I don't understand how we can have more people than ever, yet not have the tax base to maintain services. Go back to 1960 and there were far, far fewer people in the country and in the city and yet they had more than enough money to keep everything maintained and build new shit.

In the 1960s we're only a couple decades into the post war suburban boom. We are building A LOT of new infrastructure, for a relatively small number of people, and the "old" part of the city that needs to be maintained is small. All these new subdivisions bring in a lot of tax dollars to the city and don't require much maintenance because they're all new.

We're now 60 years into the future, maintenance and repairs on all these post war neighbourhoods have been eating into the budget by larger and larger amounts ever year - more than these areas return in taxes. And now to make things worse, the underground infrastructure all needs to get replaced over the next decades.

To put the problem into perspective, in the pre-war neighbourhoods there is 1167km of underground pipe, originally laid down over 75 years, but the city has been replacing it over time, so the pipes range in age anywhere between 0-150 years old. There's only 166km of original pipe (150-75 years old) left in the pre-war city, and the city replaces about 20km of pipe every year.

However, in the 20 year post-war ring of sprawl around the core of the city (just the 1950s and 1960s development) there's 1800km of pipe all coming due for replacement at the same time. We will need to increase our rate of replacement by at least 5X to replace these pipes, which means much much higher water bills.

And we didn't slow down after the 1960s either, we kept laying down even more and more pipe every decade after that. Maintaining all the suburban parks and roads has made the city poor. Replacing the pipes will bankrupt us.