Fourth Regional Plan

In the past two decades, the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region has prospered into one of the world's leading economies. But the benefits of this economic resurgence have been uneven, leaving many behind and resulting in problems that could curtail the region's future prosperity.

The Regional Plan Association's Fourth Regional Plan is an ambitious assessment that reviews the most persistent problems and provides a guide to correcting them. Topics discussed include a crisis of housing affordability, overburdened and deteriorating infrastructure, vulnerability to climate change, and a pervasive distrust in government. The plan offers solutions including how to bring nearly two million jobs to the region by 2040, while promoting shared prosperity, well-being and sustainability across the region.

The Fourth Regional Plan continues the Regional Plan Association's tradition of providing concrete ideas for improving the tri-state region. Highlights include radically restructuring the MTA and Port Authority to support creation of a modernized and expanded subway and regional rail network; significantly increasing the availability of housing; and expanding the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to fund climate change initiatives.

This highly visual, comprehensive plan will help elected officials, policymakers, and advocates guide any region to a more equitable, sustainable, healthy, and prosperous future.

The Regional Plan Association (RPA) is an urban research and advocacy nonprofit organization that develops and promotes ideas to improve prosperity, health, sustainability, and equity in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan area. For nearly 100 years, Regional Plan Association has been an indispensable source of ideas for policy-makers across the tri-state area. Recommendations from RPA’s first three landmark, once-a-generation long-range plans, published in the 1920s, 1960s, and 1990s, led to some of the region’s most significant infrastructure, open space, and economic development projects, including new bridges and roadways, improvements to the transit network, the preservation of vital open space, and the creation of sustainable communities centered around jobs and transit.