The Symbol of America That's Increasingly Becoming a Total White Elephant

The symbol of America that's becoming a total white elephant.

Specifically, it's the massive single-family housing developments. Once a symbol of the American Dream, these sprawling lawns and single-family homes were objects of envy, but now they're just a burden known as 'urban sprawl.' Originally, even the U.S. followed the traditional trend of mixed-use, transit-oriented cities, but after WWII, this low-density development—where a car is a necessity—became widespread due to high demand and falling car prices. The problem is that during the explosive growth period, they plastered everything with low-density suburbs, and now those oversized cities are placing a massive strain on municipal budgets.

Obviously, this kind of development requires way more land than apartment complexes or multi-family townhomes, which naturally means much longer roads, power lines, and water systems. And it's not like you can just build the infrastructure and forget about it. You need the manpower and budget to maintain it, and as the infrastructure ages, maintenance costs skyrocket until eventually, you need a huge chunk of cash to replace it entirely. Furthermore, basic public services like police, fire, and education have to cover a much larger physical area, driving up costs even more. Common sense says that if 1 million people live in single-family homes and commute from the far outskirts by car, the commute times, productivity loss, and infrastructure strain are way higher than if half of them lived in dense areas and used subways or buses. Plus, since the population density is so low, these areas generate less tax revenue per acre while costing way more in infrastructure and public services than the old city centers built before this sprawl trend.

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In other words, maintenance costs increase over time as infrastructure ages, while tax revenue remains low, turning these areas into 'money pits.' Economically speaking, they should have collapsed and disappeared within a generation, but because the state and federal governments subsidize over 2/3 of initial infrastructure costs, many cities chose to kick the can down the road. Instead of painful restructuring, they'd just take the subsidies for new developments and use the tax revenue from those new areas to cover the losses of the old ones—basically a Ponzi scheme.

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Whatever they couldn't cover this way, they filled with debt. After running this cycle for generations, the city structures themselves have become the peak of economic inefficiency, leaving municipal governments sitting on a mountain of debt and crumbling infrastructure. Also, plugging holes with new development only works if you assume the population and economy will keep growing. If not, nobody moves into the new spots, and the city's finances completely collapse. Detroit's downfall wasn't just because manufacturing declined; it's because they couldn't find new residents to pay for the massive accumulated costs of their low-density sprawl. That's why in places like Detroit, the city government is now buying up abandoned single-family neighborhoods where only one or two households are left, relocating the residents, and bulldozing hundreds of houses just so they can stop paying for the unsustainable infrastructure.