunity, and we don’t need anybody but ourselves to take advantage of it. The crazed national scene? It doesn’t matter. Let presidents pontificate about ideology; here at home we’ll just focus on getting stuff done. We’re doers, not debaters. We’re innovating, not arguing. We’re pragmatic, not partisan.
The only thing stopping us is ourselves.
Russell Hancock is president and CEO of Joint Venture Silicon Valley and an adjunct professor of Public Policy at Stanford University.