This is what happens when we allow our cities to be fragmented into dozens of municipalities. When the central city is fighting its own suburbs, the entire civic system decomposes. Segregated cities cannot function. https://twitter.com/DE_Gifford/status/1282777259586260994

Americans should be angry about what has happened to our once-great cities. It's a product of institutionalized greed. The concept of the city and suburb as separate municipalities with individual governments must end if our cities are to become healthy again.

The balkanized metropolitan area underlies so many of the crippling economic and social crises we are now struggling through: the housing crisis, unequal educational opportunity, racial segregation, automobile dependency, cultural division. It's destroying this country.

Other countries don't manage cities like we do. Cities in Europe, Australia, and Asia are managed on a regional scale, spanning entire metropolitan areas. Individual neighborhoods aren't allowed to entrap tax revenue and limit housing construction.

Cities are systems. They depend on cooperation and investment from all residents who use their infrastructure and consume their resources. When certain groups are allowed to stop contributing to the civic project while using its resources, the system begins to fail.

We need to fundamentally redefine what the American city is. We need metropolitan-scale governance. All parts of every metropolitan area need to contribute proportionally to the health of their regions. They need to build housing, share tax revenue, open school districts.

It shouldn't be St. Louis, Clayton, Chesterfield, Kirkwood, St. Charles, and dozens of other arbitrarily-defined pockets of exclusion. It should just be *one* St. Louis! These places are all part of the same system. That system can't survive if its cells are fighting each other.

I honestly don't believe this country can maintain its economic stature if its fundamental units of productivity—its cities—are so dysfunctional and self-sabotaging. Defragmenting metropolitan areas needs to be the great American project of the 21st century. It isn't an option.