If we let the circular dependencies stymie us at all turns, we'll never get anywhere. Gotta start somewhere, and having people to clamor for services seems like a good place to do so as any to me.
The new residents, so, by proxy, the developer putting the apartment block in.
Of course, the developer immediately starts grousing about regulation, and excessive fees, and apparently, this is the reason for why we can't have sub-$400,000 apartment units.
> Obviously it's not reasonable for a private contractor to have to build a school addition for each housing block (or is it?)
It is reasonable for them to pay the city enough money to construct the infrastructure necessary to serve the new density they are adding.
Unfortunately, even if you divide the costs per person, it's still often cheaper to get 40 people new water lines in say 20 average suburban homes, than it is to get 40 people new water lines in say, one building in Manhattan.
Infrastructure costs do not scale evenly per mile. The capital costs in infrastructure are rarely the actual wires or pipes, it's the installation and maintenance labour. Which are considerably more complex and more expensive in dense urban environments, than it is in the sprawl.
There are plenty of downsides to sprawl (it's a waste of land, for instance). But sprawl is nearly always cheaper (even after removing all subsidies), that's kind of the whole reason sprawl exists in the first place.
> The new residents
Surely it's not their sole responsibility. New residents boost the local economy, so the old residents benefit.
You can't just suddenly have 10,000 more people and no sewer system for them until you find out exactly how much poop they produce.
It's not even like questions like "If you add this many 3 bedroom homes to an area how many schools do you need" aren't unstudied questions, either. Civil engineering is a thing and should be able to answer questions like that pretty darn well.
Who is responsible for actually building it is a fair and open question with several different answers, but as long as city planning is a thing, the city that approves construction is responsible for ensuring that that construction will not overload resources somehow, and I don't even see how that can be under dispute.
That's not the kind of question civil engineering answers. That's more urban planning.
PS: Simply from the overall US population growth rate the metro area should expect to add ~27,000 people every year.
This is because the point is to illustrate the ridiculousness of suggesting that infrastructure should only be meted out once demand is known in the concrete with people living there by pointing out that until you build the sewer system, N people still need to poop, not to talk about what kind of population growth is normal for a large city.
In the UK there have been various methods to get residential developers to pay for infrastructure.
They're fairly recent, and I'm not too familiar with them.
Even if the developer isn't to pay the full cost, there are efficiencies by the local government working with the developer to build relevant infrastructure at the same time.
Example: https://www.telfordhomes-ir.london/media/press-releases/2017...
For example, having the developer plant trees along the street means the price of the new build goes up (of course the developer will pass along costs), and existing residents get an improved neighbourhood without increased taxation. But is this not something the council should be paying for? After all the new homeowners will be paying council tax, why must the also pay a fee to join the community?
