I think this is incorrect. One way to think about it is that usually infrastructure costs scale with distance. So you need much less infrastructure per person in dense places. However, everyone pays the same tax rate (or more in dense areas because the property values are higher) which means that in reality the dense areas usually subsidize the suburbs.
There is a company (urbanthree.com) that does financial modeling and produces heat maps to show the net gain/loss of a city based on area. They routinely find that the denser areas are financially solvent and supporting the city and the suburbs are not solvent.
Citation needed. Everything I have seen shows that suburbs are a net drain in contrast to dense urban areas. Infrastructure has very high fixed costs that require more people to net even.
Citation needed on what you have read as well. I too have read the same, but it conflicts with the reality that suburbs have existed for more than 100 years now, and those old ones have added and replaced infrastructure many times over their history.
That nothing i've read acknowledges that fact suggests they are cherry picking evidence instead of giving an unbiased analysis .
Well in my state generally the wealthiest people live in suburbs and pay all the taxes. The poorest areas are in cities and get the subsidies. So the suburbs are subsidising the cities. And that was before everyone started WFH so downtowns are now really empty.
What subsidies? What about businesses and their taxes? Wealthier people don’t always pay more in taxes, even at a localized level, and businesses tend to be based out of the cities.
When people talk about the “subsidy of the suburbs” they usually talk about the cost of maintaining suburban life, vs the tax base that supports it. Eg property tax usually goes to the town to pay for the town’s infra, while income tax goes to the state to pay for other thing. When the town can’t cover its cost and depends on the state’s money or when the state pays to build things in the town, that’s where the “subsidy” comes in. Often towns just can’t cover the cost of their basic infrastructure maintenance, but even when they can, the state usually still build highways and other big projects which can cost $10s to $100s of millions, and rarely can be affordable by the actual tax base of the town.
There is a company (urbanthree.com) that does financial modeling and produces heat maps to show the net gain/loss of a city based on area. They routinely find that the denser areas are financially solvent and supporting the city and the suburbs are not solvent.
https://www.urbanthree.com/services/revenue-modeling/