[OOD]

I'd like to see if any of these results and conclusions change if you take into account the total tax basis for suburbanites (income tax, sales tax spent in the cities they don't live in, etc.) versus the relatively less well off inner city urbanites. Not all areas are the same, but in places like the Bay Area, a lot of the high income earners move out to the suburbs (think Palo Alto, Pleasanton, Walnut Creek, etc.).

To add, a lot of the economic activities in downtown areas are by workers and customers who live in the suburbs and commute into town. I don't believe that was taken into account.

[ramblenode]

Strongtowns.org has some research on this. It points toward most suburbs being indirectly subsidized by the tax base of nearby urban areas after costs are accounted for.

The basic problem is density and scaling of infrastructure and utilities. The cost of many utilities (power, water, roads) is dominated by the distance from the source to the hookup. When buildings only scale laterally (single story) then comparatively more utilities are needed than when they can scale vertically into the 3rd dimension. This gets exaggerated because the population of a volume tends to scale much faster vertically than laterally (apartments are much closer together than single family dwellings) so most of the utility cost ends up being the lateral footprint of a neighborhood.

Looking at this another way, the taxes of lateral neighborhoods would need to grow exponentially faster than those in vertical neighborhoods to maintain the same unit of infrastructure.