Detroit is a well known example of it because they are still trying to uphold these parasitic relationships despite being basically evacuated.
We can't know the future. So when you need a 5-lane road now, or a major shopping center now, and the history says you'll almost certainly need a 7-lane road and big parking garage in a few years, the prudent thing to do is to build a little more capacity than you need, with the hopes that by the time you maintain it for 20 years and it needs to be replaced or improved again, it's served its purpose well.
Detroit was a seriously happening place half a century ago. There was nothing wrong with creating the buildings, infrastructure, and signing up for the maintenance contracts that those buildings needed at the time. But there was no plan in place for "What happens if all the money disappears and most of the city flees."
Many of the roads and buildings are in surprisingly good shape. Even if they can't do a good, frequent job of plowing the snow off that 7-lane-road in the winter, they're keeping up with it well enough. Pipes, drains, and wires designed to last 20 years are holding together pretty well after 40 years. But they're going to fail eventually, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Should there be a plan, maybe an insurance contract, for demolition if the city can no longer afford a thing? Could there be?
What do you mean by "enabled"? Are you suggesting the law should force a manufacturing plant to stay in a city, or a person to stay in their apartment? How would that possibly work?
http://alloveralbany.com/archive/2017/02/16/albany-redlining...
The area in red is where African Americans and poor Irish lived. No bank would write a mortgage there.
A quote from an article referenced in the link: “As federal official and leading real estate economist Homer Hoyt explained in 1939: "Usually existing residential structures deteriorate and become obsolete with the passage of time. They are occupied by successive groups of people of lower incomes and lower social standards with the result that the quality of the neighborhood declines with that of the buildings." In the eyes of Hoyt and nearly all other real estate professionals, the presence of non-white residents was prima facie evidence of neighborhood decay and the destruction of property values.”
These ideas were codified in Federal policy and residential lending standards. The legacy of those maps remains today in many places.
Or I guess the important matter would be making it so that you only have maybe a few quarters of loss before you can legally adjust services to fit within the budget.
City councils seem to think they're in the business of employing people permanently, but they really shouldn't need to be concerned about that, given that the citizens are left to foot the bill, and the majority of them do not work for the local government.
More importantly, the European cities didn't experience the same degree of racialized shunning, as described by the Detroit-native urban planner Pete Saunders: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petesaunders1/2017/07/28/detroi... Most Rust Belt metro areas have seen little population decline from their peak (metro Detroit has lost perhaps 200,000 people even as the city has lost over 1M), and could easily be intact-but-rough-edged cities with cheap housing if there weren't the same dynamic of white flight from the core.
But somehow I don't think it ever got quite as bad as Detroit. It seems that somehow American politics can just abandon cities, and declare their failure not a problem for the nation or the state.
(Last time I ran the numbers, 80s Detroit was more dangerous than troops-in-the-streets Troubles Belfast, but I don't have it to hand)
Picture's still the same.
The OP wrote, "the wealth gap in the US seems so much bigger than any other country," which is not supported by your link.
EDIT: And if you want more recent data: https://www.credit-suisse.com/corporate/en/research/research...
It's also one of the few countries with a multitude of multi-billionaires and yet an astoundingly high rate of child poverty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...