We've Got to Rebuild America's Crumbling Infrastructure

By Joanna Guldi, AlterNet. Posted August 16, 2008.

Early this summer most of America saw images of houses washing down the swollen Mississippi, logjammed against a bridge. In the following weeks we heard about the humans, libraries and even pets left homeless, but outside Iowa, few people heard about the problem of those houses, or indeed about that bridge itself. Iowans alone were left to contemplate their opportunities: When insurance failed, would FEMA provide? Would charity? Such questions only rise in importance the moment a reader in San Francisco or New Orleans or Miami pauses to consider who would repair their own city after disaster. For those who pay attention, the problem is wider still. Relics of the early 20th century, America's ancient dams and highways are crumbling with a shocking rapidity. The nation's skeleton is as fragile as the candy-cane bones sucked down to threads on Cinco de Mayo. Who replaces highways and bridges once they're gone?

Most Americans alive today grew up in an era when state infrastructure was on the rise. Some can remember still the monumental Mississippi flood of 1927, which propelled the nation into an unprecedented glut of levee-building. In 1944, the Pick-Sloan Plan gave the Army Corps of Engineers control over 316 reservoirs, dams, navigation projects and flood control zones across the nation. Seventy-year-olds still remember glowing documentaries boasting the efforts' star initiatives: the Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification. In the 1950s and '60s, state engineers spread pylons and arches and overpasses across the nation. They connected and canalized; they filled the landscape with the rumbling sound of commerce on highways, rivers, ports and streets.

That phase of building was associated with a 200-year trend in politics, in which infrastructure became the favorite experiment of expanding nations. By the 18th century, modern democracies had learned that they could extract more resources from their hinterlands if they improved the means of communication, trade and production in the form of infrastructure. State road-building projects transformed Great Britain and France. Prussia used river navigation and marsh drainage. Statecraft carved farms out of marshes and ports from lonely rocks; it threw highways across the nation. Those highways, ports and dams continue to depend upon the action of the state.

The infrastructure state, however, is no more a reality; it has been dramatically eroded by the postwar politics of suspicion. One element was a reaction against centralized states in general, which began as a rejection of contemporary dictatorships, and culminated in theories hostile to any type of centralized management whatsoever. In 1957, political scientist Karl Wittfogel argued that "hydraulic societies" of state-built dams were institutions of "oriental despotism." A second element of the reaction was shortsightedly financial: The cost of FDR's government was provoking hostile reactions and cutbacks across those years; issues of obvious social justice like welfare and housing attracted more popular support and discussion than the relative fortunes of rich and poor riparians. New legislation encouraged communities to adopt flood insurance in lieu of expecting federal subsidies. The 1968 Flood Insurance Act gave the Geological Survey responsibility for estimating the likelihood of every area in the nation to flood, and gave local municipalities the opportunity to purchase flood insurance from the government depending upon their level of risk and perceived need to act. From 1968 forward, HUD, the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Flood Insurance Program collaborated to encourage other long-term flood expense-cutting measures like national standards for urban planning that would prevent new developers from building in floodplains. The 1973 Flood Disaster Protection Act scaled back federal assistance, and the 1986 Water Resources Development Act demanded that new projects by the Army Corps of Engineers be supplemented by local finances wherever possible. Further legislation in the '80s and '90s diminished federal assistance for those communities that had not purchased flood insurance. Such policies made relief available for the worst disasters of flood, but effectively whittled away at the state, traditionally the single entity capable of providing funding large enough to build infrastructure on a major scale.

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Joanna Guldi, Ph.D., is a Commonweal Institute fellow.