Contributed by Hunter Hill
By now most of us have heard about the massive infrastructure plan that President Biden has released. You may have seen it as yet another bill that few actually care about, or maybe you see it as something that needs more discussion. Most people’s opinion on it can fall into the same two categories that most politics always end up falling in. If you lean to the Left, then you’ll probably say this is a great plan that will fix America’s failing infrastructure and it will help strengthen public transportation and help out the poor. If you lean towards the Right, you might either say that only rails, roads and bridges need to be our focus, or more likely you may think that it is simply another bill that wastes our tax dollars and that we should focus on it when the economy gets back up and running. But there’s another opinion that I hold that I rarely see discussed; one that is more complex and deals with how individual cities build themselves from the ground up.
Cities used to be built from the ground up with people making small bets in the community. They’d set up small temporary shacks to house their businesses that would grow increasingly popular and would slowly gain wealth. Eventually, they would build taller buildings that would be able to house more people and make it easier to run a business. Once the community produced enough wealth to afford it, they would invest in things like basic water and sewage services, fire and police, schools, and roads. As the city grows even more, the city could invest in more expensive things, such as a streetcar or niche services. This process would continue on because the way we used to build our buildings produced a steady return on investment that is a reliable way of building and growing a city. Many byproducts of this way of building included well maintained infrastructure, excellent walkability and the lack of need for the automobile.
Later on, we quickly turned away from this with the massive suburbanization of cities in the pursuit of the American Dream. Most of the city was zoned for single family homes and nothing else. Businesses had to be built away from residential areas for fear of people disliking a business in their neighborhoods. Those temporary businesses that were designed to be upgraded were prevented by zoning laws to continue upgrading, and thus were frozen in time. In residential areas, before a home is built, all municipal services are placed into the site so that it is shovel-ready. For the average American, this seems quite normal, and that there isn’t much harm in giving everyday Americans the ability to own their own property in a quiet neighborhood.
Those single-family homes have a small amount of taxable value, far too small to pay for the maintenance of the infrastructure around it. Gas tax, property tax and sales tax aren’t great enough either to pay it off either. Cities can easily afford it in the short-term because the funding mostly comes from the state and federal government, while maintenance is left entirely to the local government. Simply put, we can’t afford to maintain our infrastructure because there is too much of it. We need to slow down our building of new infrastructure and improve on what we already have available.
Some may reasonably say that people want to live in the suburbs and don’t want to give that up. People can still live in a suburban community if they wish to, but they should be expected to self-sustain themselves in terms of services that would otherwise be provided by the city. If you want to get a more in-depth explanation of all this, I strongly recommend reading the book Strong Towns by Charles Marohn, which discusses how we can revitalize our cities to become prosperous again.
Finally, what might President Biden’s Infrastructure do in this case? Wouldn’t that help solve the problems that I just talked about? Remember that several US presidents have proposed something similar to this, including Trump. This bill is designed to be a band-aid, where the federal government will likely use it to fix all that overbuilt infrastructure and possibly use it to build new infrastructure that they will not maintain themselves. My main fear is that, if the bill passes, that cities will see maintenance as something that can be paid for by the federal government.
$2.3 trillion is expected to be spent by this, but the return on investment will never be enough to justify the price tag. Pretty soon, we’ll have to do this again and again, where another massive bill that we can barely afford has to be proposed again so our infrastructure that we can’t pay off ourselves has to get maintained. If we want to fix these problems, we need to build upon what we know and on what we already have available. We must create wealth that is sustainable enough to give a reason to pay off the infrastructure we have.