That's not really how this works. If you don't have enough money to adequately maintain your infrastructure, you'll just inadequately maintain it instead. You w

That's not really how this works. If you don't have enough money to adequately maintain your infrastructure, you'll just inadequately maintain it instead. You won't plow ahead and spend the ideal amount of money anyway, you just let things kind of go to crap. So the failure state to look for isn't a city going into massive debt as it drastically outspends its revenues year after year, it's a city with infrastructure that's decaying and falling apart because they don't have enough money to take care of it. Then that's the thing that can have ripple effects on the local economy and population.