by jschveibinz | 2025-08-03 05:22:57+00:00
It's not all doom and gloom for the U.S. It's just a cultural thing. It's not a romantic story, but it is a typical American story based on economics and freedom of movement.

A lot of infrastructure was built in the first half of the 20th century: water, sewer, roads, dams, bridges, electricity, inner city houses, factories, etc. The New Deal programs helped with that. At one point, everything was shiny and new--100 years ago. But nothing stays that way, even if it still functions well. But how something looks is often not enough to warrant rebuilding unless there is an economic incentive to do it.

Some parts of the old infrastructure are functionally failing now and are ready for replacement or redevelopment. It has to happen; but most likely slowly, and when absolutely necessary--economically.

A big factor in infrastructure development or redevelopment is that the demographics of the country have changed. The once large and busy industrial cities of the east and midwest are no longer as populous as they once were. The factories are gone. And many people moved out of cities into suburbs. Some moved to a different part of the country where there were better work opportunities--and more sunshine. Places like Florida, Texas and the west coast have grown dramatically in population over the past 50 years. Greater LA had a population of 5 million in 1950. Now, it's 18 million. So development will likely happen where the people--and the economics--are.

Unfortunately the tax bases of the old cities are now insufficient to pay for their redevelopment. And the infrastructure in the "booming" areas is newer but mostly suburban, not urban. The ratio is something like 5:1 in spending (suburbs vs. cities).

So we aren't seeing a lot of shiny new urban skyscrapers, at least as much as before. NYC along with many other cities has a glut of commercial office space. Again, it's the suburbs along with work-from-home.

Infrastructure like trains, streetcars, etc. were once absolutely necessary to get people to/from work in industrial cities. People needed to live where the transportation was. The infrastructure served working class people--the economy depended on it. Now a large number of people either work from home or can use a car to drive to work. And they enjoy living in suburbs.

Anybody that travels in the U.S. does not want to spend 6-12 hours stuck on a train when they can fly faster or drive with flexibility. (The average distance between major metropolitan areas in the U.S. is twice that of Europe.) So domestic train travel largely vanished after the 50's once other options like jets and interstate highways became available. New train rights-of-way for high speed trains just aren't possible: the cost of land is too high for it to make sense--not to mention regulations for noise, animal habitat, etc.

The U.S. is doing better than fine economically even if there has been a major shift to service work (as opposed to factory work) as a result of technological changes and supply chain shifts to other countries. So even though we don't have trophies like bullet trains and shiny new skyscrapers, we do have a tremendous amount of economic activity--the state of Florida (23 million people) alone has the economic output of the entire country of Mexico (130 million people) or Spain (50 million people).

China and Japan, for example, have pretty skyscrapers--for now. In 50 years they won't be that shiny new anymore.