I'm not suggesting privatizing cities though my replies specifically. What I mean is on the broader perspective, we as a society are spending 10s/100s of billions to get to the moon and make a habitable base.
I totally understand that many of the problems communities face are political, and just throwing money at these kinds of issues won't solve those problems. I'm in favor of funding NASA with taxes (my taxes included), etc. I think flint wasn't the best example for this specifically.
I just think that there are certainly problems communities are facing that can be solved by paying R/D of civil and scientific engineers to work on solving these issues. It's great that we can recycle urine on the ISS, but can we help people in less fortunate places who have no water?
I'm NOT saying these issues can be solved by only throwing money at them. But if we as a society are spending tens or hundreds of billions (Let's include private companies and any other space programs from any nation because I'm considering this an international effort) to make the moon habitable, that's hundreds of billions not spent on helping many fixable problems that will immediately provide significant improvements to quality of life to many lives (say drinkable water in 3rd world nations, etc). I'm not saying we should spend all of that money on not going to space, just that we should consider what we're really achieving vs. what we know we can effectively achieve in terms of bettering humans as a society.