the source of America's infrastructure problems is subsidies from higher levels of governments (e.g., federal) to lower levels (e.g., cities) for infrastructure
That doesn't follow from your quote. The quote says that the problem is that those subsidies were used for horizontal development (i.e. sprawl), which rapidly expanded the infrastructure. You are correct that future maintenance wasn't budgeted, but if the city had expanded vertically (i.e. denser urban cores), the infrastructure costs wouldn't have risen quite so dramatically.
How is this possible? Some of my planner colleagues will say it is density, but I've long rejected that simplistic
explanation. There is a lot more to it than a simple division problem.
He goes on to explain that the poorer areas tend to have smaller houses and narrower streets built on higher ground, all of which leads to lower maintenance costs. They were built with more frugality and risk aversion than the more affluent areas. This supports the thesis that Lafayette's predicament stems from extravagant infrastructure in affluent areas that wouldn't have been built without subsidies.
>What we're really talking about is taking a neighborhood of $50,000 homes and making them $55,000 homes. That's a solid 10% increase in the tax base.
This is just such a fundamental misunderstanding of how the world works. Land doesn't pay tax. People do. And they pay it out of the things that they produce. Planting trees or painting crosswalks doesn't increase their productivity and therefore does not grow the tax base. Increased property values simply represent an increase in the tax rate. You can get this same "return" by cutting out the beautification and simply raising the millage.
Sure, if you make your city more attractive rich people from other areas may move there. But nationally that is a zero sum game. If a rich person moving to the beautified city from an ugly one the net change is 0 as the ugly city loses as much as the rich one gains. The only way for cities to actually get richer is to increase the productivity of their citizens. This means spending on education, infrastructure, and public health.
You are the only commenter quoting the horizontal development. So maybe my idea relates to you.
Are you familar with the concept of the Big O notation [1], which computer scientists use to (more or less) describe the "growth" of their algorithms? E.g. when you compare something that growth quadratically O(n²) to something that only growth linear O(n) you will see, that at some point the quadratically growth will grow faster as the linear growth. Forever! The linear growth will never win.
Comparing this to the horizontal sprawl of a city is easy. The area of a city is planar which is mathematically described as quadratic O(n²) but the average growth of the domestic product is just linear O(n). Assuming the maintainance cost of a planar sprawling city growth quadratic while the domestic product only growth linear then the costs will win over the income. Forever!
The conclusion is to limit the horizontal sprawl of a city to linear growth. This means every new house, street, rail road, pipe system, power line and so on must be build inside a diameter to the city's center with a distance which is logaritmic O(lg(n)) on average. The rest must growth vertically.
I think Manhattan provides a strong counterexample. The 2nd Ave subway line cost $2.5 billion per mile. The cost to add elevators at 70 stations is expected to be $5.5 billion. A lot of signaling equipment is from the 1930s.
That doesn't follow from your quote. The quote says that the problem is that those subsidies were used for horizontal development (i.e. sprawl), which rapidly expanded the infrastructure. You are correct that future maintenance wasn't budgeted, but if the city had expanded vertically (i.e. denser urban cores), the infrastructure costs wouldn't have risen quite so dramatically.