The last few months, I've started to really notice how shit the quality of most buildings and infrastructure is in the US. I know a lot of people in the construction industry and grew up in it, and it's really just amazing how everything is built to maximize short term appearance and minimize cost. EVERYTHING, even ostensibly "luxury" housing, is built this way. I used to live an apartment building that was only a few years old but when you looked at the details you could already see the thing was falling apart. I've seen roads get resurfaced only to see a bunch of cracks and pot holes show up the next winter.
So as America enters terminal decline, I fully expect the buildings and infrastructure around us is just gonna fall apart and look hideous. Especially the suburbs. I feel like most suburbs are held together with paper mache and veneer. And of course Americans will deny it's happening and pretend it's totally fine.
We stopped maintaining this stuff really with the onset of neoliberalism, and a lot of the really good infrastructure really dates back to the new deal era and is getting to the end of its lifetime. We don't make shit here anymore, so we don't need good infrastructure to support our manufacturing base.
That story about the two dams in Michigan collapsing should be a warning: This, much like the recent Texas disaster is a sign of things to come We have many new things poorly built and a lot of old things poorly maintained, both of which are facing extreme conditions largely due to climate change. A lot of cities and municipalities really can't afford to fix this stuff so help needs to come from state or really federal levels.
Suburban sprawl has bankrupted our cities, and is totally unsustainable
Maybe "build back better" guy can help this stuff limp along, but in typical Democrat fashion he's not really going to do anything on the magnitude that would do more than just kick the can down the road. The only proposal that seems to have taken this stuff seriously got called a "green dream" by Nancy Pelosi.
I also want to add that all of this is going to be worse because we never actually recovered from the 2008 crisis. The financial sector recovered, but people have not. The jobs are not back, and if the market stops fooling itself, the Coronavirus recession may actually catch up with us and all of this stuff is going to be exacerbated.
Sure enough and I've gathered that the parts of Glass Steagall that separated consumer banks from investment banks never got reinstated because of how the dems and gop bargained dodd Frank. So the key vulnerabilities that allowed the housing crash to take down the whole financial system, never got addressed. So like you said the situation never got fixed and imo the coronavirus is just a scapegoat (or more likely a catalyst) for the real recession.
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Death to Amerikkka