Quite a bit of European infrastructure is old, e.g. much of the stuff in the Nordic countries is &gt;100 years old. But more money has been put into maintenance and replacement.<p>For this issue specifically, part of the problem is that the U.S. kept installing lead pipes through much of the 20th century, and as a result is saddled with a lot of them. Flint&#x27;s lead pipes aren&#x27;t even particularly old, most dating to its big population&#x2F;construction boom of the 1920s-40s. That is late enough that concerns were already pretty widespread by then, e.g. Helsinki decided to phase out lead pipes during the 1890s. I can&#x27;t seem to find a date for when the U.S. as a whole phased out lead pipes, but I do find that NYC stopped new installations in only 1961, so it seems to have been quite late.