From water mains to public buildings, much of the infrastructure in use in the city today is 60-80 years old, Chaban explains. New York would need to spend $47 billion just to reach a state of good repair across the board, he writes, noting that "any major expansion or sweeping modernization would cost billions more."
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The whole country is in a similar situation, especially every big city. We have two infrastructure crises--one is public and the other is private. The crisis of public infrastructure is well-documented, and people are trying to find ways to solve it. But there is a little-known crisis of private infrastructure. Some of that private infrastructure is in HOAs and condo associations, where there isn't enough money to repair or replace it. There are also some big privatized pieces of infrastructure, such as toll highways, bridges, and many other systems. They are in the hands of private corporations that, in most cases, leased it for 75-99 years. And when it starts to go bad, these corporations don't want to pay for it. They want to sell off their lease or go bankrupt. All this private infrastructure has to be maintained and eventually rebuilt. It seems to me that this crisis of private infrastructure is not being thought about or planned for.
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And part of the reason big city infrastructure is in such bad shape is because, instead of new development in cities, for decades all the money shifted to the suburbs, when people moved out of the cities. Then many of those dollars were diverted to private associations, to pay for managers, attorneys, petty lawsuits, questionable collection services, and amenities that few people used. Plus, let’s not forget the cost of not-so-isolated fraud, theft, and corruption.
Economies of scale and publicly funded infrastructure have became foreign concepts. Whoever actually believed that uninformed, unskilled volunteeer homeowners or self-interested, short-term investors or private corporations would do a better job of constructing and maintaining infrastructure than cities was woefully mistaken.
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