In other words: we need to figure out ways to get more out of our existing infrastructure investments. How do we make these investments more productive—far more so than anyone is imagining they could possibly be today? Doing that is going to require a brand new approach to government, one less fixated on generating short term growth and more obsessed with long term financial stability.

And we’re going to need to figure out how to make this transition in a way that is consistent with our values. Today, the most financially productive places in most cities tend to be their core downtowns, as well as those neighborhoods built prior to the Great Depression. These places also highly correlate with poverty.

Such neighborhoods don’t respond well to the massive, top-down investments we’ve grown used to. Instead of attempting to transform these places overnight, we need to make modest investments, incrementally improving things, bringing the people there along for the ride while newcomers are gradually integrated into an evolving fabric.

There’s no playbook for this. If Illinois is now ready to get serious, it will have to create one.

What Kind of Problem is This?

There’s a tendency to want to look at this as a maintenance problem, but that’s misdirected. It should more accurately be thought of as a productivity problem.

The infrastructure investments we’ve made have not created enough wealth and prosperity to sustain them. From an accounting standpoint, these were mostly negative-returning investments. Governments—which, unlike private-sector actors, cannot just walk away from this stuff after a life cycle—just made some really bad investments. Decades after decades worth.

This will come as a surprise to many people conditioned to believe that building new roads, installing new pipe and making other capital investments will stimulate the economy, create growth and provide jobs. Don't get me wrong: the spending it takes to get those projects off the ground may do all of that. But it also creates a future obligation for the government to maintain a road, a pipe or a building that people now depend on. Do the math; in our current development pattern, it never adds up.

Spreading homes and businesses out across the landscape is really expensive. Driving for every daily need is really expensive. Allocating space for storing vehicles is really expensive. We’ve locked ourselves into an incredibly expensive way of living without any real fallback position.

All these public capital investments create jobs and growth in the short term, but they also create tremendous long-term maintenance obligations, enormous future bills that are never accounted for when we do these projects.

Here’s the catch: the wealth from all those homes, big box stores, strip malls, gas stations, franchise restaurants and shopping centers is not anywhere near what is needed to cover the really high financial burn rate of this development approach.

The math doesn’t work; the more we build, the poorer we get. It’s not a maintenance problem; it’s a productivity problem.

How Can We Fix It?

The problem will be “fixed” in the sense that there will be a resolution to it, but that fix will not involve keeping everything that has already been built.

To balance the very simple infrastructure math equation Illinois faces, the amount of infrastructure will be reduced—whether intentionally or through neglect—and the tax base will consolidate in places where financial productivity can be increased. There are no other options.

We only need to look to Detroit to see how brutally painful this transition can be. Detroit was the first city to experiment with the auto-oriented development pattern that now dominates North America, doing so aggressively following World War I and through the 1920’s. In a sense, American cities copied the Motor City, just not aggressively until after World War II. This puts most cities in Illinois a decade or two behind Detroit.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Detroit leaders throughout the era of decline promised every neighborhood they would not be abandoned. The relentless math suggested otherwise, a reality we’ve seen play out on the ground.