In some municipalities, local governments have been requiring that new housing developments own and maintain more than you'd expect, like sidewalks, street lights, and even sometimes the roads.
Note that this is in places where -- for example -- a new road is built off of an existing main road, and the new road is relatively short and exists solely to provide access to the homes in the new development. We're not talking about people who live on main roads that the local or state governments assume responsibility for.
In many cases the municipality has done the developer a huge favor by incorporating the subdivision and hooking it up to public water and sewer. Homeowners can hardly complain that they still have to plow their own community driveway.
Hooking a new development up to new utilities is not paid for by the municipal government. The developer pays those costs. The utility companies will pay for maintenance using the income they receive from it's customers up to the property line but the initial cost is paid with private funds. The government may want to extend out utilities to land that developers plan to build on if there's sufficient reason to do so like if the government wants to turn a massive farmland into a new town.
