Every mayor wants a landmark. Few want to fund what's underneath it. That imbalance, more than any single policy failure, explains why so many growing cities keep discovering their infrastructure can't handle growth until the exact moment it can't.
The pattern is familiar: a gleaming new public building draws ribbon-cutting coverage while the water mains beneath the street it sits on haven't been touched since the prior generation of urban planners retired.
None of this is a call for civic austerity. It's the opposite: an argument that the most ambitious thing a city can build is capacity nobody sees, because it's the thing that lets everything else — the landmarks included — keep working when the population doubles.
Until budget cycles reward the unglamorous long-term fix as visibly as they reward the ribbon-cutting, cities will keep choosing the photo opportunity over the pipe. Voters can change that math faster than any planning department can.