Local governments often describe their role in development decisions as neutral. Staff analyze applications. Planning commissions review them. Elected officials vote. The process is framed as objective and procedural, designed to keep cities from “picking winners and losers.”
But neutrality in local government is a myth.
Cities are not passive observers in development. They are long-term stewards of the places that result from these decisions. Cities own and maintain the streets, pipes, and public spaces that serve new development. They bear the fiscal risk when projects underperform. And they live with the cumulative consequences of land-use decisions long after applicants, consultants, and even elected officials have moved on.
No other party at the table shares this time horizon or level of responsibility. That alone makes the city fundamentally different from every other participant in the process.
Yet despite this reality, cities often behave as if their role is limited to administration. The prevailing assumption is that applicants propose, staff review, and decision-makers approve or deny what is put in front of them. The city, in this framing, is not meant to shape outcomes, the city takes a passive role to referee them.
I’d argue this posture is misguided. Furthermore, it’s inaccurate. Cities are not neutral in the development process, even when they claim to be. Comprehensive plans are policy visions not yet implemented and thus applied unevenly. Zoning ordinances require interpretation. Established procedural practices guide how rules are enforced. Staff recommendations reflect professional judgment. Public input influences outcomes in ways that are often inconsistent and unpredictable. Discretion exists at every stage, whether it is acknowledged or not.
In other words, cities are already shaping development outcomes. They are simply doing so implicitly, without clarity or accountability.
The real problem, then, is not that cities influence development, it’s that they pretend they don’t. By clinging to a myth of neutrality, cities narrow complex, long-term questions into procedural yes-or-no votes. Decisions about the future of a neighborhood are reduced to whether an application meets the minimum technical requirements of the code. The most important question—“what should we do instead?”—is treated as inappropriate or out of bounds.
This is not restraint. It is a failure of responsibility.
When cities avoid engaging early and directly in shaping development, they do not eliminate risk. Instead, they are deferring it. By the time the consequences become clear such as traffic problems, infrastructure liabilities, or missed opportunities for better land use, the decisions that set those outcomes in motion are long past. What remains is a built environment that technically complies with the rules, but fails the community.
This reluctance to engage is especially costly during the earliest phases of a project, when design is still fluid and alternatives are inexpensive to explore. Early, conceptual design is not about engineering pipe sizes or finalizing construction details. It is about understanding tradeoffs, testing different arrangements, and making visible the long-term implications of today’s choices. Cities already employ planners, engineers, and consultants with the expertise to do this. They have the technical capacity, they just need to adjust their institutional posture. Local governments have been conditioned to believe that offering design alternatives is interference, rather than leadership. Sometimes it is leadership. And if cities want better outcomes, they need to recognize that.
Policy decisions will always rest with elected officials. But those decisions are only as good as the understanding behind them. Cities must give themselves permission to act like the stewards they already are. They should feel empowered to ask better questions, to model and explore alternatives, and to engage earlier in shaping the places they will be responsible for long into the future.
Neutrality may feel safe. But for cities, it is neither honest nor sustainable.
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