How we have designed our cities and suburbs puts too much of a strain on our infrastructure.

[Yavin4]

Urban/suburban sprawl, where we give copious amounts of space to roads, parking lots, residence only subdivisions, etc., has stripped our ability to build a tax base to support our infrastructure needs. Property taxes on housing is not enough to support the sprawl. For example, if you have residence only neighborhoods, the property tax base alone is not going to be enough to maintain the necessary infrastructure for those neighborhoods.

Remote work will make the situation even worse. Yes, there will be somewhat less wear and tear on the roads, but the tax base will also drop because less gas will be bought. The crumbling of our current infrastructure is inevitable.

Maybe what we need are more tight knit living spaces with mixed use residential and commercial properties. Emphasize walkability which will remove the space for cars and encourage retail. Limit strip malls with gigantic parking spaces.

[zipplewrath]

1. Walking won't work in many places

You can't get Floridians to walk across a parking lot. In Arizona they want air conditioned walkways. But to your point, these "residential only" developments are really short sighted. They built a huge community near us on an old navy base. Not a single gas station. Some church finally came in and took over a commercial property but until then there were no churches. No hotels either. They have a small commercial core, and they have some properties for light commercial like dentists, day care, accountants etc. But people have to leave the community for an awful lot of their activities.

There's another similar development in the western portion of the county. It's huge. But again, very little commercial development. One big box campus, and one grocery and gas station kind of shopping center. Two nice golf courses though.

[Yavin4]

2. What you've described is unsustainable.

There's not enough economic activity to support the infrastructure. All those properties need roads, road maintenance, sewage lines, etc. Over time, the cost of the infrastructure will out pace the little economic activity.

Multiply this situation around the country and you get crumbling infrastructure.

[zipplewrath]

3. Yup

In about 30 years, there will be applications to convert residential property to light commercial. First for yoga studios and dentists offices, later, it will be accountants and vets. Soon, lawyers will want to operate out of them. Somewhere in there someone opens a business supply business in that corner lot that never sold well.