GUEST COLUMN.
WHY COLLABORATION IS OUR COMPETETIVE ADVANTAGE
By Joseph Jones, Windsor Heights City Council and Chief Community Impact Officer for the United Way of Central Iowa
For more than 20 years, central Iowa has been quietly building something that many regions still struggle to achieve: a shared vision for what it means to grow together. When one community succeeds, it strengthens the entire metro. When we plan housing, workforce development, or transportation in isolation, we miss opportunities to create systems that work for people’s real lives—which rarely fit neatly inside city limits.
I have had the privilege of seeing the benefits of collaboration from many different vantage points; most recently as a Windsor Heights City Council member and through my role as Chief Community Impact Officer at United Way of Central Iowa. From both perspectives, one thing is clear: regional collaboration is not just a nice idea. It is the only way we will meet the scale of the challenges and opportunities in front of us.
Regionalism doesn’t start with formal agreements. It starts with people in a room deciding they’re no longer willing to tackle shared problems in isolation. In central Iowa, those early conversations turned into task forces, then coalitions, and eventually into formal collaborations through tools like Iowa Code Chapter 28E agreements, which allow jurisdictions to share services, pool resources, and make coordinated decisions that no single city could execute on its own.
Regional collaboration has allowed us to compete more effectively for economic development opportunities, align infrastructure investments, and create a stronger, more resilient economy. Through initiatives like The Tomorrow Plan and Capital Crossroads, our region has advanced a long-term roadmap focused on talent, infrastructure, and economic competitiveness backed by both public and private sector leadership. That effort has helped reinforce the idea that we are not a collection of competing cities, but a shared economic ecosystem working toward common goals.
Take transit as an example.
Our workforce doesn’t live, work, and access services within a single jurisdiction. A job in one city often depends on housing affordability in another and transportation access across others. When transit systems are fragmented or underdeveloped, the impact is not just inconvenience, it is reduced economic mobility, constrained workforce participation, and missed growth potential for employers.
A regional approach to transit pushes us to ask: how do we connect people to opportunity across the entire metro, not just within our own borders? That’s why initiatives like Reimagine DART matter so much. This collaborative effort is redesigning our transit network to better connect people to jobs, education, and healthcare across the region, while balancing funding realities and local priorities.
Housing presents a similar challenge.
No single city can solve housing affordability on its own. If one community invests in attainable housing while others do not, the pressure simply shifts. We see it in rising costs, longer commutes, and growing disparities in access to quality schools, jobs, and healthcare.
A regional housing strategy allows us to align policies, share responsibility, and create a more balanced system. It also helps us move beyond competition between cities toward a more productive model of coordination. The recently released Blueprint to Address Homelessness lays out a five-year, community-wide vision for a coordinated regional response system. It brings together local governments, nonprofits, businesses, and people with lived experience to align strategies ranging from crisis response to long-term housing development.
That said, regional collaboration is not without its challenges.
One of the most common concerns I hear from fellow council members is direct cost versus direct benefit. Cities are accountable to their residents, and rightly so. When we invest in regional initiatives it can be difficult to quantify exactly how those investments flow back to a specific community.
There is also the reality of differing priorities. What feels urgent in one city may not rise to the same level in another. These tensions are real, and they require intentional governance structures, clear communication, and a commitment to transparency.
We also have to acknowledge the moments when collaboration slows down, stalls out, or becomes more complicated than expected. Aligning timelines, navigating political cycles, and balancing local autonomy with regional goals can test even the strongest partnerships.
But those challenges are not a reason to step back from regionalism. While they may introduce complexities, the benefits clearly outweigh the time and effort that’s required to overcome them.
In my experience, the most effective regional collaborations are grounded in data and a clear understanding of community need. They include diverse voices, including those with lived experience. And they are built on a long-term vision that extends beyond any single election cycle or organizational strategy.
I believe we are at an inflection point. The decisions we make now about transit investment, housing development, and regional growth will shape central Iowa – and many other regions around the country – for decades to come.
We have a choice.
We can retreat into silos, focusing narrowly on individual jurisdictions and short-term gains. Or we can build on the foundation of the past 20 years and commit to a shared future—one that recognizes that our destinies are interconnected.
The contents of this Guest Column are those of the author, and not necessarily Barrett and Greene, Inc
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