Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:

Federal development money as it stands is basically a ponzi scheme where they'll pay out bigly for new developments but you gotta deal with maintenance yourself, american suburbs took full advantage of this in the 50s by building huge sprawling nonsense-towns that use space as inefficiently as possible that no one would ever want to visit for any reason except they live there. 50 years later these places can't possibly afford to maintain them because they only managed to build them with one-time grants. If any thought had been put in back then we wouldn't be in this mess but now its impossible to fix and basically will need to be abandoned or repurposed as things get worse. Honestly fixing a lot of them is throwing good money after bad, fixing up all the roads in unmaintainable poo poo town #445308 just punts the problem down the road another 30 years and helps comparatively few people compared to infrastructure work in desirable cities where people actually *want* to work and live. Like sure you can squeeze the local gas stations and convenience stores and maybe there's a walmart in town if you're lucky but it's kinda like, blood from a stone.