Causes And Consequences Of Sprawl

"The 1972 Clean Water Act provided hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies for sewage conveyance around American cities, making it even less expensive to build in a suburban location. The methods for financing new infrastructure by local government eliminated any hope that central cities could compete on equal footing with the deeply subsidized suburbs... American suburbs have the largest number of roads, sewers, water and gas lines per capita on the planet. It costs the government hundreds of dollars more per year per household to maintain this infrastructure than if densities were modestly higher."