that wouldn't help much, since the infrastructure is still crazy expensive and not worth paying for. Surely it would help, then? The entire point of the articl

that wouldn't help much, since the infrastructure is still crazy expensive and not worth paying for. Surely it would help, then? The entire point of the article is that local governments built infrastructure that isn't worth paying for, and paid too much for it, because of bad planning/misaligned incentives. If towns were fully privatised then there'd be no assumption of government bailouts, and towns that overbuilt would go bankrupt and be abandoned/eventually bulldozed. In practice governments are rarely willing to let that happen. Even in the case of Detroit it was bailed out.