America can't afford to maintain cities and it can't afford to maintain the infrastructure required for suburbs. There is a serious breakdown in our ability to simply exist as municipalities.

It's a complex issue and many people are sure they know the solution, but the reality is that the only way we know how to govern ourselves anymore is scraping the bottom of the barrel with knee-jerk responses to acute events.

Edit: I can tell by both responses that I wasn't clear enough in my main comment. Civically, America's representative governments have collectively established a policy of maintaining function just slightly above total catastrophe, while robbing taxpayers blind through nearly every single initiative they fund.