Here’s an exercise for you. Close your eyes, and picture the world after an apocalypse. What did you see? Everyone’s vision is different, of course, but I’m willing to bet that somewhere in that slideshow of movie tropes was decay. Uninhabited buildings leaning at physically impossible angles, with only their concrete skeletons remaining. Trees growing in places where they would never be allowed to grow if any human had the power to stop them. Cracks in roads expanding and getting greener and greener until there’s hardly any road left. But here’s the thing: You don’t have to wait until the end of the world to see those things. You can actually see them right now if you want to. A few blocks east of the Superior Avenue Regional Transit Authority station, there’s an abandoned apartment building that was once called Huron Place Apartments. The mood in there can only be described as post-apocalyptic. All the windows are gone, the ceilings have long fallen, the wall framings have warped so much that they block the hallway like branches and nature is slowly beginning to reclaim it. But Huron Place Apartments wasn’t done in by a catastrophe: It just ran out of money. The world we build doesn’t only decay when we aren’t there anymore to maintain it; it also decays when we stop caring about it. And when you stop caring about an area so much that you let the infrastructure decay, it shows.

In sociology, there’s a popular school of thought called “broken windows theory.” It claims that small imperfections, such as windows that never get fixed, create a culture which lacks care for the common good. For example, it’s much easier to justify vandalizing a building if it’s already abandoned because nobody’s using it. Unfortunately, this theory did result in broken windows policing, which was doomed to fail because this type of policing misunderstands what is socially harmful about a broken window. Broken windows don’t represent a culture of lax law enforcement but rather a culture of neglect. And does anything communicate a culture of neglect more than crumbling infrastructure? How can we expect people to keep our streets clean when they’re already dirty from chunks of crumbling asphalt? How can we expect them to work with a smile on their faces when the trains they take to work are old, rickety and loud? How can we expect people to contribute to their communities when their roads have potholes so big that they have to drive on the sidewalk to avoid damaging their cars? Furthermore, how can we expect people to believe that we care about them when we have the ability to fix those potholes but don’t? This is what’s at stake when we ignore our infrastructure. “Good enough” may allow us to continue to scrape by for a while, swerving around potholes and ignoring cracks, but living in a world so neglected ultimately unravels our social fabric.

When we let our infrastructure deteriorate so much that it needs to be replaced instead of renovated, we pay even more for it. Most people don’t know that, for most projects, replacement actually costs significantly more than the original construction. For one thing, demolition is expensive and time-consuming. Another major expense in infrastructure is what we civil engineers call “Maintenance of Traffic.” Having to rebuild a bridge while cars are still driving over it multiplies every logistical challenge and time constraint because contractors have to stagger their construction instead of doing it all at once. And don’t forget that someone has to pay for transporting road work signs, barriers and delineators while someone has to work as a flagger. This is why infrastructure projects come with a staggering price tag.

But these expenses aren’t a bad thing at all. When we’re lax on tax policy and don’t tax the wealthiest Americans, the money often stays in one place. It’s likely to get invested, sure, but invested into companies that are already doing well. In contrast, what happens when we tax the wealthy and spend those gains on infrastructure? It goes to struggling American steel mills in the Rust Belt. It goes to American concrete plants. It goes to workers who are paid good union wages who then spend that money on their families and distribute it into their local communities. Today, the economic math of construction has flipped—materials aren’t the most expensive part anymore, labor is. But the other side of that coin is that construction workers have never been as valuable as they are today, so doing more work on infrastructure means distributing massive amounts of cash to those who (in my opinion) deserve it the most.

I think I’ve made my point that investing in infrastructure is important. And the good news is that we’ve made great progress in that investment. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), passed almost exactly three years ago in November 2021, was possibly Biden’s greatest policy achievement. It allocated about $1.2 trillion to all kinds of infrastructure. And it’s certainly made a difference. As you can imagine, the bureaucratic rollout has been slow, but it has now fully taken effect. As I’ve learned from industry professionals, civil engineering in America is positively electric right now—critical projects that had been in funding limbo for years are now moving at maximum speed, and civil engineering firms are hiring like crazy to meet the demand. We’ve even seen the effects here at Case Western Reserve University—the resurfacing of Adelbert Road, just to the east of the Case Quad, was paid for by the IIJA.

But we’ll need more. Every morning, I walk under the two rail bridges at the Cedar-University station, just southwest of Sears think[box]. The piers have decayed so much that you can see that one of them was built with modern rebar, while the other was reinforced with riveted steel plates. It’s hard to tell exactly how dangerous those support columns are, but seeing them every morning doesn’t exactly do wonders for my morale.

More broadly, our roads, bridges and buildings will never stop decaying. But how do we summon the political capital to rectify this in the future, given the legacy that President Joe Biden now has as a boring, ineffective president? The IIJA wasn’t just an incredible legislative achievement, it also required an incredible amount of political capital. And yet, this may be the first time you’re hearing about it! When we fail to talk about how important our infrastructure is, it sends a clear message to our representatives. Knowing that Americans don’t care about their infrastructure, that their ability to get to work smoothly is a negligible concern compared to the price of meat at the supermarket, is it any wonder that politicians haven’t talked about this success? I’ll be the first to admit that Biden’s administration isn’t perfect. But if we continue to neglect appreciating our infrastructure, we’ll also continue to neglect fixing it.