Across the nation, there’s a lot of hand wringing going on about how state budget crises will affect local communities. Will trash pickup be less frequent? Will senior services be cut? How will the schools be affected?
All of this obscures, to a certain extent, one of the major ways we got ourselves into this mess in the first place. For roughly 50 years, states have allowed and encouraged their metro areas to grow outward, building countless miles of new roads, sewers, and other infrastructure with little regard for the sustainability and efficiency of the new communities.
Budget cuts are going to be painful in Ohio and Michigan and lots of other places. They were inevitable, recession or not, in part because this type of development is simply not sustainable, economically or otherwise.
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