…in government fragmentation, according to this 2003 paper by David Rusk at the Brookings Institution.

• The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has created the nation’s most fragmented system of local government within its metropolitan areas.
• State policies have contributed to uncontrolled urban sprawl by making its “little boxes” governments so highly dependent on local property taxes, promoting a constant ratables chase. Over the last fifty years Pennsylvania ranks second only to West Virginia in consuming the most land for the least population growth.
• The combination – constant outward development overlaying a pattern of immutable local government boundaries – has condemned Pennsylvania’s “inelastic” central cities, most boroughs, and many “built-out” townships to population, economic, and fiscal decline.
• The many governmental “little boxes” actively contribute to the high degree of racial and economic segregation that characterizes Pennsylvania’s metropolitan areas.
• Whether through costly inefficiencies, high social and economic disparities, or cutthroat inter-municipal competition, Pennsylvania’s governmental system of “little boxes” also retards its economic growth.
• Sprawl and steady abandonment of “inelastic” central cities, most boroughs, and many “built-out” townships also implicitly means abandonment (or certainly underutilization) of existing physical infrastructure (houses, stores, factories, water and sewer lines, etc.) that cost prior generations a fortune to create originally and is even more expensive to duplicate anew. Discarding this investment is decidedly fiscally wasteful.

The obvious answer would be to reorganize around metropolitan areas. The Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Council is one model of a regional government with real teeth. I am not an expert on state constitutional law, but it may be that Pennsylvania’s “home rule” state constitution makes it difficult to do something similar. Or it may be that the system of representative government gives outsize power to representatives from relatively less populous places, so the state legislature is unlikely to overhaul things even if the constitution would allow it. Even if these problems could be solved at the state level, the Philadelphia metro area would still cover parts of New Jersey and Delaware. So the remaining option is massive changes to the United States Constitution abolishing states entirely in favor of metropolitan areas. I haven’t noticed that in any campaign platforms lately.