Among those forces that would make a place old, even prematurely, I’d suggest (1) regulating excessively, (2) taxing heavily, (3) prohibiting widely, (4) spending profligately from others’ earnings, (5) building vaingloriously from the public coffers, (6) using still more public money to boost one’s undeserving cronies, (7) conflating headlines with facts, (8) ignoring the truly needy, all the while (9) insisting that this is the very definition of serving one’s community.