Once the city gets built, residents easily loose the conscience that built their city.
Projects yield good results because of wisdom, tough decisions, doing things that aren’t popular everywhere, even paying above market value, firing friends, and hiring enemies, all because of the quality of work that will get done. But, after the hard work, hard thinking, and hard choices become history, human tendency is to take the yield for granted.
Pile that into urban populations with infrastructure and real estate unsustainable without farmlands. Understandably, urban populations favor public spending. But, it’s big money, not bankrupt government, that spends big.