Indeed, it reeks of NIMBY stonewalling; yet another reason not to build along the litany of reasons not to build. The Party of No has had decades upon decades to fix bridges and infrastructure with their sprawl and their cars, and what has that gotten us? Sorry, but that bridge didn’t start crumbling yesterday, and preventing new buildings won’t help it.

Exactly what Minneapolis is seeing right now with it's 2040 plan that requires upzoning basically everything to allow at least duplexes in interior neighborhoods, and more dense allow corridor routes, etc. The main arguments are "It will destroy the character of our neighborhoods", "It's just a boondoggle for developers", and "The current infrastructure can't handle the increased density". Really it's people who have their comfortable little neighborhoods and don't want those filthy renters coming in.

One of the reasons why suburbs are so attractive is because other taxpayers subsidize their existence. New developments shouldn't get the same free ride regardless of density. Ideally what should happen is the city should plan the infrastructure, and the development should be forced to pay in their percentage of estimated load capacity into the building of it.

But I don't know how realistic that is or isn't. Maybe it's more feasible to have a temporary special tax assessment on the property to help pay for their share of it.

I mean, it’s realistic enough considering we used to build infrastructure and buildings. Only relatively recently did this become an issue.

Is it possible that a larger portion of government expenses goes towards debt service such as debt for infrastructure built years ago and pension payments? This would leave fewer resources to invest in the future.

I think thats a big part of it. Strong Towns blog aruges that suburbs are a growth ponzi scheme.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/16/the-growth-pon...

From part 4: talking about the 70s when infrastructure maintanence and replacement bills started coming due "The critical insight today is to understand how we reacted to the end of the first life cycle of suburban development, when those maintenance costs started to come due and cut into our growth-generated wealth. This time there was no spatial shift as seen in the other large, economic corrections. Instead, we made a choice to double down on the suburban experiment by taking on debt.

We used debt to drive additional growth and sustain the unsustainable development pattern for a while longer. A lot of this debt was public debt, but we facilitated mechanisms for increases in private debt as well (for example, Fannie and Freddie early on and then subprime mortgages and securitization later). Here is a graph showing our public and private debt levels since the beginning of the suburban experiment. I have noted roughly the first and second life cycles of those initial investments."

> The more requirements you tack on to any kind of housing development, the more expensive it becomes to build housing, and so projects on the margin get killed and rents go ever-higher. That's not acceptable.

That’s not faux progressivism. That’s real progressivism, just applied to an area some progressives want to see flourish rather than be killed.