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US history shows spending on infrastructure doesn’t always end well

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US history shows spending on infrastructure doesn’t always end well

Over the past two centuries, federal, state and municipal governments across the U.S. have launched wave after wave of infrastructure projects.

They built canals to move freight in the 1830s and 1840s. Governments subsidized railroads in the mid- and late 19th century. They created local sewage and water systems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then dams and irrigation systems through much of the 20th century. During World War II, massive amounts of public money were spent building and expanding ports, factories, airfields and shipyards. And after the war, highway construction – long a state and local project – became a federal endeavor.

Many of these projects did not end well. The problem wasn’t that the country didn’t need infrastructure – it did. And the troubles weren’t the result of technical failures: By and large, Americans successfully built what they intended, and much of what they built still stands.

The real problems arose before anyone lifted a shovel of earth or raised a hammer. These problems stem from how hard it is to think ahead, and they are easy to ignore in the face of excitement about new spending, new construction and increased employment.

Spiraling costs at remote industrial park – Investigative Post

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Spiraling costs at remote industrial park – Investigative Post

The bill is coming due for putting an industrial park in the hinterlands of Genesee County and the cost to taxpayers is considerable.

The Science and Technology Advanced Manufacturing Park, being built on 1,250 acres in the rural Town of Alabama, flunked the state’s smart growth test when first proposed.

The project’s location rated so poorly that it failed to meet seven of ten smart growth criteria under the state’s own grading system, prompting one good government group to label it a “poster child for location inefficiency.”

Empire State Development Corp. nevertheless approved spending state tax dollars to develop the site, which is bigger than Central Park in New York City and equal in size to 945 football fields.

Parking Has Eaten American Cities

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Parking Has Eaten American Cities

Parking eats up an incredible amount of space and costs America’s cities an extraordinary amount of money. That’s the main takeaway of a study that looks in detail at parking in five U.S. cities: New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, Des Moines, and Jackson, Wyoming.

How Our Cities And Towns Are Killing Us | The Daily Caller

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The Landscape Of Despair: How Our Cities And Towns Are Killing Us | The Daily Caller

While many Americans deplore suburbia in a general way — including many who live in it — its actual dynamics are poorly articulated in the public arena. Interestingly, one of suburbia’s biggest defects is the impoverishment of public space, and with it the degradation of the very public arena where ideas are exchanged and vetted for value.  Most public space in America is devoted simply to the movement and storage of cars. The highway is a hostile environment for humans and few people seek camaraderie or stimulation in the parking lots. The ambiguous leftover scraps of land, like the woodsy berm between the Walmart and the Best Buy, have no civic value. (That’s where kids go to drink malt-liquor.) Everything else is private space, including the shopping mall, by the way, where you can be arrested for making a speech, or just wearing a T-shirt with a provocative message. Public space per se has been relegated insidiously to TV and the Internet, and neither of these are an adequate replacement for real-live social relations with other human beings in a real place worth caring about.

I know from experience that the public’s attempt to understand all this can be laughably dim. If you show a slide of some schlocky boulevard of strip-malls to an audience in a town hall — as I have done many times — and ask them what’s wrong with this picture, you’ll probably get this answer: “It all looks exactly the same!” That is quite true, of course. The strip malls outside Syracuse, NY, look just like the strip malls outside Baton Rouge, LA, or Seattle, WA, except for the shrubs that decorate the parking lot. But sameness alone is not exactly the problem.

Costco could be coming to Guilderland | WNYT.com

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Costco could be coming to Guilderland | WNYT.com

While the Costco at Crossgates Maul is less objectionable to the proposed 222-unit apartment complex right next to the butterfly corridor, one has to question why need yet another big box store, when B.J. and Wally World is right up the road. I mean doesn't the world have enough plastic crap that burns with black smoke, that can be bought at local big box stores already? Local government needs revenue like a heroin addict needs his baggy.

The Growth Ponzi Scheme, Part 1 — Strong Towns

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The Growth Ponzi Scheme, Part 1 — Strong Towns

Following World War II, there are four ways that American cities have grown (we call these the Mechanisms of Growth). They are: 

Government Transfer Payments

Transportation Spending

Debt

The Growth Ponzi Scheme 

Focusing initially on the first three, they all share two things in common. First, the initial cost to the local government for new growth is minimal. If the state or federal government provides a grant or low-interest loan to subsidize a project -- for example, the extension of a sewer or water line -- the local government may have to pay something, but it is nowhere near the total cost. Where the DOT comes in and builds a highway, widens a road, puts in a signal, builds an overpass, etc... there may be some local funds contributed, but again, the vast overwhelming majority of the money is spent by the DOT. When a developer comes into a community and uses leverage to finance a development project, and then when families or business owners come in and take on mortgages and real estate loans to acquire a property within the development, the local government spends little or nothing to make this happen.