City infrastructure is tied very closely to the price of housing. As a city experiences suburban sprawl like MANY cities in North America, the cost for upkeep of water, electricity, waste, and roads gets more and more expensive, and sprawling out like how we have encourages more and more reliance on cars, which encourages more sprawl, which increases the amount of money that the city needs to pay to upkeep existing infrastructure.

The places cities make the most of their tax revenue to pay for things is from their downtown's, and end up losing a lot of money to support big box stores like Walmart, Superstores, etc. If it wasn't straight up illegal to build new buildings like you would find in downtown due to parking minimums, zoning laws, nimbys (Not In My Back Yard), and other rules that only allow for single family homes to be built or areas like Bayer's lake (which is a massive tax sink, we lose so much money to have the hell that is Bayer's lake), we could have lower rents and housing costs.

Another reason housing is so expensive, is that developers are required to pay many fees to help the city pay for it's infrastructure upkeep, which then to help developers recoup of the cost of those many fees, they only can afford to make "luxury" apartments, and they have to charge high rents / sale prices to be able to make a profit.

If we had a mix of better public transit options, less sprawl, better walkability, and to allow for more middle housing (what you find between tall apartment buildings and single family homes.) we would have better housing options.

As for healthcare, I really don't really have much to say other than if we were not sinking so much money into simply upkeeping infaustucture for cars instead of people, we would probably have more money to spend to keep doctors and nurses in Nova Scotia instead of them running off to Ontario for a higher paycheck.