The pandemic has widened the divide between how Americans want to live and how urban planners think they ought to live. Even before the pandemic, surveys found that 80 percent of Americans live wanted to live in single-family homes in low-density neighborhoods, but urban planners think urban areas should be more compact and that a higher percentage of people should live in multifamily housing. In 1991, a planner named Douglas Porter urged urban planners to use the power of regional governments to get the dense cities they wanted.

Under federal law, every urban area of 50,000 people or more must have a regional government, known as a “metropolitan planning organization” (MPO). These organizations — there are currently 408 of them — are required to write long-range transportation plans for their regions and update those plans every four years. Since they distribute federal transportation and other dollars to local governments, they can deny funding to local governments that refuse to follow their plans.